In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Physical AI & Robotics, Cole Swain, senior vice president of strategy and partnership at Tomorrow.io, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how purpose-built satellite constellations and AI-driven modeling are closing critical gaps in global weather intelligence. Swain outlines Tomorrow.io's evolution from a predictive analytics software company to a vertically integrated platform with assets in low earth orbit, explaining why going to space became the only path to meaningfully improving forecast accuracy. He details the Gen1 constellation — 13 microwave sounder satellites delivering a 60-minute global revisit rate — and contrasts it with the previous state, where six-hour cycles meant only one in seven thunderstorms was ever observed. That shift to near-continuous coverage dramatically expands both the training data and real-time inference needed to build reliable AI weather models.
The conversation also explores how weather is becoming its own AI language — spanning 300 physical parameters, from soil saturation and turbulence to lightning timing and snow intensity, well beyond what language models were built to handle. Swain highlights Gale, Tomorrow.io's generative AI assistant that lets operators have a direct conversation with their operational risk, and details the launch of Altitude, a dedicated aviation product enabling flight and network operations teams — including launch partner Lufthansa — to proactively manage crew schedules, hub disruptions and on-time performance. He also touches on the convergence of commercial and public-sector demand, noting that logistics providers, airlines and governments face fundamentally the same weather-driven workflow disruptions. From the DeepSky next-generation constellation pushing global data frequency even higher to industry-specific partnerships still in development, Swain provides a roadmap for how Tomorrow.io is positioning itself at the center of a weather intelligence market that AI is fundamentally reshaping.
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Cole Swain, Tomorrow.io
Matt McClernan, Chief Revenue Officer at Augment Code, joins Dave Vellante during theCUBE's coverage of NYSE + theCUBE AI Robotics Week. This insightful discussion focuses on the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence in development and its impact within enterprises. McClernan shares Augment Code's vision, which revolves around offering AI coding assistance, marking a significant shift in how developers interact with complex codebases.
McClernan delves into their background with MongoDB and the expertise brought to Augment Code. The conversation includes theCUBE Research and is hosted by Dave Vellante. They explore the unique market trends driving AI adoption in development environments, emphasizing a human-AI collaborative approach. The discussion also addresses Augment Code's strategic goals and their innovative product offerings.
Key takeaways from the discussion include insights on integrating AI into go-to-market strategies and how Augment Code leverages current trends to facilitate exponential growth. According to McClernan, the necessity of AI in development becomes ubiquitous, driving productivity and allowing companies to rapidly iterate on their products. Highlights also cover how AI can optimize customer interactions and enhance roles such as sales development representatives.
In this interview from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Physical AI & Robotics, Cole Swain, senior vice president of strategy and partnership at Tomorrow.io, joins theCUBE's John Furrier to discuss how purpose-built satellite constellations and AI-driven modeling are closing critical gaps in global weather intelligence. Swain outlines Tomorrow.io's evolution from a predictive analytics software company to a vertically integrated platform with assets in low earth orbit, explaining why going to space became the only path to meaningfully improving forecast accuracy. He det...Read more
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What recent updates can you provide about your company's space efforts—specifically the completion of your Gen1 constellation, the announcement of the DeepSky (Gen2) constellation, and the capital raised to advance that project?add
1) Briefly explain what your company does and the landscape/market in which it operates.
2) Describe the infrastructure and technology required to deliver your service — e.g., the space deployment (satellites), software, data ingestion, and analytics.add
>> Welcome back to theCUBE here at our NYSE studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley and Wall Street. This is our physical AI robotics series, part of our AI leaders program. We feature the leaders making things happen in the industry, obviously physical AI robotics. Space is the conversation. Cole Swain is here. SVP and strategy and partnership Tomorrow.io back. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming in.
Cole Swain
>> It's good to see you, John.
John Furrier
>> So, space is super hot right now. Defense tech. If you look at all the recent work that's going on, obviously we're in a war right now, so there's a lot of discussion around military, defense, et cetera. But it's been a hot category. You're going back the past five years, Space Force, the whole space industry. Smaller, faster, cheaper ways to get things into orbit. The software stacks are emerging. You guys are in the middle of it. Give us the news. You guys had made some recent announcements. Give us the quick update.
Cole Swain
>> It's been a busy 2026. January started with the completion of our Gen1 constellation. That got us to a 60-minute revisit rate for every point on Earth. From there, we announced our DeepSky constellation, which is our Gen two constellation. From there now, it's all about capital that we raised in order to make sure that that project comes to full fruition. And we continue to create value for our customers and for the world.
John Furrier
>> You guys got great momentum. Thanks for sharing that. So, lay out what you guys do for the folks that want to understand the landscape of where you guys execute in. Explain quickly what you guys do.
