Interesting Bet: WeatherBill Takes $12.5 Million
San Francisco based weather betting site WeatherBill has taken $12.5 million in a round led by New Enterprise Associates and Index Ventures. Original investors Allen & Company, Atomico Investments (Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom), del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter and Howard Morgan also participated.
Barney Schauble, a partner at Nephila Capital and WeatherBill’s risk capacity partner, will join WeatherBill’s Board of Directors. Total funding for Weatherbill to date is now $16.5 million.
WeatherBill was founded by former Googler David Friedberg and offers weather insurance policies to individuals and businesses. Users can also use WeatherBill to place cash bets on the weather in a given geographic area.
Users choose a weather station via a Google Maps mashup and choose whether you want it to pay out for each hot, cold, rainy or dry day. Temperatures are set by the user by degrees and precipitation by inches.
WeatherBill hedges their own risk via their weather algorithm and also sells their risk on the back end to a number of hedge funds, in theory delivering a guaranteed profit regardless of the weather.
See our previous WeatherBill coverage here and here.
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