Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

The Climate Corporation Gets $50M More for Weather Insurance

Silicon Valley venture capitalists like to talk about how what they really want to do is fund companies that don’t just build trendy social apps or solve incremental problems.

And so, the VCs are piling in to back the Climate Corporation, which provides an automated insurance program for American farmers based on computing the actual versus expected weather conditions for their precise location and crop.

Now the six-year-old company (founded by ex-Googlers and formerly known as WeatherBill) has raised $50 million more from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, NEA, Index Ventures, Atomico, Glynn Capital and Western Technology Investment.

Right now, the service has far more data (yes, “big data”), funding and ambition than customers; a press release puts the official count at “thousands of farmers” over the past year.

The new funding is meant to fuel a major hiring effort, and brings San Francisco-based Climate Corporation to $110 million raised in total.

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus