Well-known TV weather presenter and meteorologist Jane Bunn found most apps used only one weather model for forecasting, meaning if that model was "having a bad day" so could you or your business.
As a trained meteorologist, Ms Bunn is one of Australia's most-qualified television weather presenters, but one question which she was asked repeatedly - particularly at community events - helped spark a new idea.
"At the end during the Q&As, I am often asked what app I used to look at the weather," she said.
"And I would say, 'Well I don't because I look at the underlying data and then analyse that to come up with the forecast'."
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With repeated requests for recommendations and no solution to provide, an idea was born.
It led her to develop Jane's Weather, which uses four models in one app to counter this problem.
With the help of AgriFutures growAG, Ms Bunn is now seeking up to $750,000 equity investment from angel, corporate and institutional investors.
The app sources information from four weather models that update several times a day into a user-friendly, yet customisable format, to remove the guesswork from weather-dependent operations.
Ms Bunn said depth of data collection made it ideal for the agriculture industry.
"Quite often farmers will have apps they look at and find one was right one time, another is alright when it comes to rain, and so on," she said.
"What we're doing is bringing the best data under one umbrella and letting you see them side by side so you can identify if a particular model is going off on a very weird tangent and can say, 'let's not trust that' because that model is clearly having a bad day."
The app's algorithm, developed by data scientists from the University of Melbourne, takes into account a range of weather factors, including temperature, cloud cover, wind and Delta T.
It overlays the information with other data including location and historical records to create a precise and personalised forecast based on what the user wants to know.
"If you need to spray in the next week, we'll let you know which hours are likely to be good for spraying," she said.
Ms Bunn said the information could be equally valuable for other industries, including construction event management, aviation, mining and logistics.
"The alert service is up and running and it makes sure that anything you need to know about, you are alerted to," she said.
"For example, when there is an activity where you need to know if there are wind gusts over 60 kilometres per hour, we can let you know hours over the next week in which that will be a concern.
Jane and her team have three of the four main global models incorporated into the app and are seeking equity investment of up to $750 000 to fund access to the fourth model and its rich data.
The AgriFutures growAG. platform has been helping Jane's Weather connect with potential investors and has already received reasonable interest since being listed.
"We are in discussions with three different organisations which have come through growAG.," she said.
"We are seeking investors for what I think is going to be a game-changer for weather forecasting.
With 350 paying users and 1400 on the free subscription, Jane's Weather is still growing, but the TV meteorologist behind it knows all too well the weather is something everyone is interested in.
"Australia is step one and then we can go global," she said.
"We are thinking New Zealand will be next and then the USA and Europe because weather data is in global demand, and we can fine tune it for all the conditions across the world."
