WindBorne Systems – a weather and climate tech company with an ultra-cost-effective balloon-based data source – recently announced that it has closed a seed financing round of $6 million. The funding round was led by Footwork and included Khosla Ventures, Pear VC, Ubiquity Ventures, Harvest Ventures, and Humba Ventures, among others.
Starting out as a research project within the Stanford Space Initiative, WindBorne’s patented balloon technology fills the data gap for 85% of the globe with inadequate or nonexistent weather data. And filling this data gap unlocks significantly better weather forecasts for airlines, shipping companies, the energy sector, and the general public. The company’s intellectual property allows for collecting 100x more data per dollar than alternative methods.
With the new funding round, WindBorne will scale its data collection capabilities by an order of magnitude and make several key hires. And WindBorne’s core business, which includes customers in the U.S. military as well as private-sector businesses, is already cashflow positive.
In a time of accelerated global warming, businesses, energy providers, governments, and relief organizations have been desperate for accurate predictions about the weather. Since the weather is a global system, even places where the weather is well-measured receive low-quality forecasts. For example, the North American West Coast’s winter storms – which cost California more than $1 billion – were hard to predict because the systems developed over the Pacific Ocean, one of the world’s biggest data deserts. According to the World Meteorological Organization, 85% of the Earth lacks adequate weather observations.
Between 1990 and 2022, weather-related disaster recovery costs have increased from $30 billion to $175 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and these costs continue to rise. Globally, governments spend more than $10 billion annually on weather data to improve forecasts.
WindBorne invented a new kind of long-endurance, smart weather balloon to fill the data gap and improve weather forecasts. And where a traditional weather balloon collects data for only about two hours, WindBorne Global Sounding Balloons can fly autonomously for over a month. In that time, they can fly tens of thousands of miles, collecting the critical data needed to improve weather forecasts.
Due to their long duration and controllability, WindBorne’s balloons enable previously unattainable worldwide atmospheric sensing, as WindBorne has already proven in revenue-generating contracts with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, and the National Mesonet Program. And n contrast to other high-profile balloons, WindBorne’s balloons are cost-effective and small, with each fully-loaded balloon weighing under six pounds at launch and carrying a sensor housing that fits in the palm of a hand. WindBorne has purpose-built their balloons to be lightweight and zero-emission, propelled purely by wind currents, making perpetual planetary observation affordable and sustainable.
The company has launched over six hundred balloons to date. And they have been flown into extreme weather around the world, including into atmospheric rivers, arctic cyclones, and even Hurricane Ian.
WindBorne is a full-stack weather company, currently licensing access to its data and working to build value-added products on top of it. With this funding, WindBorne will be able to scale operations from several flights per day to hundreds of concurrent balloons by the end of 2024. And WindBorne is also expanding its sensor suite beyond the sensors typically used in weather observation–temperature, pressure, wind speed, and humidity.
WindBorne is planning to continuously operate tens of thousands of balloons, providing constant, comprehensive atmospheric awareness and dramatically better forecasts.
KEY QUOTES:
“Businesses and governments rely on accurate weather forecasts to make critical decisions, yet all too often the weather forecast is wrong. Everyone I talk to has a story about bad weather causing a travel nightmare — the stakes are even higher on a state, national or continental level. This new investment will supercharge our data collection as we seek to fill the data gap for weather globally.”
— John Dean, CEO and co-founder of WindBorne
“WindBorne is working on an enormous and growing problem–weather forecasting — with a unique solution, starting with proprietary data collection from balloon technology that the team has been working on for many years. We could not be more excited to partner with the WindBorne team.”
— Nikhil Basu Trivedi, Co-Founder and General Partner at Footwork
