Vaisala Acquires professional business-to-business weather services from Foreca

Vaisala has acquired the professional business-to-business weather services from a Finnish weather forecast services company Foreca Oy. The transferring business serves weather critical professional customers in transportation, energy, and industry segments. The transaction is expected to complete on October 1, 2019. Foreca Oy will continue to offer weather services and precise weather forecasts for consumers, media houses, and digital media channels.

“Foreca’s professional B2B weather services business brings truly valuable skills and assets in data analytics, forecasting, and impact analysis to Vaisala. Our ambition with the acquisition is to drive development of even more powerful modelling and decision support systems to customers whose operations are significantly impacted by weather,” says Jarkko Sairanen, Executive Vice President, Weather and Environment, Vaisala. “We are excited to bring new benefits especially to our ground transportation offering and airport runway solutions, as well as maritime and energy customers. We see particularly significant opportunities in creating detailed insights for prevailing and forecasted road surface state along entire routes for authorities, contractors, as well as connected vehicles today and increasingly autonomous vehicles in the future.”

The transferring business will become part of Vaisala’s Weather and Environment Business Area, and its Digital Solutions business line. At the same time, the name of the Digital Solutions business line will be changed to Vaisala Digital. Foreca’s professional business-to-business weather services will significantly strengthen Vaisala Digital’s offering, by providing new capabilities in form of talented people and an industry leading technology platform for forecasting, modelling, and impact analysis for weather critical operations. Vaisala Digital, headed by Markus Melin, will move its locations in Finland to Keilalahti, Espoo, in order to maximize synergies with the software development community going forward.

“Foreca’s professional B2B team’s capabilities have been recognized highly in particular among various stakeholders focusing on road surface. We see that combining these capabilities with Vaisala Digital can create something completely new going forward,” says Atso Rönnblad, CEO of Foreca Oy. “Foreca continues to grow and innovate with focus on offering user-friendly weather services and precise weather forecasts for consumers, media houses, as well as digital media channels, such as websites, mobile applications, and displays.”