SoftBank-Backed ClimaCell Raises Funds for Weather Forecasts

(Bloomberg) -- ClimaCell Inc., a Boston-based startup that aims to create hyper-accurate weather reports, has raised $23 million from investors. The fund raising comes as the company reorients its business model away from serving pandemic-stricken airlines and restaurants, and toward providing data on supply chains and infrastructure.

The funding round was led by Square Peg capital, Australia’s largest venture capital firm, and Pitango Venture Capital. ClimaCell is also backed by SoftBank Group Corp., whose wholly owned subsidiary SB Energy Corp. invested in the company last year.

Shimon Elkabetz, ClimaCell’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said the startup hadn’t been looking to raise fresh funding. “We decided to take it because we believe we know what to do with the money,” Elkabetz said. “We know how to grow our sales in the next few years. We have exciting R&D projects we want to invest in.”

Elkabetz also said that revenue at ClimaCell had increased since the start of the pandemic, and that sales in the first few months of 2020 exceeded the total for all of 2019.

ClimaCell’s forecasting products use past weather history and artificial intelligence to gauge the weather’s impact on businesses. Airline companies had been some of ClimaCell’s key customers, but the slowdown in global travel caused by the coronavirus prompted the startup to pivot this year, Elkabetz said.

A spokesperson for ClimaCell declined to provide a valuation for the company, but said that it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

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