StormGeo, a globally renowned provider of weather forecasting services from Norway, has announced plans to expand its Lithuanian branch. The company has been operating its Vilnius-based R&D centre since 2014, and over the course of the year is planning to add around 20 Software Developers, Weather Technicians and QA, DevOps specialists to its nearly 50-strong team.
StormGeo started in 1997 as Storm Weather Center, a spin-off of Norway’s largest commercial broadcaster, TV2. In the following decades, the company became an international player with 24 offices and seven global weather-operations centres, employing 550 specialists. StormGeo provides weather intelligence and decision support services worldwide to several key industries, including Shipping, Oil & Gas, Renewables, Aviation, and Media.
StormGeo’s innovative platform combines deep domain expertise with cutting-edge data science to help businesses make better decisions in weather-sensitive operations. Whether onshore, offshore, in the air, or at sea, StormGeo’s forecast centres around the world provide clients with 24/7 support.
Today, the products developed and continuously improved by colleagues in Vilnius are used by tens of thousands of the company’s clients. StormGeo chose Lithuania because of its geographical and cultural proximity to Scandinavia and its abundance of talent.. Since 2014, the company has been operating in Vilnius with a strong focus on developing, prototyping, and perfecting weather intelligence and decision solutions for the Shipping industry.
Talking about the team’s culture, Paliūnas emphasises how informal and fun it feels: “We celebrate things like the Chinese New Year, decorate our offices with pictures of rock stars and occasionally bug our chief engineers to show us an actual vessel engine room from the inside. And from time to time we get to show off our skills in hackathons.”
Even though domain knowledge is not a prerequisite for landing a job at the company, StormGeo has developed strong ties with the Meteorology Department of Vilnius University. Its students and graduates are invited for internships or employment at StormGeo.
According to Elijus Čivilis, the General Manager of Invest Lithuania, StormGeo’s expansion is testimony to the kind of environment Lithuania has to offer to innovative Nordic companies: “The level of autonomy and responsibility provided to Lithuanian branches of forward-thinking international companies never ceases to astound me. And the positive examples set by the likes of StormGeo will attract even more global tech players to Lithuania.”
