Riverkin Information

Flash floods on small streams kill people and take infrastructure offline. The world measures big rivers. Small streams, where flash floods start, are a blind spot: no gauges, no live data, no local forecast. What operators and towns get instead are regional warnings, dozens a month, none naming a creek. So nobody acts on them. Riverkin builds River Radar, a flash flood early warning system for small streams. Low-cost sensor kits in the creek measure water level, rain and soil moisture every 10 minutes and transmit by satellite, because these valleys have no mobile coverage and floods destroy the masts. Our machine-learning models fuse that live data with weather radar and satellite Earth observation to warn 60 minutes before a flood reaches a named point. Long enough to close an intake, pull a crew from the riverbed, evacuate a campsite. 122 sensors are deployed across Europe. The largest Swiss hydropower utilities pay us to run them. Every sensor we install improves the forecast for everyone on the network. We are building the live water data layer the world is missing; climate adaptation infrastructure for hydropower, civil protection and insurance, one creek at a time. Riverkin AG is an ETH Zurich spin-off based in Zurich, a graduate of ESA BIC Switzerland, and backed by the Migros Pioneer Fund.