In this exclusive interview with Samhita R, Co-Founder & CEO of Resilience AI, reveals how the company is transforming disaster preparedness from an annual compliance checkbox into a real-time business imperative—helping enterprises, cities, and governments protect the 60% of climate-vulnerable assets that ESG reporting still misses.
1.Resilience AI was born out of the aftermath of Cyclone Yaas. What systemic failure did that event expose, and how did it shape the founding vision of Resilience AI?
Cyclone Yaas exposed a critical blind spot: over 60% of infrastructure and assets at risk from climate shocks were invisible in existing risk models. This failure galvanized our founding team—, spanning disaster, technology, infrastructure, and policy, to create Resilience AI. Our vision: is to build resilience at every step and our mission at Resilience AI is to prepare 1 billion assets by 2030, before disaster strikes and Protect 60% unaccounted lives, infrastructure, business.
2. From climate anxiety to action—this is a powerful shift. How does Resilience AI operationalize this transition for your clients on the ground?
We move clients from reactive and recovery mode of natural disaster management to proactive and preparedness mode of disaster life cycle management. Resilience360TM doesn’t just automate disaster workflow, it pinpoints which building and infrastructure will be exposed, which line of business and business unit is a high priority, what would be the magnitude of infrastructure damage, business loss, environment impact and incident rate, , and what can be done to prevent the financial and reputational cost of damage, loss of revenue, and decline in productivity. Asset and Organization analysis can be delivered in under two hours, across six disaster types, four global standards and frameworks, multi-variate parametric, empowering CXOs to act with confidence and speed.
3. Why do you believe disaster tech is the missing link in enterprise and urban resilience?
Traditional models are manual and slow, annual and broad, thereby disconnected from on-ground realities and unusable. Disaster lifecycle tech like ours bridges the gap between environment and climate checklists, compliance and regulatory frameworks and on-ground preparedness before disaster. We bring together science-grade models capable to ingest and churn multi-variate scientific data, ,,, ground truthed, graded in easy-to-understand risk and priority scores, and AI/ML based modular enterprise software to make risk-to-resilience as possibility for small to large enterprises equally.
4. Despite a rise in ESG disclosures, why do 60% of at-risk assets still go unaccounted for?
Resilience is a combination of Net Zero and Net Safe. Most ESG reporting macro, retrospective, and spreadsheet based assessment with Net Zero performance metrics. ESG doesn’t deepen into Net Safe performance metrics. It overlooks the physical risk footprint , —what’s the exposure to disaster beyond climatic forecasting, but on the ground at individual structure and individual business level. Resilience AI brings visibility to those hidden assets and individual businesses, across the value chain from supplier to customer for a business, using real-time scans, building-level and business-level diagnostics, and adaptation actions to prepare faster and smarter.
5. Resilience360™ promises asset-level risk intelligence in under two hours. Can you break down how that’s even possible —and what makes your platform fundamentally different from static dashboards or traditional disaster alerts?
Resilience360TM AI/ML model has been trained over the last two years, spanning 750,000 structures, in more than 25 real time events, for six types of disasters in more than 50 locations in the USA, Canada, Australia, Brazil, India. It is designed to be a plug-and-play enterprise disaster lifecycle management platform. Just enter a location, our stack reads terrain, climatic condition, and built environment, to determine exposure, then delivers a detailed assessment report and digitized mitigation action. It’s not a dashboard. It’s an enterprise grade decision system .
6. Let’s talk about ResScore™ and ResSolv™, —what kinds of decisions are your clients making based on these tools that they weren’t empowered to make before?
Clients are now able to re-site warehouses, disaster-proof facilities, justify capex for resilience, and engage insurers with data. ResScore™ benchmarks organizational preparedness. ResSolv™ diagnoses weak points of structures and buildings and suggests engineering-grade fixes, —converting uncertainty into actionable insights
7. With 750,000+ structures mapped across India, United States of America, Australia, and Brazil, what’s been your most transformational success story so far?
In one flood-prone industrial hub, our tools helped pre-empt ₹180 crore in potential losses by identifying vulnerable substations and redirecting infrastructure investment. That single deployment influenced local government planning, utility resilience, and ESG reporting, —all from one workspace.
8. How does your data help businesses quantify avoided losses or justify resilience investments to boards, insurers, and regulators?
Resilience360TM baselines risk as a simple-to-understand score, for both organization and asset, in accordance with the risk management principle of “measure risk to manage it”. It assigns an estimated loss value at organizational level to avoid losses by comparing pre- and post-intervention risk profiles. This helps companies frame resilience as ROI, —not just risk mitigation. Boards see resilience not as cost, but as value unlocked. Insurers see improved pricing. Regulators see alignment.
9. Resilience AI’s model is policy-aligned by design, built in accordance with Disaster Management Act, Reserve Bank of India CRIS and Sendai framework . How has that shaped adoption —and what does this say about the future of public-private resilience ecosystems?
Our alignment and subsequent engagement with NDMA, TERI, State Governments ensures instant relevance. Governments are able to access faster. Enterprises gain asset risk management, environment impact assessment and compliance-ready tools in a single window. This is the new frontier of public-private collaboration: co-building tech that’s not just innovative —but regulatory by design. The most recent example of this is the successful handover of Vishakhapatna V-Pull.
10. What role do you see platforms like yours playing in unlocking climate finance, especially urban adaptation and disaster insurance?
We de-risk investment. By providing evidence of vulnerability reduction, our tools help cities and firms access climate adaptation grants, green bonds, and disaster insurance. Think of us as the audit trail and disclosure source for asset resilience—essential for unlocking billions in climate finance.
11. You’ve led across smart cities, renewables, and ESG in both Europe and Asia. How has your journey influenced your approach to climate innovation in India?
I’ve seen firsthand how annual, siloed, and fragmented data planning slow progress. Globally the challenge is to understand the cost of inaction and accept the reality that cost of preparedness is fractions compared to cost of reaction, the journey is not about building better disaster management plan and sustainability reporting every year as a stack of reference document s for reacting to a disaster, but it is about becoming resilient before disaster by managing it as a lifecycle with end goal of risk to resilience at scale. We built Resilience AI to cut across sectors, geographies, and decision levels. It’s built for global enterprises and governments, .
12. Finally, what’s the one myth about disaster risk you wish every CEO and infrastructure investor would unlearn right now?
That disaster is rare, and disaster risk is abstract or annual compliance. It’s not. It’s physical. It’s local. And it’s already on your balance sheet. The biggest myth? Disaster preparedness is a long-term corporate social responsibility goal. In reality, it’s a day-zero business imperative.