Breezometer

Ran Korber is an environmental engineer. In 2012, he was looking for a house to buy for his family. His wife has asthma and was pregnant with their first child. Knowing how short-term exposure to air pollution can harm a pregnant woman and her unborn child, he set out to find the safest place to live. He approached the Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection and asked where the cleanest place to live was. Even the ministry could not provide real-time, hyperlocal air quality data to support that decision.

Korber built the company with his colleagues Ziv Lautmann and Emile Fisher, who became co-founders. They started with a consumer app that showed people the air quality around them. The company was founded in 2014. It later pivoted toward a data-as-a-service model. Korber describes the business as close to SaaS but more accurately data as a service: customers license access to an API that provides real-time air pollution data, historical air quality data, and pollen data. Breezometer publishes the accuracy of its data in downloadable reports, which Korber says makes it the only company, or probably the only authority, in the world to do so.

Breezometer's customers are enterprises, not consumers. Dyson is the clearest example. Dyson's air purifiers turn on automatically when outdoor air quality is poor, and users get real-time notifications in the Dyson Link app that carry Breezometer's attribution. Other customers include GE, Cisco, Motorola, L'Oreal, and AccuWeather. Together, the roughly 30 companies serve millions of users. Sales are long enterprise cycles that require many meetings. The company raised more than $5 million across two rounds, including a $2 million seed round and a $3 million round in July 2016, and used that money to expand the team and grow revenue.

The company's revenue model depends on features more than raw API volume. Pricing is negotiated one-on-one and varies by industry, so an air purifier maker, an advertising company, and a real estate firm each pay for different feature sets. Churn has been low. Korber put it at under 5% annually, with the main losses coming from medical device companies whose trials ended. The company did not yet know its customer acquisition cost, which Korber admitted when pressed. It also had not calculated the cost of acquiring each customer.

As of the interview, Breezometer had 23 employees, 21 in Israel and two in the US. It reported over a million dollars in revenue in the previous year and had a goal of reaching $10 million in ARR by the end of that year. The founder described the company as somewhere between $1 million and $10 million in annual recurring revenue.