dClimate, the first decentralized network for climate data, has closed an oversubscribed $3.5 Million seed financing round led by CoinFund, with participation from Multicoin Capital and Republic Labs. The funds were raised in exchange for the network's native governance token, WTHR, and will be used to hire development talent and expand the network's data trove by attracting more participants to the marketplace.
"We are privileged to have CoinFund, Multicoin Capital and Republic Labs as partners in our mission to build a network that works to solve the many issues currently plaguing the climate data ecosystem," said Sid Jha, a founding partner of dClimate. "Businesses large and small, governments, professional sports teams and multinational corporations all have one thing in common. They rely on this critically important information about our planet and its complex ecosystems to make informed decisions and to plan for the future. This fundraising round will now allow us to do the important work to build dClimate and give businesses and organizations a unique new tool to build resilience against volatile and adverse weather."
Global climate data is a massive market that is serviced by a mix of government and private sector providers with little transparency or standardization and with huge gaps in data and forecast availability. This dearth of data means that climate and forecast information is often inaccurate, conflicted, or left stagnant for extended periods. At the same time, the demand for accurate data and forecasts are growing rapidly with industries ranging from finance to logistics. dClimate seeks to address these problems by creating an open marketplace that incentivizes innovation and aims to make climate data more accessible and reliable by directly connecting data publishers with data consumers under a modern architecture that is user-friendly and supports data immutability.
"The existing climate data marketplace suffers from entrenched, inefficient incumbents and misaligned incentives that hold back consumers and publishers alike. The importance of accurate, reliable, and verifiable data about our natural resources will only increase over time, and dClimate has a unique opportunity to reintroduce market forces into an arena that has long faced negative externalities and subsequent coordination failures," said Jake Brukhman, founder of CoinFund. "CoinFund is excited to support the dClimate project, based on our thesis that the core value propositions of crypto networks will be a disruptive force in fixing these inefficient equilibria."
"Weather and climate data is one of the most important datasets in the world, yet it's remarkably fragmented. dClimate is creating an incentive layer that encourages incumbents and new stakeholders to contribute their data to an open, transparent marketplace," said Matt Shapiro, Partner, Multicoin Capital. "Generating a comprehensive record of weather data globally, in a more structured and standard way, can drive more accurate and efficient forecasts of that data, which benefits everyone. dClimate is pioneering a better way to make climate data the universal resource that it should be."
"We were excited to back a company that displays a deep understanding of how to productize and monetize data," said Christian Sullivan, Managing Director, Republic Labs. "We're confident that the dClimate team will enable a new suite of climate data products, bringing the industry out of its current, ossified state, and into the modern realm of immediate and actionable applications."
dClimate was conceived of by the founders of Arbol Inc., an InsurTech platform for parametric products which leverages blockchain and a decentralized climate data infrastructure to help businesses protect themselves against various forms of weather and climate risk. Arbol Inc. will be an anchor client for dClimate, using data and models obtained from the network for its parametric and derivatives products.
