With AI, Vaisala Xweather takes the uncertainty out of weather for businesses that can't afford to guess.

On September 28, 2022, we launched Vaisala Xweather with a question: What’s your X? The date was deliberate: the birthday of Vilho Väisälä, the Finnish scientist who founded Vaisala back in 1936. Standing in front of a room full of meteorologists, technologists, and business leaders, it felt like the right moment to honor what the company had built over nearly nine decades, and to plant a flag for where we believed the industry was heading.

From forecast to competitive advantage

Most businesses know weather affects them. Very few know exactly when, where, and how, in time to do something about it. AI is fundamentally changing what weather intelligence can be: not just how fast it arrives, but how precise, how local, and how actionable it can be. The world needs better weather intelligence that reaches decision-makers before it's too late. For any enterprise where operations, assets, or markets are exposed to weather, timing and precision are the difference between a good decision and a costly one. That is the problem we built Xweather to solve.

Today, almost 40% of the Fortune 100 rely on us. Energy traders depend on our forecasts to navigate increasingly weather-driven markets. Automotive manufacturers use our road condition intelligence to improve the safety of connected and autonomous vehicles. That breadth of trust is not accidental. It reflects a real shift: in every industry where weather shapes outcomes, being first to know is now a competitive advantage.  

A self-reinforcing flywheel 

Xweather didn't come out of nowhere. Vaisala had spent nearly nine decades at the frontier of atmospheric measurement and weather science. We took that heritage and combined it with machine learning, AI and modern data architecture, and made deliberate investments in AI-driven forecasting capabilities.

Here is what I find most compelling about this business: it gets better the bigger it gets. Every Xcast sensor we deploy feeds more precise data into our AI-powered forecast models. Better models attract more customers, more customers drive more deployments, and the dataset keeps strengthening. We call it a self-reinforcing flywheel. It improves with scale: more sensors, more customers, more data, sharper forecasts. What gives our models an edge is not just the AI, it is what feeds them. While many train models on publicly available data, our forecasts are augmented with our own proprietary measurement data, that no model trained on public datasets alone can replicate. A prime example is our scientifically validated global lightning detection network: in US we have operated the National Lightning Detection Network for decades, over which time lightning-related fatalities in the United States have fallen by nearly 70%.

Trusted where the stakes are highest 

National meteorological services provide an essential foundation for our society. Businesses need to zoom in even further to street level, turbine level, or vehicle level. Xweather was built to close that gap. The result is not just a better forecast, it is intelligence that reaches the right decision-maker, in the right form, before the moment it is needed.

As vehicle automation advances, road surface intelligence has become safety-critical. Twenty global automotive OEMs rely on our road condition data to support advanced driver assistance and autonomous driving systems across Europe, North America, and Japan. In energy and financial markets, wind now ranks among the largest external factors influencing natural gas pricing, and solar generation can create negative electricity prices that force rapid market adjustments. Our trading support platform continuously updates forecasts as conditions evolve, giving operators, traders, and risk managers the foresight to act rather than react. 

Growing, and still early

The numbers tell their own story. Subscription net sales grew from €28.4 million in 2022 to €58.4 million in 2025. Over 95% of revenue is recurring, and net revenue retention is above 100%. That last figure is the one I keep coming back to: customers don't leave, they expand. 

With most of the $2 billion global market still ahead of us, both geographically and by vertical, the opportunity to bring in new ones is only growing. AI is also expanding that market in ways that go beyond traditional weather customers: organizations building automated systems and AI applications increasingly need reliable weather intelligence as a foundational input, opening up an entirely new category of demand. Increasingly, that growth includes AI systems and automated platforms that depend on Xweather as their weather intelligence layer: a logistics algorithm pulling live severe weather alerts, a trading model ingesting wind forecasts as they update, a connected vehicle reading road conditions before the driver does. AI and machine learning are also changing the fundamentals of weather forecasting: a custom weather forecast that three years ago required a supercomputer accessible only to the largest meteorological agencies can now be delivered at scale to any business that needs it. 

People sometimes ask me what drives the Xweather mission beyond revenue and growth. My answer is simple: weather isn’t small talk. It shapes operational outcomes, financial exposure, and human safety at scale. It does not respect borders either. A thunderstorm, a heat wave, a hurricane does not stop at a country line. Building best possible weather insights requires global cooperation. What we've seen over these years only deepens that conviction: the organizations that treat weather intelligence as a strategic capability will be better positioned than those that do not.  

That is the opportunity Xweather was built for. And we are just getting started.

Samuli Hänninen is Executive Vice President of Vaisala Xweather. Vaisala Xweather serves over 2,000 subscription customers globally, with solutions spanning transportation, energy, finance, insurance, and automotive industries.

Read more: Vaisala changes its financial reporting structure and provides comparative information for 2025 according to new reportable segments, 17.3.2026