WeatherXM AG, the startup developing WeatherXM, a weather-focused decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN), has raised $7.7 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Faction.
Additional participation in this round included 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. block.
Manolis Nikiforakis, co-founder and CEO of WeatherXM, told The Block that WeatherXM’s board of directors will not change following the funding round and that WeatherXM will use the funds to continue developing crypto-enabled hardware, improve data quality and prediction algorithms, and Enlist the first cryptocurrency-based weather station manufacturer to join the network and strengthen decentralization efforts.
WeatherXM builds weather stations that collect environmental data stored on Filecoin, a decentralized storage blockchain, with the goal of generating hyper-local weather forecasts. Those who run these stations receive the ERC-20 token WXM, which is the platform’s native governance token.
WXM will be available for trading on Uniswap v3 and other platforms starting May 30, with the company’s rollout continuing. Users can also earn Arbitrum-based daily rewards and cumulative beta rewards on May 30.
“This round begins our growth phase,” Nikiforakis said in the release. “Over the past two years, we have demonstrated our ability to manufacture and deploy thousands of stations globally at a fraction of the typical cost. Now is the time to grow tenfold. We are committed to becoming the world’s largest network of weather stations by the end. “By 2025, we will provide services to both existing and new Web3 markets.”
WeatherXM stations start at around $400 and there are variants for European Union customers. The top-of-the-line model costs $900. According to the company’s website, each device measures temperature, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure and precipitation. WeatherXM says it has deployed 5,000 weather observation devices in 80 countries and sold 7,000 units.
WeatherXM previously raised $5 million in seed funding in June 2022 from Placeholder VC, Metaplanet, Consensys Mesh, SOSV, Protocol Labs, Borderless Capital, DLTx, and others.
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