Rainbow Weather, a climate tech startup focused on ultra-accurate short-term forecasting, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to accelerate development of its consumer app and expand into business customers. The company said the financing included a syndicate of investors led in part by Yuri Gurski, founder and president of Flo Health.
Founded in 2021, Rainbow Weather builds a minute-by-minute forecasting experience designed for highly localized rain and snow predictions. The app generates four-hour precipitation reports starting from the exact moment a user checks the forecast, refreshes its output every 10 minutes, and claims spatial resolution down to one square kilometer. Rainbow Weather positions this as an advantage versus major weather providers whose short-term products refresh less frequently and project farther into the future.
The company argues that many established approaches to very short range precipitation forecasting either rely on fast but simplified motion based techniques, or on physics based numerical models that can be too slow to adapt to real time changes. Rainbow Weather says its system instead uses machine learning models that combine high resolution inputs across multiple sources, including radar, satellite imagery, weather stations, and smartphone barometer data, to produce faster, cleaner, and more precise predictions.
Beyond precipitation, the product also includes hurricane and wildfire tracking. Rainbow Weather said the wildfire feature was added following the Palisades fire, which the company described as the most destructive in Los Angeles history.
With the new funding, Rainbow Weather plans to add more weather parameters, extend its forecasting horizon from 4 hours to 24 hours, and expand its footprint in the business-to-business weather market. The company also said it has launched APIs aimed at industries where weather accuracy is operationally critical, including logistics, agriculture, navigation, aviation, drone operations, and outdoor activity apps, and that it has secured a partnership with a leading long-term forecasting firm, which has not yet been named, to provide near-term weather inputs into climate models.
Rainbow Weather reported more than 1 million installs and more than 100,000 active users. The team also operates weatherindex.ai, an open source tool that evaluates the accuracy of short-term precipitation forecasts from providers including AccuWeather, Vaisala, and The Weather Company in real time by comparing forecasts against verified airport weather reports using metrics such as accuracy and F score.
The company was founded by Yuriy Melnichek, who previously built AIMatter (later acquired by Google), Vochi (acquired by Pinterest), and Wanna (acquired by Farfetch), and by Alexander Matveenko, who previously founded AI mapping startup MapData, which was sold to Mapbox in 2017.
KEY QUOTES
“Many legacy forecasting providers rely on optical flow for short-term precipitation forecasting. That’s a fast but simplistic method that treats clouds as shapes in motion, without any understanding of atmospheric physics,” explained Alexander Matveenko, co-founder of Rainbow Weather. “A second category of services uses large-scale mathematical models that do incorporate physical principles, but they’re so cumbersome and slow that they can’t respond quickly to real-time weather changes.”
“Mixing heterogeneous data allows us to eliminate the typical errors inherent to each individual source. This, in turn, helps us to feed cleaner and more accurate data into our models and achieve a much more precise forecast. And thanks to the optimized performance of our AI models, we can make this forecast much faster than our competitors,” Matveenko added.
Alexander Matveenko, Co-Founder, Rainbow Weather
