WindBorne wins US Air Force contract worth up to $49M for balloon data
TechCrunch and AIbase report that the U.S. Air Force will buy data from WindBorne Systems' fleet of autonomous weather balloons under a contract worth up to $49 million, paid for on demand; about $1.7 million in orders have been placed so far. WindBorne, founded in 2015 and based in Redwood City, California, flies roughly 700 balloons, selling the sensor readings and feeding them into its own AI forecasting model; the company says WeatherMesh 6, released earlier this year, produces more accurate forecasts than the ECMWF's physics-based model. The contract was awarded without competitive bidding, and co-founder and CTO Andrey Sushko described it as a government determination that WindBorne was the only company able to meet its global data-collection needs. CEO John Dean said in August that the company had raised a $37 million Series B, and the report also notes WindBorne says it became the first organization to send an unpowered flight system into the eye of a typhoon in August.
It is a concrete case of AI weather forecasting moving from research into government procurement and operational decisions, alongside a growing role for observation data in deep-learning forecasting.