Luxembourg is becoming a living laboratory for climate resilience technology thanks to startups like RSS-Hydro.
Anyone who has lived in Luxembourg will be familiar with rain. On 14 July 2021, it even made headline news, turning underground carparks into swimming pools, flooding houses with muddy water and costing over€125m in insurance claims.
Building Digital Twins to Prepare for the Next Crisis
Luxembourg can expect more severe weather events like this one because of climate change. But next time, it will be prepared. Tech company RSS-Hydro is working with local authorities to monitor water-related risks and develop numerical models for climate resilience. In Luxembourg, it has developed digital twins of town and communes to show what would happen to people’s homes and assets if the country were to experience torrential downpours again.
“The final goal is to be resilient when catastrophes happen,” explains RSS-Hydro technical lead Paolo Tamagnone, adding: “Every human-induced change will have an impact. So, we create a model which considers all these changes and shows how the entire system behaves to provide better information to local actors.”
The hydraulic engineer with a background in academia, joined RSS-Hydro in 2022. It was after the 2021 floods but at a time when the startup was beginning to take off. Founded by Dr Guy Schumann, RSS-Hydro currently counts eight employees and is growing organically thanks to grants and non-dilutive funding from bodies like the European Commission, and partnerships with research institutions like LIST.
From Satellites to the Edge: Cutting Response Time to Minutes
Its solutions blend satellite data with algorithmic insights that can be easily interpreted. The latest innovation involves deploying algorithms directly on satellites. This space edge computing analysis solution is being tested through partnerships with satellite providers, notably D-Orbit and Luxembourg-based EnduroSat. The goal is to achieve a dramatic reduction in lag time between the satellites acquiring images and transmission to offices and stakeholders. “This helps a lot in emergency situations, for example when a first responder needs information to take action,” says Tamagnone. What would previously have taken days will, in future, take under 10 minutes, according to the company’s roadmap.
In addition to water, RSS-Hydro’s geospatial services also enable it to monitor and track wildfires, their impacts and other landscape changes and hydrological impacts, for example how vegetation changes over space and time. These valuable insights can be useful across multiple sectors.
A major strategic shift within the company is from Earth observation to prediction, by leveraging forecasts from diverse actors and delivering them in a format that is easy for a layperson to interpret.
“Imagine you’re driving from Luxembourg to Paris and want to know what will happen in the next four hours, compared to a farmer planning crops for the next season,” he says, adding: “We are trying to achieve this kind of weather situational awareness for everybody, but in a predictive way.”
The company expects to reach a TRL for this solution by spring 2026.
When Big Tech Takes Notice
The company’s expertise and ambition are helping it to get noticed by some. It won Luxembourg’s Fit4Start accelerator programme in 2022, and also participated in the Microsoft for Startups Programme. In 2024, it joined the Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change cohort for Europe and, more recently, was part of NVIDIA’s Inception Programme. They were among the first to use NVIDIA’s 3D software to reproduce geospatial extreme weather events in more realistic and compelling three-dimensional models. “At NVIDIA’s 2024 GTC conference, Jensen [Huang, NVDIO CEO] was giving a talk. Behind him were slides with the logos of the main partners and our logo was there, beside groups like Mercedes and SpaceX!” recalls Tamagnone. These kinds of programmes have been critical for securing partnerships, for instance with cloud firm Oracle.
Technology As Humanitarian Infrastructure
On the solutions side, it is also having an impact on some of the most flood-prone populations of the planet.
The firm is piloting a package of flood monitoring and early warning for Beledweyne, a town in Somalia that was left submerged for over two weeks after heavy rainfall in 2023. By monitoring and forecasting river water levels, it informs residents whenever a certain threshold is reached or is predicted to be reached. “Here we have a platform showing people living there the extent of expected flooding: which villages will be potentially affected,” he said, adding that each time a threshold is reached, it prompts the sending of a warning message directly to people’s phones.
Luxembourg’s development aid and research budget is funding RSS-Hydro to develop early
warning system solutions in countries like Bangladesh, one of the world’s highest-risk flood areas. “We are more working on understanding the impact of the floods and providing better maps in order to understand which villages and infrastructure will be affected during heavy flooding.”
Scaling Impact Without VC Pressure
As a bootstrapped, R&D-focused company, RSS-Hydro’s growth has been sustained through grants. But its commercial operations are taking off. In July 2025, it strengthened its market position by acquiring Water In Sight, a Stockholm-based climate SaaS, also founded by Schumann.
It expects to double the team over the next year, adding young talents, and highly-qualified technical profiles, while also expanding its sales and business development activities.
As Tamagnone says: “We like to be framed as a bridge between academia and the private sector. We try to create this strong connection with the two worlds with a focus on the real application of it.”
