At our first lunch of 2022, Venture Connectors was pleased to feature Louisville-based Climavision’s founder and CEO, Chris Goode, who shared how his weather services and intelligence platform recently raised $100 million in equity funding. He talked about what the process was like, and how the company kept it “under the radar.” He also shared why he believes the Louisville region is undervalued by investors, and how his company is providing cutting-edge weather data and forecasting tools that fill in the “observation gaps” to better prepare communities for major weather events.
For almost 30 years, Goode has pioneered technology that merges big data with meteorology and remote sensing — a lifelong passion culminating in the launch of Climavision, a gamechanger in ClimateTech. After decades in weather tech, Chris knew intimately the value and the limitations of weather data networks. Climavision addresses this problem, expanding access to high-integrity weather information. Through strategic partnerships and a $100 million strategic investment from TPG’s The Rise Fund, his team is alleviating the burden of expensive weather infrastructure and rolling out a proprietary network of radio-occultation satellite and ground-based sensors to help mitigate the risks of increasingly volatile weather.
Before Climavision, Goode leveraged weather data to serve industries such as aviation, energy, media, insurance, defense and international governments. As the CEO for the world’s leading manufacturer of weather sensors and software, and a former vice president at weather heavyweights AirDat, The Weather Channel and WSI (now IBM), Goode helped craft national remote sensing networks for more than 90 countries and led the development of innovative software and data solutions that has changed the way the world sees weather data today. Some of these innovations include smoke detection, commercial dual-polarization, bird-tracking and volcanic ash detection.
A U.S. Air Force veteran, Goode holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Montana.
