WeatherXM Raises $7.7M to Become the Largest Weather Network in the World

The fundraising round was led by Lightspeed Faction and will be used to advance the network and development of on-chain weather derivatives

ZUG, Switzerland, May 22, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- WeatherXM AG, core contributor to the WeatherXM Network, a leading decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN), today announced the closing of a $7.7 million USD 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, WeatherXM CEO and Co-Founder said, "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 $5M 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.

Participants who operate the special low-cost, low-maintenance stations, are given ERC20 $WXM tokens as rewards, which are the WeatherXM Network Association native governance, utility, tokens. Starting Thursday, May 30, $WXM will be tradable on Gate.io, MEXC.com, BitMart.com, Uniswap v3 and SwissBorg.com will follow.  On the same day, station owners will be able to start collecting daily rewards and accumulated beta rewards on the Arbitrum mainnet.

Investor Quotes: 
Tim Khoury, Deal Partner at Lightspeed Faction added, "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".

About WeatherXM AG
Founded in 2022, WeatherXM AG is the core contributor of the WeatherXM Network. The company also designs and builds crypto enabled weather stations, utilizing WiFi, Helium and 4G wireless communications, and value-added services that leverage the Network's data.

You can learn more about the company and its products and services at https://weatherxm.com
A real-time map of deployed stations is available at https://explorer.weatherxm.com

About WeatherXM Network Association
WeatherXM Network Association is a non-profit organization based in Zug, Switzerland. The purpose of the Association is to grow and develop the WeatherXM Network and its surrounding community and ecosystem. The Association owns WeatherXM Network's data, and is the issuer of the $WXM token. Through an auction mechanism (in $WXM) the network sells licenses that allow commercial uses of their publicly available weather data.

You can learn more about the WeatherXM Network Association and the $WXM token at https://weatherxm.network/.

About Lightspeed Faction
Lightspeed Faction is the leading blockchain-native venture capital firm that merges Silicon Valley VC experience with deep blockchain expertise. Faction typically invests in early-stage startups across the blockchain ecosystem that are in their Seed or Series A funding rounds. Faction is firmly committed to the growth of the crypto space, investing in projects with the potential to meaningfully contribute to and advance the industry and society at large.

For more information, please visit: https://www.faction.vc

About Lightspeed Faction's Relationship with Lightspeed
Faction Ventures, LLC ("Faction") and Lightspeed Management Company, L.L.C. ("Lightspeed") are separate businesses that operate independently of each other. Faction is a registered investment adviser under the United States Investment Advisers Act of 1940, as amended. Faction advises its own fund(s) and does not advise any Lightspeed clients, and Lightspeed does not advise Faction or any of its clients.

Value of weather observation data
More than one third of the global economy is weather-sensitive and accurate weather data are critical for many industries. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), "highly weather-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, energy, transport and construction, and disaster risk management can benefit by over US $160 billion per year from potential improvements in weather forecasting capabilities that would be within reach given our current state of scientific knowledge and our technology".

Climate change creates more challenges across business, public discourse, and daily life, increasing the demand for and value of precise, hyper-local data.

CONTACT: [email protected]

SOURCE WeatherXM