SAN FRANCISCO – Tomorrow.io raised $87 million in a Series E funding round to support its campaign to collect weather and climate data.
Boston-based Tomorrow.io announced the news June 14 after launching its second satellite, R-2, on the SpaceX Transporter-8 rideshare flight.
Tomorrow.io’s $87M Series E round was led by Activate Capital. Joining the round were RTX Ventures, Seraphim Space and Chemonics. Existing Tomorrow.io investors, SquarePeg Capital, Canaan, ClearVision, JetBlue Ventures and Pitango, also provided funding.
Tomorrow.io launched its first radar satellite, R-1, April 15. Since then, the corporate has confirmed that each one systems including its space-based radar are functioning well.
“That is the world’s first commercially built weather radar satellite,” Rei Goffer, Tomorrow.io co-founder and chief strategy officer, told . “Only a handful of weather radar satellites have flown” and people were developed by NASA, the Japanese space agency JAXA and the European Space Agency.
Soon, Tomorrow.io will begin sharing radar data from R-1 and R-2. Tomorrow.io satellites equipped with microwave sounders are expected to start launching in 2024.
Along with weather data, Tomorrow.io radar satellites will provide detailed information on ocean surface winds and sea surface heights. “Altimetry is a hidden capability of the instrument,” Goffer said.
Military Applications
To this point, Tomorrow.io has received greater than $30 million in contracts from the Defense Department.
In May, the corporate won $10.3 million in U.S. Space Force funding for 2 weather satellites. The cash, awarded through the Defense Department’s Speed up the Procurement and Fielding of Revolutionary Technologies program, will “augment the present commercially-owned, managed, and sustained weather constellation to support weather data-as-a-service use by the military,” in response to a May 22 news release.
Tomorrow.io can also be considered one of five corporations that won contracts to display the mixing of economic data into the U.S. Air Force Weather Virtual Private Cloud.
By way of private capital, Tomorrow.io’s previous funding round, Series D, was accomplished in 2021 when the corporate was referred to as ClimaCell.