AISTec

💎 Idea

Climate change is rewriting mountain glacier risk faster than monitoring institutions can react. Glacier retreat, permafrost degradation, and extreme precipitation are accelerating a cascade of hazards—slope instability, debris flows, and proglacial lake formation - directly threatening critical infrastructure like hydropower, transport networks, and mountain settlements.

Current monitoring is either static (decadal maps) or academic. While Copernicus provides raw satellite data, no commercial service integrates these signals into continuous, decision-ready risk intelligence that an infrastructure manager or transport engineer can actually execute on.

AISTec builds that layer. The full product delivers a unified risk view across multiple climate-accelerated hazard layers: paraglacial slope instability, debris-flow exposure, proglacial lake formation and growth, and permafrost-degradation indicators. Each layer is linked to the specific infrastructure in its exposure zone.

We are building the multi-hazard dashboard architecture, featuring proglacial lake tracking as the first operational layer. Using a selected catchment in the Himalayan region, we automate the tracking of lake growth and downstream flood routing to named infrastructure. Other layers are integrated into the interface as planned capabilities.

Beyond satellites, AISTec extends to targeted IoT or robotics/UAV sensing devices for high-priority hotspots and filling satellite observation gaps. These sensors characterize risks that satellites flag but cannot fully detail, enabling high-cadence inspections where human access is unsafe or unaffordable.

🛰️ EU space technologies

We use Copernicus and Galileo together, and build on top of existing Copernicus services.

• Sentinel-2 MSI: the core layer. NDWI-based lake detection and decadal area-trajectory reconstruction at 10 m.
• Sentinel-1 SAR: all-weather lake surface detection for cloud-covered scenes and rapid change events.
• Copernicus DEM GLO-30: downstream flow-path modelling and exposure routing.
• Galileo: centimetre-level positioning for the UAV ground-truth layer (future roadmap)

Everything is accessed through the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem (openEO + STAC), which keeps the pipeline reproducible and free to replicate/extend to other alpine regions.

EU Space for Water

Challenge #3 — Disaster risk monitoring, with overlap into Challenge #1 where hazards affect water infrastructure.

AISTec complements existing Copernicus services — EGMS for ground motion, CEMS for post-event response — with a lake-specific intelligence layer currently provided by no operational service at cross-border cadence. Target users: infrastructure operators with alpine exposure (hydropower in particular), reinsurers pricing climate-physical risk under CSRD disclosure (for Europe), and provincial civil protection services as reference and validation customers. Longer-term institutional alignment: the Copernicus Water Thematic Hub forming under the EU Water Resilience Strategy.

🤼 Team

Alexander Fries — Business Development and Product Strategy. 

MSc Robotics and AI (TU Munich), prior experience at the  German Aerospace Center (DLR) and in deep-tech VC. Taking care of product direction, the pitch, and business development.

Jeet Gupta — Business Development & Data Science

Michael Gradwohl — Earth Observation & Remote Sensing 

Sahil Sameer Kunjeer —  Earth Observation & Remote Sensing 

Shyam V. Logishetty — Earth Observation & Remote Sensing 

Mahmuda Akter Lubna — UI/UX & Design

Markus Schiermayr — UI/UX & Design

Jasper Jonkhans — Data Science & AI

⌨️ Code Repositories & Demos

Front-end GUI: https://sort-karate-90694581.figma.site

Back-end & EO data pipeline: https://github.com/jasperjonkhans/AIStec/tree/main