Meteomatics eyes U.S. expansion for its enterprise-focused weather forecasting tools

Martin Fengler knows a lot about the weather. Fengler received his Ph.D. In mathematics, aimed at numerical weather forecast, before he worked for MeteoMedia AG, a network of weather stations in Switzerland and Germany. But although he knew a lot about weather forecast of the forecast side, he realized the gaps that remained at the consumption boom when he started working on the license of his pilot in 2011.

“I learned a lot about weather forecast from a user perspective,” Fengler told WAN. “Of course it is much different than looking at the weather forecast as a mathematical and minimizing error measures. But sitting on a runway and you can’t fly because of fog or a bad prediction, that was a decent eye opening. “

Fengler decided to launch his own weather company and started meteomatics in 2012. The company, based in Switzerland in St. Gallen, retains weather information from more than 110 sources in addition to collecting data from its own autonomous weather drones. With this combination of data sources, meteomatics can update the weather forecasts every hour and make precise predictions for areas only one square kilometer.

Meteomaten Place all that information in one place for its customers and builds an API on top of it, so that its customers can use the data on how they consider it appropriate, including performing their own AI algorithms on it. Fengler, CEO, added that the fact that Meteomatie translates weather data into one uniform structure seems simple, but is its own performance.

“It had to do with complicated large files, data formats that are very specific for these industries, there is little standard around,” Fengler said. “Bringing APIs to this industry was like brought the light to the blind.”

Fengler said that this focus on building a weather company aimed at companies, or the commercial sector in general, distinguishes from most weather companies because many are focused on one area and one audience.

“Most weather companies have a focus on the media industry and I didn’t like that,” said Fengler. “It’s very much about TV and radio, but there is a huge question from the industry, and I was always intrigued by the topics with which customers are dealing with.”

Meteomatics now works with more than 600 customers, including large companies such as Tesla, CVS Health and Swiss Re, among other things. Fengler added that although some company cases are clearer for meteomatics, such as a renewable energy consumption company that uses weather data to predict results of their wind or sun farms, others are less, and Fengler said he learns from a new company use case for data again Almost every week.

Companies are likely to increasingly look for this type of data, because the effects of climate change remain more intense. Climate disasters cost $ 150 billion a year, Only in the USWith companies that should be a percentage of those costs.

Meteomatics has just increased a series C round of $ 22 million under the leadership of Armira growth with participation of Alantra’s Energy Transition Fund, Klima and Fortyone Group, among other things. Fengler said that the company deliberately reinvested the money that it earned back in the company during his 12-year history, so that the startup has not applied for a ton of capital.

Fengler added that they usually increase a new round when they are looking for money for a specific project or initiative. This series C round is no different, because the company intends to use the capital to work on its American expansion by hiring a sales and marketing team aimed at the region.

Part of the money from De Ronde will also be placed to build the company’s technology. The great vision of Fengler is to bring precision weather, defined as a range of a square kilometer, to the whole world. This level of specificity is currently available throughout Europe and should be available in the US by the end of Q1.

“That remains the North Star for meteomatics,” Fengler said. “I get up in the morning. I am strongly convinced that one day we can deliver a worldwide model of one kilometer. “