Accurate weather forecasts are critical for industries like agriculture, and are also important in helping prevent and mitigate damage caused by inclement weather or natural disasters. But getting predictions right is extremely difficult. That's why the founders of WeatherXM have been looking to make weather forecasts more accurate for the past 12 years.
In 2012, Manolis Nikiforakis, Stratos Theodorou and Nikos Tsiligaridis launched an app that allowed community members to provide grassroots weather updates. They then worked as consultants for corporate clients, such as Athens Airport, in climate-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 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. Anyone can access all the data collected for personal use for free with paid offers for companies that want to use it commercially.
“We are strong supporters of open source,” Nikiforakis said. “We believe (WeatherXM's mission) is meaningless without the collaboration of multiple different people and expertise. We are making all this data 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, an early-stage blockchain-focused fund that is affiliated with Lightspeed, with participation from venture capitalists such as Borderless Capital, Alumni Ventures, and Red Beard Ventures , plus more venture capitalists and others. types of investors. The startup will use the capital to expand its team and prepare to begin monetizing its business users.
Tim Khoury, a partner at Faction, said he was attracted to investing 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 that the company was producing. The TAM potential for more accurate weather data didn't hurt either.
“The decline of many deep networks is due to the demand side,” Khoury said. “If there is no demand for what is actually generated or produced, in this case, the network cannot be sustained over time.”
As someone with a basement that has flooded multiple 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 initially confused me.
Nikiforakis told me that the crypto incentive structure is the only way this local weather network could work. Paying each person to monitor 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 his first app they discovered that people were willing to provide weather data for free, so WeatherXM's structure is meant to incentivize users a little more.
“(The use of cryptocurrencies) also helps coordinate that (weather stations) are deployed in the areas that matter most to us, developing nations and rural nations,” Nikiforakis said. “crypto rewards function as a coordination tool. In many ways, this is a community project, so cryptocurrencies act as a governance tool. People can vote using this token in decisions that influence the operation of the project.”
While I admit I'm not an optimist when it comes to blockchain or crypto, using that structure here makes a lot of sense. It is also complementary to the startup's focus on making data open source, which requires blockchain technology 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 needed to be open source so that public and private entities could more easily work together to plan for and better respond to climate disasters.
WeatherXM making all data open source, especially from its stations in rural or underserved areas, could be advantageous for communities fighting the growing threat and damage from weather events without requiring a large budget or resources.
The mission here is easy to support, but we'll see if bringing climate to the blockchain generates enough demand to really make a difference.
“We need to create an ecosystem around our technology and ideas for the industry to move forward and for meteorology to improve in general,” Nikiforakis said. “We don't like the old way where things happen in silos and don't give access to anyone who has the credentials or the payment. We go against the current. “We are opening the data to everyone.”
