A Weather Startup Takes Flight

Windy.com is moving beyond extreme-sports fans with its hyperlocal forecasts

- David Rocks

A few years ago, Ivo Lukacovic hauled 25 pounds of gear up Switzerland’s Gotthard Pass expecting to spend the day snow-kiting—gliding from peak to peak tethered to a sail the size of a bedsheet. But instead of the favorable conditions he’d seen in the forecast, he found himself blinded by a freezing fog and had to give up for the day. Although he always obsessively combed the predictions spit out by NASA supercomputers or crunched by Swiss climate scientists to find just the right conditions, “I’d often still fail,” Lukacovic says. “I needed to create my own version of the weather forecasts.”

Unlike most other snow-kiters, Lukacovic had both the coding chops and the money to do that: He’s a programmer who founded and still owns the Czech Republic’s biggest internet portal, Seznam.cz. Six years ago he launched Windy.com, a website that aggregates vast amounts of data to create hypergranular forecasts and assessments of climate conditions ranging from staples such as temperature, rainfall, and cloud cover to detailed looks at dew point, fire risk, air pollution, and more. “We’re the only service in the world right now that can sell this very complicated data to common people,” says Lukacovic, 45. “That’s where we want to stay a leader.”