Ilika Geospatial places second at the TiE Jersey Women Pitch Competition 2026
Ilika Geospatial was awarded second place at the final of the TiE Jersey Women Pitch Competition 2026, held on 3 September. Abhaya Pawar, our chief executive and co-founder, presented the company and the problem it was built to address.
The competition is run by the New Jersey chapter of TiE, and the result was announced by TiE Jersey on 3 September. What Abhaya put in front of the judging panel was the problem the company exists to solve.
Weather forecasts are accurate for about two weeks. Past that point, the forecast does not simply become vaguer. It becomes wrong in ways that repeat: the same location runs too warm, or too cold, season after season, and the range the model puts around its own forecast is narrower than the errors it actually makes. The forecast looks more certain than it is.
That matters because the decisions do not wait. A utility hedges its winter load months before the winter. A weather derivative desk prices a contract on a season that has not started. An insurer sets terms on a freeze that may or may not arrive during flowering. A food company commits to supply on next season's growing conditions. Each of them is working from a long range forecast, and most are left choosing between raw model output and a thirty year average. The average carries no information about this year. The raw output carries a bias no one has removed.
Ilika Geospatial closes that gap. We calibrate long range forecasts against decades of past forecasts and matching observations, learning the errors a model makes at a specific location and horizon, then removing them. The output is a corrected probability distribution, delivered in the units the client actually decides in: the fair value of a temperature contract, the probability of a freeze during flowering, the spread of outcomes behind a seasonal position. The calibration layer sits on top of the major forecast models rather than competing with them, so it improves as they do.
Our thanks to the TiE Jersey leadership team, the board and the judges for the program, and to the mentors and reviewers who read the deck and improved the pitch ahead of the final.