WindBorne Systems has raised $37 million to sell something it has already proven it can build: weather forecasts that beat the government’s. The Series B, reported by TechCrunch, was co-led by Khosla Ventures and Galvanize and values the company at $250 million. It takes WindBorne’s total funding past $62 million.
The forecasting is the easy part now. Turning it into a business is the hard one.
The planetary nervous system
WindBorne flies balloons. About 600 of them are in the air at any moment, launched from 20 sites worldwide. They drift for weeks, gathering readings where satellites and weather stations cannot. The eye of a typhoon is one such place. The company calls the network a planetary nervous system, and it is the point of the whole business.
That data feeds WeatherMesh, WindBorne’s AI forecasting model. The latest version, released two months ago, tops public benchmarks as the most accurate weather model available. It beats the leading AI systems and the traditional physics-based models that governments run. It does so on far less computing power to train.
