A Reston startup, TruWeather Solutions, has raised $5.3 million, a big chunk of a $7 million Series A funding goal, as part of its bet on more vehicles, manned or not, taking to the skies in the coming years.
TruWeather Solutions gives weather predictions and logistics data on wind speeds, temperatures and moisture data 5,000 feet below the atmosphere. For those wondering why one can't just watch the Weather Channel, a 30% chance of rain isn’t enough data for a helicopter company or a retail giant like Amazon or Walmart to make decisions on whether to schedule a flight or drone delivery, the company says. To be safe, TruWeather saidthese companies ground flights and deliveries on days that later turn out to be sunny, resulting in potential lost revenue.
“People don't want to pay for weather data because they think they can get it for free,” said TruWeather Solutions co-founder and CEO Donald Berchoff. “But they're not realizing that that's costing them money. I'm trying to tell them, 'Look, it's costing you 30% of your flights.”
The company's latest round is led thus far by Supernal, a U.S. tech innovation arm of Hyundai Motor Group that's working to develop an electric takeoff and landing vehicle.Supernal, which invested $3.5 million, said it plans to pilot the weather sensor tech in its own vehicles, which it hopes to release in 2028.
TruWeather didn't specify other investors in this round, but said fundraising has generally proved a difficult path. Berchoff said it’s been hard to prove the business case as commercial air travel seemed largely content with government weather data and the drone and other air transportation technology remained in its infancy. Until now, TruWeather reported raising only $425,000 in VC funds, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.
But Berchoff said perceptions are slowly changing through increased growth of “the anchor industries” of drone delivery and air taxis, including new vertiports planned for cities like New York City and Chicago for electric air vehicles attracting investments from the likes of American Airlines and United Airlines.
Now Berchoff hopes to tap into that growing attention to win over more investors. With its $5.3 million haul, it plans to invest in product development and sales, growing the 30-person company to 35 employees. It also plans to build a 24/7 operations center near the University of Albany's Atmospheric Sciences Research Center. If the round closes at the full $7 million goal, Berchoff said he may explore leasing office space in Northern Virginia. But for now, TruWeather remains a remote workforce, he said, and he’s “putting the money in the product, not in the glitz and glamour of an office.”
Back in 2001, Berchoff was a meteorologist with the Air Force, where he served for nearly a quarter-century. He was based at the Tanker Airlift Control Center at Air Mobility Command in Illinois' Scott Air Force Base, and he said of the center's 100,000 flight missions a year, it averaged 5,000 delays a year. Through a risk management system he designed at the time, he said the base cut those flight delays to 1,800 and saved an estimated $500 million, just by changing how decisions were made with flight dispatchers and operators.
With TruWeather, he's turning his eye to the commercial market on how to make better decisions to increase flight time, reduce costs and increase responsiveness. Berchoff — who directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service Office of Science and Technology before working C-suite stints at IT giant Unisys Corp.; MetraWeather, the commercial arm of the Meteorological Service of New Zealand; and weather forecast company Tempoquest, per his LinkedIn — said he honed TruWeather's technology through $3 million in small business innovation research grants from NASAand others, as well as a partnership with Oracle Corp.
Its customers now include Walmart’s DroneUp delivery network and Grand Sky, a 217-acre business and aviation park in North Dakota's Grand Forks Air Force Base that boasts defense and aerospace technology companies such as Northrop Grumman Corp. and General Atomics as tenants. In 2022, Berchoff said TruWeather tripled its revenue from 2021 to 2022, and hopes to grow it significantly, based on increased market size and demand, to $3.5 million this year.
"Weather is one of the most unrealized advantages that a business can have because people don't understand it," Berchoff said. "They think what they get on TV is the best you can get. You need a professional meteorologist to work with you on the risk management side of that. You can't know what you don't know."
