The Story
The forecast that became a company
Colin Perry learned to read the sky before he learned to read a balance sheet. As an undergraduate at Texas A&M University, where he earned a B.S. in meteorology with a minor in mathematics, he spent his time doing something most students never do: forecasting real weather for real people. In 2010 he worked as a forecaster and broadcaster for the Texas A&M Weather Broadcast, preparing 36-hour forecasts each week and recording short segments that aired on FM radio stations across the Brazos Valley.
That work put him close to a problem that most people never think about until it is too late. Weather is not just a topic for small talk. For anyone responsible for a field full of athletes, a park full of families, or a crew working outdoors, weather is a safety decision - and often a legal one. The tools available to make those decisions were, in Perry's view, badly out of date.
He founded Perry Weather in 2013. It did not start as a software company. In the early days it was a weather consulting firm, offering expert judgment to organizations that needed a meteorologist in their corner. But consulting has a ceiling. It scales with hours, not with code. Perry listened to what customers actually needed - fast, site-specific answers they could act on without a phone call - and pivoted the business toward software backed by physical hardware installed where people actually gather.
That combination is the heart of what Perry Weather does today. On-site weather stations feed real-time data into a platform that watches for lightning, dangerous heat measured by wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT), air quality, and other hazards. When conditions cross a line, the system fires alerts automatically and enforces the safety policy an organization has already written down. Every decision is logged, which turns a chaotic moment into a clean record for compliance and liability.
From a radio booth to the big leagues
Before Perry Weather took all of his attention, Perry also spent time as a meteorologist and analyst at Thomson Reuters, work that sharpened the data side of his thinking. But the pull of his own company won out, and the bet paid off. Perry Weather grew the unglamorous way - one customer at a time, one region at a time.
The milestones stacked up. The platform passed 1 million alerts sent in 2017. By 2023 it had reached 50 million, and it became the official weather platform of the PGA of America that same year. In 2024 the company raised a $15 million Series B led by Arthur Ventures, the same firm that had led its $6.25 million Series A in 2022. By 2026 the counter had rolled past 200 million alerts.
Today the customer list runs from the NFL, MLB, and the PGA of America down to thousands of schools, cities, golf courses, and industrial firms. The through-line is simple: any place where people are outdoors and someone is responsible for their safety.
The mohawk and the milestone
For all the seriousness of the mission, Perry runs a company that knows how to have fun with a goal. In the early days, the team set an ambitious target: help 1,000 organizations streamline their weather operations. Perry made a deal. If they hit the number, he would cut his hair into a mohawk and bleach it. They hit the number. He kept his word, publicly, hair and all.
It is a small story, but it says something about how he builds. The goal was concrete, the stakes were personal, and the whole team got to share in it. That mix of rigor and playfulness has followed the company as it has grown. In 2025 Perry Weather was named to the Dallas Business Journal's Best Places to Work, and it has repeatedly ranked among North Texas's fastest-growing technology companies.
Building hardware when the advice says don't
Plenty of software founders are told to stay away from hardware. It is expensive, it is slow, and it breaks in the field. Perry went the other way, choosing to build resilient on-site stations because that is what site-specific weather safety actually requires. A forecast from a distant radar station is not the same as a reading taken where athletes are standing. That insistence on ground truth is part of why the platform earned trust from organizations that cannot afford to be wrong.
The company has also leaned into the science. Perry Weather opened a Heat Lab in partnership with the University of North Florida's Korey Stringer Institute, a leading center for the study of heat safety in sport. It is the kind of move that fits a founder who came to business through meteorology rather than the reverse - the product's credibility rests on getting the physics right, not just the interface.
Perry's ambition for the company is stated plainly: to build the leading weather safety platform, combining powerful software with resilient hardware, so organizations everywhere can protect lives and make confident decisions when the weather turns. More than a decade in, with 200 million alerts behind it, that goal no longer sounds like a forecast. It sounds like a track record.