SAN FRANCISCO – Tomorrow.io raised $87 million in a Series E funding round to support its campaign to gather 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 company has confirmed that all systems including its space-based radar are functioning well.
“This is the world’s first commercially built weather radar satellite,” Rei Goffer, Tomorrow.io co-founder and chief strategy officer, told SpaceNews. “Only a handful of weather radar satellites have flown” and those 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 begin launching in 2024.
In addition to 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 date, Tomorrow.io has received more than $30 million in contracts from the Defense Department.
In May, the company won $10.3 million in U.S. Space Force funding for two weather satellites. The money, awarded through the Defense Department’s Accelerate the Procurement and Fielding of Innovative Technologies program, will “augment the existing commercially-owned, managed, and sustained weather constellation to support weather data-as-a-service use by the military,” according to a May 22 news release.
Tomorrow.io is also one of five companies that won contracts to demonstrate the integration of commercial data into the U.S. Air Force Weather Virtual Private Cloud.
In terms of private capital, Tomorrow.io’s previous funding round, Series D, was completed in 2021 when the company was known as ClimaCell.
