PistenBully Owner Buys AI Snow Forecasting Company

🌨️Forecasting the piste

How does Schneeprophet's AI snow forecasting work?

Schneeprophet is designed for a much narrower task than a normal consumer weather forecast. It combines local measurements from a ski area, meteorological models and AI-supported downscaling to estimate future snow and piste conditions.

Kässbohrer says the software processes those data streams continuously and can calculate conditions up to 15 days in advance. It also provides longer-range information intended to help operators plan through to the end of the winter season.

🛰️From forecast to grooming

Schneeprophet's forecasts are set to be integrated into SnowSat

The strategic part of the acquisition is not simply owning another ski-tech company. Kässbohrer plans to use Schneeprophet's forecast data within SnowSat, its existing digital platform for ski-area operations.

SnowSat already gives grooming teams information about snow depth, terrain, vehicles and operational processes. Kässbohrer says adding Schneeprophet should create a more continuous workflow, beginning with weather and snow forecasts and moving through snowmaking planning, staffing and piste grooming.

The acquisition announcement describes the planned SnowSat integration but does not give a specific date by which every Schneeprophet feature will be available inside the platform.

⚡Efficiency claim

Kässbohrer says better forecasting can cut snowmaking energy use

The headline efficiency figure attached to the deal is a claimed 10–15% energy saving per season. Kässbohrer says savings can reach up to 30% during individual snowmaking windows when operators can make better-timed decisions about when technical snow is genuinely worthwhile.

Those are company-stated figures, rather than a universal guarantee for every resort. Actual savings will depend on factors such as altitude, weather, snowmaking infrastructure, the amount of natural snow available and how a resort already manages its piste operations.

The bigger objective: use more accurate forecasts to reduce unnecessary snowmaking, move snow more deliberately and give grooming teams a better picture of what conditions are likely to look like next rather than only what they look like now.

🏔️Where Schneeprophet came from

Schneeprophet grew out of more than 20 years of snow research

lumiosys was founded in 2022 by Florian Hanzer, Michael Warscher and Ulrich Strasser. Kässbohrer describes the company as a Tyrolean spin-off from the University of Innsbruck, drawing on more than 20 years of snow research.

The technology had already gained recognition before the acquisition. In 2025, lumiosys received the SIS Eco Award from the Foundation for Safety in Ski Sports of the German Ski Association for Schneeprophet and its approach to more resource-efficient technical snowmaking.

🎿What changes next

The deal pushes PistenBully further from machinery into full digital slope management

For skiers, most of this technology will remain behind the scenes. For resort operators, however, the acquisition is potentially significant because it joins two parts of mountain operations that have often been managed as related but separate tasks: predicting what snow will be needed and physically managing that snow on the piste.

PistenBully is already associated with the machines that prepare ski runs. SnowSat added digital snow-depth and fleet-management tools. Schneeprophet now gives Kässbohrer a forecasting layer that reaches further back into the planning process.