Accurate weather forecasts are critical to industries such as agriculture and are also important in preventing and mitigating damage from adverse weather events or natural disasters. But getting the predictions right is extremely difficult. That’s why WeatherXM’s founders have been trying to make weather forecasts more accurate for the past 12 years.
In 2012, Manolis Nikiforakis, Stratos Theodorou and Nikos Tsiligaridis released an app that allowed community members to provide weather updates. They then worked as consultants to business clients such as Athens Airport in weather sensitive industries. Now, they are building WeatherXM, a network of community-monitored weather stations that collect and share local weather data through systems built on the blockchain.
WeatherXM CEO Nikiforakis told TechCrunch that the startup has already deployed 5,000 of its own weather stations in more than 80 countries. These stations collect local ground weather information and are monitored by volunteers who are compensated with WeatherXM’s crypto token, $WXM. All collected data is accessible to anyone for personal use for free with paid offerings for businesses that want to use it commercially.
“We are strong supporters of open source,” Nikiforakis said. “We believe [WeatherXM’s mission] it is not purposeful without collaboration with many different sides of people and expertise. We make all this data openly available to anyone. You can see in real time what each weather station is reporting.”
The startup just raised a $7.7 million Series A round led by Faction, a blockchain-focused early-stage fund affiliated with Lightspeed, with participation from VCs including Borderless Capital, Alumni Ventures, and Red Beard Ventures, in addition to more VCs and other types of investors. The startup will use the capital to expand its team and start monetizing its commercial users.
Tim Khoury, a partner at Faction, said he wanted to invest in the company because it offered an attractive use case for a community-driven blockchain project that had both the supply of people willing to join the community and the demand for what the company produced. . The potential TAM for more accurate weather data didn’t hurt either.
“The downfall of many deep networks is the demand side,” Khoury said. “If there’s no demand for what’s actually being created or produced, in that case, you can’t sustain the network over time.”
As someone with a basement that has flooded many times during storms that were not accurately predicted, this deal immediately piqued my interest. But the blockchain and crypto token aspect of WeatherXM’s strategy confused me at first.
Nikiforakis told me that the crypto incentive structure is the only way this local weather network could work. Paying each person to oversee a weather station would make the idea too expensive and complicated to scale to the size the network needs to reach to be effective. He said that through their first app, they found that people were willing to provide free weather data, so WeatherXM’s structure is meant to give users a little more incentive.
“[Using crypto] also helps coordinate this [weather stations] they grow in the areas where we care most, the developing nations and the rural nations,” Nikiforakis said. “Crypto rewards act as a coordination tool. In many ways this is a community project, so encryption acts as a governance tool. People can vote using this token on decisions that affect how the project works.”
Although I will admit that I am not an optimist when it comes to blockchain or crypto, using this structure here makes a lot of sense. It’s also complementary to the startup’s focus on making data open source, which blockchain technology requires to be truly effective.
I was moderating a panel earlier this week that focused on how communities can prepare for climate emergencies and disasters, and one thing that came up multiple times was that data like this needs to be open source so that public and private agencies can more easily work together to plan for and better respond to climate disasters.
WeatherXM making all data open source, especially from its stations in underserved or rural areas, could be beneficial to communities combating the growing threat and damage of climate events without requiring large budgets or resources.
The mission here is easy to overcome, but we’ll see if finding the weather on the blockchain has enough demand to really make a difference.
“We need to create an ecosystem around our technology and ideas to move the industry forward, to improve meteorology in general,” Nikiforakis said. “We don’t like the old way of things happening in silos and not giving access to anyone with credentials or payment. We go against the current. We open the data to everyone.”
