ClimaCell Becomes Tomorrow.io, Adds $77M Series D For Weather Intelligence

ClimaCell brought in $77 million in Series D funding and is now The Tomorrow Companies Inc., doing business as Tomorrow.io.

Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

The Boston-based company develops SaaS weather intelligence modeling and technology.

The name change came just a month after the company announced its new Operation Tomorrow Space project, which involves proprietary satellites equipped with radar that will be launched into space to improve weather monitoring and forecasting capabilities.

“Our mission is to help companies, businesses and individuals manage environmental challenges, saying that we ‘take control of tomorrow today,’” Shimon Elkabetz, co-founder and CEO of Tomorrow.io, told Crunchbase News. “We are building the world’s largest, as well as industry-defining, weather enterprise, and felt it was time to change before getting too big. We are planning on building a global brand, and the name is applicable to what we are doing.”

Stonecourt Capital led the new round and was joined by Highline Capital. This gives the company more than $185 million in funding since its inception in 2016, according to Elkabetz.

Stonecourt Capital, as a private equity firm, doesn’t typically make venture capital investments, said Rick Davis, partner at the firm, in an interview. However, it partners with Highline, and when there is an opportunity, will go in on a transaction. In the case of Tomorrow.io, the more the firm learned about the company, the more Davis thought he needed to put capital behind it.

“This is something that previously only governments could afford to do, but this team has come with novel approaches to space, and an economic way to do it that got a great review from people we asked to look at the technology,” Davis said. “We invest a substantial amount in environmental companies and think Tomorrow.io is a timely private company doing something in a traditional government sector.”

The big picture

Meanwhile, space exploration has matured to the point that services have become less costly, including the launching and downlinking of technology, Elkabetz said. Tomorrow.io’s technology includes developing a payload that typically needs a big radar, making the radar smaller and affordable to get on a spacecraft. It will use the new funding on that technology and product development, as well as its space operations.

The company, which brought its product offerings to market two years ago, is going after the global weather, air quality and climate-risk industries that together account for trillions of dollars:

• The global weather forecasting systems and solutions market size is expected to reach $4.63 billion by 2025, according to a study conducted by Grand View Research.
• Grand View also estimates the global air pollution control systems market size was valued at $66.54 billion in 2017.
• Meanwhile, in June 2019, CDP reported that a group of the world’s biggest companies valued the climate risks to their businesses at almost $1 trillion, with many likely to hit within the next five years.

Tomorrow.io has operations across North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia. In the past two years, the company achieved a 200 percent net revenue retention rate and 850 percent annual contract value growth, Elkabetz said.

Going forward, the company is working in a technology area that was previously dominated by government agencies, he said.

“There is an area of opportunity in unique sensing and modeling, and we are one of the only private companies innovating here, including taking weather data and translating it into business insights,” Elkabetz added. “We see more use cases being addressed, including more verticals that did not previously use weather consultancy. It is also about geographic expansion, bringing very unique software and modeling capabilities previously only in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan, to other parts of the world.”

Feature illustration courtesy of Tommorow.io.
Blogroll illustration: Li-Anne Dias