Rainbow Weather raises $5.5M to refine real-time weather forecasting

Warsaw, Poland 26 January 2026 – Rainbow Weather has raised $5.5 million in seed funding to push weather forecasting further into the short-term, high-precision territory it believes the industry still underserves.

The Warsaw-based climate tech startup focuses on hyperlocal, minute-by-minute forecasts, zeroing in on what happens in the next few hours rather than days out.

The round was backed by a syndicate of investors, including Yuri Gurski, founder of Flo Health, one of Europe’s best-known consumer tech unicorns.

Rainbow Weather’s core product is a mobile app that delivers four-hour precipitation forecasts calculated from the exact moment a user checks the weather.

Open the app at 3:51 am, and it forecasts conditions through 7:51am, refreshed every 10 minutes and mapped down to a one-square-kilometre grid. That level of temporal and spatial precision is what the company says sets it apart from mainstream weather apps.

Most major providers, including AccuWeather, Apple Weather, and The Weather Company, still rely on approaches that either simplify cloud movement or depend on large-scale numerical models designed for longer forecasts. According to Rainbow Weather, both methods struggle when conditions change quickly.

“Many legacy forecasting providers rely on optical flow for short-term precipitation forecasting. That’s a fast but simplistic method that treats clouds as shapes in motion, without any understanding of atmospheric physics,” explained Alexander Matveenko, co-founder of Rainbow Weather. “A second category of services uses large-scale mathematical models that do incorporate physical principles, but they’re so cumbersome and slow that they can’t respond quickly to real-time weather changes.”

Rainbow Weather positions itself in between, using machine learning to fuse high-resolution data from radar, satellites, weather stations, and even smartphone barometers. By combining these sources, the company claims it can reduce the noise and bias inherent in individual datasets, then generate forecasts faster than traditional systems.

The app currently focuses on short-term precipitation, but it has expanded into tracking wildfires and hurricanes, a feature added after the Palisades fire in Los Angeles. That expansion reflects a broader ambition to become a real-time risk awareness tool, not just a rain predictor.

The new funding will be used to extend Rainbow Weather’s forecasting window from four hours to 24 hours, add more weather parameters beyond precipitation, and grow its B2B offering.

The commercial weather intelligence market is expected to grow steadily over the next decade, driven by industries that depend on precise, near-term forecasts, from logistics and agriculture to aviation and drone operations.

Rainbow Weather says it has surpassed one million installs and has launched APIs aimed at companies that “can’t afford to get weather wrong.” It has also partnered with an unnamed long-term forecasting firm, supplying near-term data to improve broader climate models.

The founding team brings a track record of exits in applied AI. CEO Yuriy Melnichek previously founded AIMatter, acquired by Google, as well as consumer apps later bought by Pinterest and Farfetch. Matveenko previously sold mapping startup MapData to Mapbox.

Alongside its commercial products, the team also runs weatherindex.ai, an open-source project that evaluates short-term precipitation forecasts from major providers in real time. The tool compares live forecasts against verified airport weather reports, using standard accuracy metrics. It’s an unusual move in an industry not known for transparent benchmarking.

For Rainbow Weather, that openness is part of the pitch. The company is betting that as climate volatility increases, users and businesses will care less about next week’s weather and more about what happens in the next hour, and whether the forecast can be trusted.

About Rainbow Weather:

Rainbow Weather is a next-gen climate tech startup for ultra-accurate short-term forecasts founded in 2021 by Yuriy Melnichek, who previously built AIMatter (acquired by Google), a neural network-based AI platform, as well as the video creation and editing app Vochi (acquired by Pinterest), and fashion marketplace Wanna (acquired by Farfetch), and Alexander Matveenko, a founder of artificial intelligence mapping startup MapData that he sold to Mapbox in 2017.