Cole Swain
>> It's about collecting data in order to create intelligence. And what a lot of people don't realize is in the world of weather, there's not a lot of data out there being collected today. And with the advent of a lot of these AI models, when you make a prediction, you need to be able to see how well that prediction performs. And you need to be able to have something to initialize that prediction. And so ultimately, our constellation is all about collecting more data about the atmosphere in order to train these models and improve our ability to not only understand what's going to happen, but also understand what did happen in history. Because most of the world is not covered by these types of observations.
John Furrier
>> Talk about the infrastructure required. You have to deploy in space. So, that's one.
Cole Swain
>> We do. Yeah.
John Furrier
>> You got to have the software and the coverage. You need the data analytics, the ingestion. Take us through some of the tech and what the mechanics are of deploying and making it all work.
Cole Swain
>> I think the key thing is that we started with our customer problems at the forefront. And throughout, call it the first half of our company's existence, we focused entirely on creating predictive analytics for our customers. And through a software application that allows them to interpret and understand not just that it's going to be windy, but what does that mean to their schedules? What does that mean to their assets? If you're an airline, if you are a railroad, if you are a supply chain, a logistics company, a retailer, whatever it might be, converting that into intelligence for you. Now, as that journey progressed, we started to see that there were significant gaps in our ability to be able to increase the infrastructure, improve the performance of predictions, which the only conclusion in order to drive that home was to go to space. And now fast-forward, we have about 13 satellites launched, currently in low earth orbit, again, at a 60-minute revisit rate of microwave sounders, providing the world with intelligence that it didn't have prior.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. What's the before and after picture look like? How would you describe that to someone? Okay. Before the deployment, what does that mean? Refresh rate and all that good stuff.
Cole Swain
>> Think of it, at this very moment, there are 2,000 thunderstorms evolving around the world right now. The average life cycle of each one of them is about 30 to 60 minutes. Now, if you have satellites up there that are revisiting every six hours, call it, you're going to catch-
John Furrier
>> Revisiting means going over the area and getting the data.
Cole Swain
>> That's right.
John Furrier
>> Okay. Got it. Okay.
Cole Swain
>> Yeah. Returning to the same spot so that it gets a new version of the data it last collected. And if you have a satellite up there doing it every six hours, for instance, which is what was currently up there on a before standpoint, you only catch one out of every seven thunderstorms. And you get one slice of it. But that thunderstorm is born, it grows, and it dies. And there's so much you can learn about that thunderstorm so that you can improve your models and understand what are the environmental conditions that are causing it to change. And so the after is now, if every thunderstorm evolves every 30 to 60 minutes and we have a global picture, every coordinate point on earth, we're able to collect far more training data and far more inference data to improve how we predict these things.
John Furrier
>> It's like time over target, as they say. The more you're watching, better the data, full models. I got to ask you, Cole, one of the things that's come up in the past, I'd say six months and the past three months specifically has come up a lot, is that everyone sees AI and they go, "Okay, the AI wave is coming." But everyone is starting to realize now that LLM stands for large language models. Weather's not a language. It's not English or text. It's its own language. So, how do you guys view that? Because I think there's a huge shift now in the mindset that there's so much more opportunities around data modeling using AI techniques. Because you guys actually have physics, you have unique data that you know.
Cole Swain
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> You're smiling because you got-
Cole Swain
>> It's the right question. I mean, you think about weather and it's history, it's a very oratory field. People are familiar with looking at the weatherman, watching the weatherman on TV, being told what's going to happen. I think a lot of people underestimate the breadth of what weather actually is. A lot of people personify to their particular use case for their barbecue or for their umbrella need. But for industry, for commercial applications worldwide, there's 300 different parameters. Whether it's how much saturation is in the soil, so what turbulence is that flight going to hit, all the way to, when is the lightning strike going to occur, all the way to, what's the wind speed, to, are we talking snow accumulation or the intensity? And so I say all that because when you say weather is not a language, it's becoming one.
John Furrier
>> Yeah, you have the data you can synthesize.
Cole Swain
>> We can. And we have a really great... We launched actually in 2023, Gale, which is our generative AI assistant that understands how your operation, how your physics, how your physical moving assets are expected to be impacted. So, you can have a conversation with your risk. And you can build reports about your risk and digest at the context of my flight is going to be here at this airport at this point in time. Where are my crews going to actually be timing out relative to when are they scheduled to time out? It's really an intersection of the physical world.
John Furrier
>> Yeah. I mean, there's a zillion examples. Obviously supply chain, commerce. I mean, there's a zillion things. You mentioned flights, aviation, huge area. You got news in that area on aviation.
Cole Swain
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> What's the update with aviation? Because clearly traveling in the sky is big.
Cole Swain
>> It is.
John Furrier
>> That's where the weather is.
Cole Swain
>> Keeping everybody safe up in the sky and making sure everything's efficient up in the sky. So yesterday, we launched Altitude, which is our dedicated vertical aviation specific product in which network operations and flight operations can leverage to be able to understand how their flights are being impacted, which hubs, which airports are getting impacted and when so you can take all the proper networking decisions around that. We spotlighted Lufthanza on that piece. It just launched yesterday. Exciting partnership with Lufthanza. Couldn't be happier than working with that team.
