Dear Tomorrow.io community,
Today, we’re announcing our recent $23M Funding, led by Pitango Growth and Square Peg Capital. A few words about the strategic initiatives we’ll be focusing on with the funding and Tomorrow.io’s future.
TL;DR
Raising a venture round of funding during a global pandemic is not obvious. We are lucky and grateful for the vote of confidence by both our new and existing investors.
Expect big things from Tomorrow.io in the coming weeks and months. Whether you are an individual who is planning your precious outdoor time or an organization whose bottom line or safety is continuously impacted and at-risk due to weather, Tomorrow.io’s platform is agile and *immediately* solves your needs with insights and automation, backed by AI and our underlying proprietary weather technology.
While the weather is a given, and forecasts are sometimes accurate, it is not enough for businesses to simply plan, optimize, and protect. With Tomorrow.io, businesses forecast the outcome of incoming weather and can be proactive about what’s coming. With Tomorrow.io, you can “control the weather”.
We will keep leading the industry with our mission to help people and organizations better manage weather-related challenges by utilizing our exciting technology and products.
Let’s Go!
Shimon
Full Story
2020 is not a year of joy, to say the least. It has brought extreme health, economic, social, political, and educational challenges to the entire world. To use our own domain jargon, it is “the perfect storm”. We do not ignore it as we mark our achievement today. We are part of the global community and have been dealing with the severe impact ourselves. We were sad as our communities suffered, and took a stand when times called for vocal protests. Of course, in our business context, some of our focus industries still suffer tremendously (aviation, sports), and we had to adjust in the way we support them, as well as the way we continue to grow as a business.
We “took control” in the same way we empower our customers to do. While you can’t control the weather or pandemic outbreaks, you can, with the right actionable insights in the right context and time, take control of the outcome. I am proud of the initiatives we’ve accomplished as a team over the past six months:
1. First, we invested heavily in building new supply chain, infrastructure, and agriculture technology – key industries that have become even more important these days.
2. We have planned long-term and already executed on some incredible roadmap projects for our key products:
- Dashboard: Our dashboard now has more content (industry and sub-industry dashboards templates). The dashboard is truly industry agnostic, and can be configured to your job within minutes. We are the “Excel” of weather. Tomorrow.io’s dashboard is now the best Weather Intelligence Dashboard in the world, providing the most accurate weather data and most advanced weather related insights.
- API: Our API is truly the most comprehensive API out there, API for all. Beyond our HyperLocal, global weather data, our API now contains Insights and operational workflows, enabling every industry to automate its weather operations. Soon, more navigation and supply chain related features will be launched.
- Weather assistant app: with the launch of our Activity library, our Weather Assistant is helping our users do more than just getting raw weather data – we help our users plan their day and week around weather. We are also in the top 10 weather apps in both the Android and Apple Store.
3. Supported our community:
- Employees: As we adjusted to the economic turmoil, we furloughed some of our employees from the areas of the business we expected to decline. We did it with full transparency and our recruiting team helped all departing members find their next job. Of course, as we found our renewed track for success, we brought back from furlough as many employees as we could. We supported our team with dedicated “time off” at several points during the last few months so our team members could disconnect, rest, and support their families, as the entire company vacationed “together”.
- Recruiting: We now offer our open positions to individuals from all over the World, without limiting them to our office locations. We understand that remote work is here to stay and are fully embracing it.
- Customers & Prospects: We offered some of our customers who face business struggles free vouchers and extended licenses. We created flexible spending models to allow industries to spend according to their business activity and potentially trial our solutions at no cost for long periods of time. If you have weather related challenges but your budget stands in the way – do not hesitate to reach out to us. We can work through it together.
Despite the challenges, we’ve seen significant growth in our sales over the last year’s results and partnered with new customers across multiple verticals. With our aggressive actions at the end of February, we had plenty of cash to sustain the storm. And yet, an opportunity knocked on our door, and we decided to partner with our new and existing investors, and strengthen our position. Why take additional investment if you don’t necessarily need to?
1. Weather is more important than ever. More investment is needed to improve our offering and technology. Some say, climate is the next black swan. Every organization should weatherproof its work plan, operations, and strategy. In the past few months, we helped Indigrid prevent outage for millions of people during the Covid19 Lockdown, Swiggy deal with supply and demand issues during a major Monsoon, and ITS Conglobal protect its staff and optimize its supply chain operations as it supports the biggest railways and trucking companies in the United States.
2. We have a lot more to build. We are about to launch major improvement to both our Global Precipitation System & Nowcasting, as well as launch a new Proprietary Forecast System that will augment all of Tomorrow.io’s stand alone models (including our NWP CBAM model) and public models, to provide one, unified ML improved output – One Forecast (1F). These systems will increase the accuracy gap between Tomorrow.io and the publicly available models.
3. The venture capital world should invest more in BIG PROBLEMS. Preventing climate change is almost impossible, but mitigating and helping the world get ready is COMPLETELY DOABLE. Climate change makes weather more volatile, and more regions and verticals will become weather sensitive. Not to be too dramatic, but the next Black Swan could come from Mother Nature and weather will be a key factor. There are plenty of ways to improve sensing, modeling, and software solutions to help humanity better protect itself, and the investment in such technologies is minimal vs. the impact. Tomorrow.io is invested in all three aspects, and will continue investing. Governments played the historic roles of building the pillar capabilities of weather forecasting, and just like in space exploration, it’s about time for the private sector to truly take the lead.
4. Our investors, new and existing ones. They believe in Tomorrow.io, our mission, and our ability to build the first, most advanced weather intelligence platform. These challenges are not going away, and the world will need to address them sooner rather than later. The time is now.
Raising during a pandemic is indeed rare. We are lucky and grateful for the vote of confidence by our new and existing investors.
Expect big things to come from Tomorrow.io soon. Whether you are an individual who is planning your precious outdoor time or an organization whose bottom line or safety is at risk due to weather, Tomorrow.io’s platform is agile and can *immediately* solve your needs with insights and automation backed by AI and our proprietary weather technology. While the weather is a given and forecasts are sometimes accurate, it is not enough for businesses to simply to plan, optimize, and protect. With Tomorrow.io, businesses forecast the outcome of incoming weather and can be proactive about what’s coming. With Tomorrow.io, you can “control the weather”.
We will keep leading the industry with our mission to help people and organizations better manage weather related challenges by utilizing our exciting technology and products.
Take control!
Shimon
