Correct weather forecasts are crucial in industries such as agriculture and assist prevent and mitigate damage from severe weather or natural disasters. However, correct forecasting is extremely challenging. That’s why the founders of WeatherXM have been trying to improve weather forecasting for 12 years.
In 2012, Manolis Nikiforakis, Stratos Theodorou and Nikos Tsiligaridis launched an app that allows community members to provide local weather updates. They then worked as consultants for corporate 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.
Nikiforakis, CEO of WeatherXM, 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 own crypto token, $WXM. All collected data is available to anyone, free of charge and personally, as part of paid offers for companies that want to apply it commercially.
“We are mighty supporters of open source,” Nikiforakis said. “We believe [WeatherXM’s mission] is not expedient without collaboration with many different people and expertise. We make all this data openly available to everyone. 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, an early-stage blockchain-focused fund affiliated with Lightspeed, with participation from VCs including Borderless Capital, Alumni Ventures and Red Beard Ventures, as well as more VCs and other types of investors. The startup will apply the capital to expand its team and start earning money from its commercial users.
Tim Khoury, a partner at Faction, said he was interested in investing in the company because it offered an attractive apply case for a community-led blockchain project that included both the supply of people willing to join the community and the demand for what the company produced . A potential TAM for more correct weather data didn’t hurt either.
“The failure of many deep networks is the demand side,” Khoury said. “If in this case there is no demand for what is actually generated or produced, the network cannot be sustained for a long time.”
As someone who has a basement that has repeatedly flooded during storms that could not be accurately predicted, this transaction immediately piqued my interest. However, the blockchain and crypto token aspect of WeatherXM’s strategy initially confused me.
Nikiforakis told me that a crypto incentive structure is the only way this local weather network can work. Paying every person to oversee a weather station would make the idea too costly and intricate to scale to the size the network needs to reach to be effective. He said that with their first app, they discovered that people wanted to share weather data for free, so the structure of WeatherXM is intended to further entice users.
“[Using crypto] it also helps coordinate it [weather stations] they are deployed in the areas we care about most, which are developing countries and rural areas,” Nikiforakis said. “Crypto rewards act as a coordination tool. In many ways it is a community project, so cryptocurrency acts as a management tool. With this token, people can vote on decisions that affect the operation of the project.
While I admit I’m not bullish when it comes to blockchain or cryptocurrencies, using this structure here makes a lot of sense. This also complements the startup’s focus on creating an open source of data, which requires blockchain technology to actually be effective.
Earlier this week, I moderated a panel that focused on how communities can prepare for climate emergencies and disasters, and one issue came up on multiple occasions: such data needs to be open source so that public and private entities can more easily collaborate, to plan for and better respond to climate disasters.
WeatherXM making all data open-source, especially from stations in underserved or rural areas, can benefit communities that are fighting the growing threat and damage of climate-related events without requiring immense budgets or resources.
This mission is uncomplicated to skip, but we’ll see if bringing weather to the blockchain generates enough demand to really make a difference.
“We need to create an ecosystem around our technology and ideas so that the industry can grow and meteorology overall improves,” Nikiforakis said. “We don’t like the senior way of doing things in silos and not giving access to anyone who has credentials or makes a payment. We’re going against the grain. We share data with everyone.”
