How AI Is Transforming Climate Risk & Forecasting – Michael Ulin, CEO of Tenki AI

In this Season 3 episode of Hines On Air, host Matt Hines (Atlanta, GA) talks with Michael Ulin, co-founder and CEO of Tenki AI, about the rapid growth of AI startup companies and how AI is evolving from earlier “discriminative” models to today’s generative AI systems. Ulin shares his background on the founding team at Zesty AI, which builds climate risk models for property insurance, and explains why insurers are increasingly forced to model “secondary perils” like wildfire, hail, and wind risk as losses rise due to more severe events, building in riskier locations, and more expensive homes. He describes how Zesty’s AI wildfire underwriting models scored property-level risk using factors such as vegetation density, slope/elevation, and roof type, and notes Zesty raised over $78M and continues operating under other founders. Ulin explains Tenki AI (a Japanese term meaning “weather,” also “divine will” or “turning point”) and its focus on AI-driven probabilistic forecasting, starting with prediction markets and covering areas such as economics, politics, and sports, with weather as a future application. He discusses how forecasting has historically required specialized expertise, but can now be run quickly using AI and multi-agent research systems drawing from public internet data (with plans to incorporate private organizational data later). He shares examples of forecasts, including a prediction about Maduro being gone by March 2026 that Tenki rated at 55% versus prediction markets at around 30%, and work on the likelihood of cannabis rescheduling, emphasizing regulatory timing and lobbying pressures. Ulin reports Tenki is three months old and currently achieving about 59% accuracy on higher-uncertainty questions compared to an expected 53% based on market pricing. The episode closes with how to find Tenki at trytenki.ai and contact Ulin via X/Twitter or LinkedIn, plus a brief discussion of the emotional “rollercoaster” of startup building. 00:00 Welcome Back: Season 3 Kickoff + What to Expect 00:21 Meet Michael Ulin: AI Startup Builder & 10Key AI CEO 01:20 Climate Risk Reality Check: Insurance, Mortgages & Coastal Property 05:23 Inside Zesty AI: How Wildfire Risk Models Actually Work 06:58 Why ‘Secondary Perils’ Became a Big Deal for Insurers 08:07 What ‘Tenki’ Means + The Big Idea: AI-Powered Forecasting 11:43 Forecasting vs Stock-Picking: What AI Can (and Can’t) Predict 13:21 From Zesty to Paxton to Tenki: Building Companies in the AI Shifts 15:03 How Tenki Forecasts on Demand: Probabilities, Models, and Use Cases 17:56 Real Forecast Examples: Maduro, Elections, and Cannabis Rescheduling 24:45 Accuracy, Methodology, and the Data Pipeline (Public Now, Private Next) 29:09 Wrap-Up: How to Find Tenki + The Startup Rollercoaster Sponsor By Hines Law https://hineslaw.org/ Sponsor By Bravos Leadership https://bravosleadership.com/#