A Stanford University-founded startup hopes to change how climate data is collected and reported. Their solution: use artificial intelligence-powered weather balloons to upend forecasts.
WindBorne, a Palo Alto-based company, has been dedicated to ensuring that forecasting everything from hurricanes and wildfires to daily weather is as accurate as possible, given the disruptive effects of climate change.
"Let's say a hurricane is going to make landfall in 7 days. If you want to predict that storm accurately for both intensity and ground track, you want data from in and around the storm, so not just around the United States, but inside and around the storm above the ocean," said John Dean, WindBorne's CEO.
What started out as a project in a student-run club at Stanford led the four founding members — Dean, Andrey Sushko, chief technology officer, Kai Marshland, chief product officer, and Joan Creus-Costa, an engineer at the company — to develop what they claim is the most comprehensive balloon constellation on the planet.
The company's weather balloons can fly for several weeks instead of traditional ones that pop in hours. It claims it can collect up to 50 times more information per balloon, even in remote locations like the ocean.
"While our balloons are long-duration, they're the lightest and most sustainable balloons on the planet," read a blog post from the company. "Our balloons have traveled more than 40 days, even double circumnavigating the globe. Our smart balloons navigate the sky by creating and following dynamic flight paths to complete their individual missions."
Using a five-step methodology, the company said it can communicate with the balloon to set flight objectives, create flight plans, and automatically update plans if necessary. This, in turn, helps provide a more accurate weather forecast.
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According to the World Meteorologists Organization, the globe currently lacks weather data for 85% of the atmosphere.
Since founding, WindBorne has partnered with the United States Air Force, the Defense Innovation Unit, the Gates Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
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In partnership with NOAA, a study was conducted that concluded WindBorne's AI forecasting data helped reduce the error in tropical storm tracking by as much as 18% in a specific scenario.
It is worth noting that NOAA is a commercial customer of the startup's services.
In order to provide more information to remote locations the company has launched a pilot program in Kemya. The Gates Foundation backs that project, which is focused on sub-Saharan African observations. The company will deploy close to 100 balloons to better help local farming communities.
"For WindBorne specifically in this pilot — we’re working closely with Kenya Met Department (KMD) and TAHMO (Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory)," said a company spokesperson. "TAHMO is plugged in with multiple met agencies in Africa. Think of TAHMO and KMD as the immediate beneficiaries to our data that can leverage it."
Now with operations worldwide, the company claims it can make a two-week forecast as accurate as daily forecasts.
"If you can monitor the temperature more accurately over the arctic, you can see what the trends look like in that region," Dean said. "We have some of that from satellites, but it's not accurate or high-resolution, so the balloons fill in that gap."
WindBorne and its founders have also garnered the attention and funds of venture capitalists.
To date, the company has raised $25 million in funding from backers such as Khosla Ventures, Footwork VC, Pear VC, Convective Capital, Ubiquity Venture, and Susa Ventures. Khosla led the last round of $15 million and was also the leader in its pre-seed round.
The recent round's funds were used to increase research and development, hire more staff and move its operations to a larger building.
WindBorne now occupies Vive Church's former two-building location. Upon moving, it was able to streamline the manufacturing process and provide more individualized spaces to employees.
The now 40-person company has also raised funding from the government but declined to disclose figures. A spokesperson for the company said, "We had millions in [government] revenue last year, and it is growing."
