Zomato unveils 'India's first' crowd-supported weather infrastructure: Here’s what it will do and why

Zomato co-founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal has announced “India's first crowd-supported weather infrastructure” that aims to provide real-time information on temperature, rain, humidity, wind speed and other weather-related updates.
In a long post on X, Goyal said that the weather infrastructure (http://weatherunion.com) is a proprietary network of 650+ on-ground weather stations – the largest private infrastructure of its kind in India – developed by Zomato.

“This rich data holds significant potential in unlocking weather use cases for enterprises and research institutes. Having already collaborated with CAS - IIT Delhi, we expect more institutions and companies to benefit from this and contribute towards the greater good of our economy,” he said.
Why Zomato unveiled this weather infrastructure
According to Goyal, knowing about weather conditions beforehand will help the company make right business decisions in terms of customer services.
“At Zomato, it was crucial for us to have access to precise and real-time weather information to make the right business decisions to serve our customers better. Hence, we took it upon ourselves to develop a solution capable of empowering us on this front,” he added.
Currently available across 45 large cities, Zomato will expand these ground stations in other Indian cities “very soon.”
“Also, a lot of Zomato employees have hosted weather stations at their homes. As we look forward to further expanding this infrastructure, we welcome volunteers who want to provide us space on their premises to install these weather stations and contribute to nation building,” Goyal added.
Zomato is opening free access to this through an API to all institutions and companies in India.
“We believe that this data is too valuable to keep to ourselves or to monetise; therefore, as a Zomato Giveback, we are opening up access to this data to everyone for public good. Multiple companies and public institutions should use real-time weather data, to boost the productivity of our economy,” said the CEO.