ClimaCell, a Boston-based microweather tech startup, whose platform generates high-definition weather maps, has brought in $23 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Pitango Growth and Square Peg Capital.
It's been a turbulent year for ClimaCell. This spring, as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the startup economy, the startup furloughed 10 employees. Co-founder and CEO Shimon Elkabetz wrote in a blog post published Tuesday that the startup has brought most of those employees back but said goodbye to others for good: "[O]ur recruiting team helped all departing members find their next job," Elkabetz said.
The Series C funding, then, comes at just the right moment. TechCrunch reported that the new funding will go toward expanding ClimaCell's go-to-market efforts and the fundamental R&D that makes its platform work. The company also expects to launch updates to its consumer mobile app soon.
ClimaCell's bread and butter is providing high-definition weather maps in real time. The startup integrates traditional sources of data, like satellites and radar, with proprietary data from wireless networks. The startup closed its Series B round at $45 million in October 2018 to, as Elkabetz told BostInno at the time, turn its platform into "the Google of weather forecasts."
"While you can’t control the weather or pandemic outbreaks, you can, with the right actionable insights in the right context and time, take control of the outcome," Elkabetz said in his blog post.
Over the past six months, ClimaCell has invested heavily in building new supply chain, infrastructure and agriculture tech, per Elkabetz's blog post. The startup is also executing on long-term plans to build out its dashboard, its API—which now contains insights and operational workflows—and its Weather Assistant app.
Next, the startup will launch a "major improvement" to its Global Precipitation System and Nowcasting, as well as launch a new proprietary forecast system that will augment ClimaCell’s standalone models to provide one unified, machine learning-improved output. Those systems are intended to increase the accuracy gap between ClimaCell and publicly available weather models, Elkabetz wrote.
Elkabetz repeatedly emphasized that ClimaCell's technology will only become more important as climate change impacts weather patterns more drastically.
"Not to be too dramatic, but the next Black Swan could come from Mother Nature and weather will be a key factor," Elkabetz said. "There are plenty of ways to improve sensing, modeling and software solutions to help humanity better protect itself, and the investment in such technologies is minimal vs. the impact."
