Lightspeed Faction leads $7.7 million Series A round for DePIN weather startup WeatherXM

WeatherXM AG, a startup developing the weather-focused decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) WeatherXM, raised $7.7 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Faction. 

Additional participation in the round came from 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, according to a release shared with The Block. 

WeatherXM's board of directors will not change following the funding round, the firm's co-founder and CEO Manolis Nikiforakis told The Block, adding that WeatherXM will use the funds to continue developing crypto-enabled hardware, improve data quality and forecast algorithms, onboarding third-party crypto-enabled weather station manufacturers onto the network and bolstering its decentralization efforts. 

WeatherXM produces weather stations that collect environmental data stored on the decentralized storage blockchain Filecoin, aiming to create hyper-local weather forecasts. Those who run these stations receive the ERC-20 token WXM, the platform's native governance token.

WXM will become tradable on Uniswap v3 and other platforms beginning on May 30, the company release continues. Users can also earn Arbitrum-based daily rewards and accumulated beta rewards on May 30. 

"This round kicks off our growth stage," Nikiforakis said in the release. "During the last two years, we proved our ability to manufacture and deploy thousands of stations globally, at a fraction of the typical cost. Now it’s time to grow 10x: We want to be the largest weather station network in the world by the end of 2025 serving both traditional and new web3 markets."

WeatherXM stations start at around $400, with variants for customers in the European Union. The highest-end model costs $900. Each device measures temperature, humidity, solar radiation, wind speed and direction, pressure and precipitation, according to the firm's website. WeatherXM says it has sold 7,000 units, deploying 5,000 weather machines across 80 countries. 

WeatherXM previously raised $5 million in seed funding from Placeholder VC, Metaplanet, Consensys Mesh, SOSV, Protocol Labs, Borderless Capital, DLTx and others in June 2022.