John Furrier
>> And the use case there is to use the data to make better decisions, flight schedules, paths, information.
Cole Swain
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> I mean, was there more to that? Can you share a little more?
Cole Swain
>> There's so much. To maintain on time performance, maintain connectivity, keep passengers flowing through to their connections, maintain crews that have legal timeouts as to when they have X amount of hours that they can actually fly. There's such a cascade that when your flight is delayed at your particular gate, a lot of the times it's a result of weather. And for them to take proactive action to schedule where their crews are located, where their assets are located, and properly prepare for these events, allow them to be able to mitigate a lot of that risk.
John Furrier
>> Talk about this momentum of the company. Obviously great news. You got the Gen1 out. Gen2, you mentioned Deep...
Cole Swain
>> DeepSky.
John Furrier
>> DeepSky. Give us a little teaser on that. I know it's a little early. How should we think about the Gen two?
Cole Swain
>> Think of Gen one at a core mission that we made very clear to the world. Gen two represents moving that mission significantly forward. It's a bigger constellation and we just couldn't be more excited to make sure that the world has access to higher frequency data.
John Furrier
>> So, there's a lot of secret sauce in that. I can't wait to get more details. On the company side, how's things going? Employee count, hiring, what are some of the updates there?
Cole Swain
>> Things are great. It's an exciting mission to be working on. I'd say it naturally just attracts some of the smartest people that exist in this world on the topic that we're working on. It's the intersection of space, of weather, and climate and environment with enterprise commercial applications, government applications. And at the core of it all is AI that allows us to be able to evolve our software to deliver intelligence. It's the intersection of some of the world's most specific problems right now. And everybody's really excited about what we're working on.
John Furrier
>> I mean, the aperture of opportunities are great. You knock down aviation. That's clearly one that's immediate. Supply chain, disaster recovery. And I mean that not in the classic IT about, hey, if there's going to be a hurricane, what's the paths look like? There's kind of a geospatial opportunity-
Cole Swain
>> Yeah, it is....
John Furrier
>> there. Safety, evacuating areas. I mean, just general logistics are impacted by weather.
Cole Swain
>> And little details.
John Furrier
>> And dollars are going to hit the table on that one.
Cole Swain
>> Little details. Shipping your prescription medicine two days earlier because you have choke points in your routes that are going to happen from a flood or from a blizzard. Or demand spikes that come from the weather that allow you to be able to optimize where you place your courier services. Or working directly with governments to help them with their infrastructure, deploy new rapid refresh models that aren't refreshing every few hours. Every 15 minutes, we're taking every available observation because AI makes it more efficient, makes us leaner in our ability to adapt models to your operation and to your geography.
John Furrier
>> You know what's interesting about what you just said is that this is a trend I'm seeing on theCUBE here, both here in New York and in California and across all of our interviews on this point. When you start getting in this outside the language models into these areas where you can get the data and create models around them, the public sector and commercial markets are both in play. So usually it's, "Hey, we got to have a commercial strategy. Let's go sell this to Lufthanza Airlines, make some money.," but there's a huge public sector.
Cole Swain
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> I mean, little things, towns and cities, regions. Talk about that dynamic because I've never seen it that robust.
Cole Swain
>> .
John Furrier
>> I mean, usually public sector is either a dedicated area or a bolt on. In your area, it seems to be lifting in both.
Cole Swain
>> In the end, if you were to think about the problem holistically, they're all being disrupted. They want to accomplish a workflow, whether it's keeping citizens safe, whether it's making sure that goods are delivered on time, whether that's a passenger or whether that's a supply, they are disrupted by the weather. And they need to have proper ways to navigate that X amount of days ahead. And have proper ways to be able to understand what confidence at the intersection with all the data that they have internally and where they need to be and when. In the public sector and commercial sector, the use cases are extremely similar. It's just the translation in the industry is a little bit different.
John Furrier
>> Well, Tomorrow.io Is definitely a physical, real world intersection. Final question, what are you focused on now? What is on your to do list? What are you optimizing for?
Cole Swain
>> Executing on DeepSky, bringing on those more satellites, and making sure that our customers are as happy as can be.
John Furrier
>> And partnerships opportunities?
Cole Swain
>> Absolutely.
John Furrier
>> What's your agenda there?
Cole Swain
>> There's some baking specific to a few industries .
John Furrier
>> He's tight-lipped. We'll get it out of them, but you have a lot going on.
Cole Swain
>> We got a lot going on.
John Furrier
>> All right. Cole, great to see you. Thanks for coming in.
Cole Swain
>> Yeah.
John Furrier
>> All right. Physical AI and robotics. Again, space, data, all comes back down to unifying that data, getting the infrastructure in place. And space is going to be the next horizon, the next frontier. Certainly is populated up with a lot of activity and we're seeing it all across the industry. I'm John Furrier, host of TheCUBE. Thanks for watching.
John Furrier