Swiss startup WeatherXM raises $7.7m to become the largest weather network in the world

WeatherXM, a core contributor to the WeatherXM Network, a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN), announced the closing of $7.7 million Series A round led by Lightspeed Faction. Additional participating investors include Protocol Labs, Borderless Capital, Arca, Alumni Ventures, Placeholder VC, Red Beard Ventures, Metaplanet, GS Futures, Consensys Mesh, Westerly Ventures, dlab, Eleftherios Diakomichalis and Juan Benet.

The company plans to utilize this investment to grow the team, and the network, and continue research and development in crypto-enabled weather hardware and decentralized infrastructure.

Manolis Nikiforakis, CEO and Co-founder, WeatherXM: "This round kicks off our growth stage. During the last two years, we proved our ability to manufacture and deploy thousands of stations globally, at a fraction of the typical cost.  Now it's time to grow 10x: We want to be the largest weather station network in the world by the end of 2025 serving both traditional and new web3 markets."

This investment follows an initial $5 million seed round from investors including, Placeholder VC, metaplanet, Consensys Mesh, SOSV, Protocol Labs, Borderless Capital, DLTx and several prominent angel investors including Juan Benet (Filecoin), Maxwell Krohn, Dimitris Togias and Ele Diakomichalis (Radicle). In just 2 years, WeatherXM deployed more than 5,000 stations in more than 80 countries, a record number compared to government-funded agencies.

WeatherXM produces a variety of weather station hardware devices that collect local environmental data, collaboratively building a unique ground sensor weather network. Each station includes a secure element that provides cryptographic proofs of the data collected, and data is stored on the Filecoin decentralized storage network, where it can be queried and processed to create hyper-local weather forecasts as well as web3-native use cases such as onchain prediction markets and parametric weather insurance products.

Tim Khoury, Deal Partner, Lightspeed Faction: "We're thrilled to see WeatherXM utilize crypto incentives to build out the world's highest resolution, most comprehensive and most accurate weather network. Users can enjoy hyper-local weather data and be rewarded for their contributions to the network, while businesses across the insurance, power and energy, and agriculture industries can access more reliable forecasts and better plan for the future. WeatherXM is leveraging the power of a decentralized physical infrastructure network to make a positive impact in the world, and we're beyond excited to be supporting this team."

www.weatherxm.com

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