Understory (company)
Understory (founded in 2012 as WInstruments)[1] is a company that forecasts weather and collects data using a grid of weather-sensing hardware that tracks weather from the ground level.
History[edit]
Although originally known as WInstruments, founder and CEO Alex Kubicek changed the company name to Subsidence and joined Gener8tor, a group in Madison, Wisconsin that provides funding to startups.[2] After receiving funding from Gener8tor, the company moved to Boston to the Bolt hardware accelerator.[3] Kubicek soon renamed the company “Understory,” and combined funding from Gener8tor and Bolt came to $68,000.[4] After raising $1.9 million in seed funding led by True Ventures, with participation by RRE Ventures, Vegas Tech Fund, SK Ventures, and Andrew C. Payne, the company moved from Madison to Boston, Massachusetts.[4][5]
Headquarters was set up in Somerville at the clean tech incubator, Greentown Labs, and the company set up pilot tests in Kansas City, Missouri, Dallas, Texas, and Boston.[6][5] Series A funding resulted in another $7.5 million for the company, co-led by 4490 Ventures and Monsanto Growth Ventures and joined by CSA Partners, True Ventures, RRE Ventures, and SK Ventures.[7] The company then announced a plan to move back to Madison, Wisconsin.[6]
The company's first customer was American Family Insurance, which uses weather data to adjust claims.[8]
Device[edit]
Understory makes solar-powered weather stations that detect three-dimensional rain, hail, wind and other weather in real-time at the ground level, instead of using atmospheric data like traditional weather detectors.[6] Each weather station is about 1 foot wide and 2 feet tall, and connects in a grid through cellular connections.[4] The stations can collect up to 3,000 data points per minute.[5]
References[edit]
- ^ “Madison’s WInstruments allows weather watchers to go inside the storm.” In Business Madison. April 2013
- ^ McCarty, Brad. “Meet the 7 Startups from Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s Gener8tor Accelerator.” The Next Web. Aug. 23, 2012
- ^ Darrow, Barb. “Bolt to nurture startups that want to build the things for the internet of things.” GigaOm. July 31, 2013
- ^ a b c Levine, Barry “Understory scores $1.9M to generate better weather data from the ground.” Venture Beat. April 30, 2014
- ^ a b c Subbaraman, Nidhi. “Weather startup Understory helps City of Somerville plan for climate change.” The Boston Globe. May 18, 2015
- ^ a b c Castellanos, Sara. “Weather tech startup moves HQ from Somerville to Wisconsin.” Boston Business Journal. Feb. 22, 2016
- ^ Primack, Dan. “Term Sheet: Monday, February 22” Fortune. February 22, 2016
- ^ Etherington, Darrell. “Understory raises $1.9M to Deploy Its Network of Hyper-Local, Ground-Level, Weather Stations.” Tech Crunch. April 30, 2014