WeatherBill in Europe
WeatherBill had a couple of exciting announcements yesterday (see TechCrunch and Red Herring.) Firstly they raised a further $12.5 million of capital from a group of investors including Index Ventures, NEA, Atomico Investments and Allen & Co. I also participated, and have been an investor in the company from the start (and have previously written about the company a number of times.) Even more exciting is the news that they are now offering coverage of a number of European countries (the United Kingdom, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, and Norway.) The opportunity in the UK is particularly exciting given the island nation’s changeable climate and its citizen’s well-documented obsession with the weather.
weather sex football business politics
Too bad they aren’t pricing France yet: England could hedge against good weather this weekend in Paris - I’m sure cold and rainy would suit them much better than it would the Springboks!
Anyhow, here is the press release:
Web 2.0 Summit, San Francisco, CA – WeatherBill (www.weatherbill.com) the world’s only online service that allows businesses to protect revenue and control costs from the impact of bad weather, today announced the close of a $12.5 million Series A round, that when combined with earlier funding totals $16.8 million. The round was led by investors New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Index Ventures, with participation from Allen & Company, Atomico Investments, and Sean Park. Existing investors include First Round Capital and several angel investors. Following the close of the investment, Kittu Kolluri, a partner at NEA, and Neil Rimer, a partner at Index Ventures, will join WeatherBill’s Board of Directors. The company also announced that Barney Schauble, a partner at Nephila Capital, WeatherBill’s risk capacity partner, will join the Board.
“Climate change isn’t just making the weather more unpredictable, it can have a significant impact on corporate profits,” said Kolluri. “There’s high demand for financial protection against unexpected weather. WeatherBill’s technology, backed by Nephila’s world leadership in catastrophe reinsurance, creates a unique and valuable financial solution for businesses of all sizes.”
WeatherBill is working with a diverse roster of clients in weather-sensitive industries that include agriculture, travel, leisure, and retail. Clients include ski resorts, farmers, restaurants, travel service providers, and outdoor sports and leisure event managers.
“It’s now estimated that nearly one-third of the US economy, that’s $3.8 trillion, is at risk because of climate change,” said Rimer. “With that much at stake, weather-sensitive businesses need to understand their risk and then be able to protect their profits quickly and affordably. The experienced team at WeatherBill is helping businesses of all sizes do just that.”
The funding will help fuel WeatherBill’s rapidly growing business in the United States and Canada, and expand the company’s service to five new European countries this week: the United Kingdom, Germany, The Netherlands, Spain, and Norway.
“This funding allows us to offer our clients more customizable weather protection as we add additional locations to our service, offer newly supported weather conditions, and enhance the ease of purchase,” said David Friedberg, CEO and co-founder of WeatherBill. “Strong investment support and advice from these market leading investors is invaluable and will result in more accessible and affordable weather protection for businesses worldwide.”
New Enterprise Associates (www.nea.com) is helping fund more than 550 companies in the IT and healthcare sectors. NEA is the entrepreneur’s venture capital firm; built on the philosophy of team achievement and measures success by their entrepreneurs’ success. NEA helps entrepreneurs build strong businesses for the long term, not the quick turn.
Index Ventures (www.indexventues.com) is an European venture capital firm with offices in London, Geneva and Jersey and a portfolio of leading technology and biotech companies across Europe, Israel and the US. The Index team is committed to working with the best entrepreneurial teams and helping them to build their companies into market defining global leaders.
October 18th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Congrats!
And I can only hope/assume that Australia is next. The best news coming out of the literal liquidity crunch there is that they are no longer in a drought. Rather, the current lack of precipitation has been re-defined as normal.
Paraphrasing a quote from a recent article: “These weathermen are crazy. This ain’t no climate change. It hasn’t rained on my farm for 15 years!”. This was in an article describing the bankrupting of a number of farmers who committed to forward delivery of wheat on the basis of a long range forecast for rain in September. There was no rain. Hence the wacky state of the current wheat market. Of course, these farmers had to borrow to buy the seeds… Terrible really.
October 19th, 2007 at 6:51 am
Hear, hear, Josh! I’m in the wine industry, and we certainly need hedging against weather events (whether drought OR flooding rain!) during vintage and of course long term - the new “normal” threatens to displace or significantly change many of the existing wine grape growing regions
October 19th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
If I weren’t stuck in NYC for a variety of reasons, I’d be back in Australia doing exactly that…
(Un)fortunately one can make more money trading in markets than operating them.
Ric- Are you a fellow Oz?
October 20th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
I’m not sure where Australia sits in the (Weatherbill) development pipeline (a lot depends on how easy it is to get reliable - and reasonably priced - weather data; and then making sure there are no regulatory issues.) Do you think that Australian farmers and business people would embrace a weather hedging product? It would seem to me to be a no brainer, but then again so would fostering intelligent pricing of water resources, but that doesn’t seem to stop vested interests from keeping it from happening. Combine something like Weatherbill with a proper market in water resources and my suspicion is that very quickly you would get a much more efficient and sustainable geographical distribution of water-dependent industry and agriculture.