US Air Force to buy WindBorne balloon data in contract worth up to $49 million
The U.S. Air Force has signed a contract with California startup WindBorne Systems to buy atmospheric data from its autonomous weather balloons. The deal could be worth up to $49 million, though only $1.7 million has been ordered so far.
The U.S. Air Force will purchase data gathered by the autonomous weather balloons of WindBorne Systems under a new contract worth up to $49 million. WindBorne is a startup founded in 2015 and based in Redwood City, California, and this is the largest contract it has taken part in.
How the contract works
The Air Force pays only for the data it needs and can place orders for specific regions at specific times. So far it has ordered $1.7 million worth, and company executives expect further orders.
WindBorne co-founder and chief technology officer Andrey Sushko said the contract mainly supports continued growth of the balloon fleet, along with research and development to improve the balloons' hardware and performance. He said the contract was awarded without competitive bidding, which he described as the government's determination that only WindBorne could provide global data collection in the way its operations required.
The company and its model
WindBorne currently has about 700 balloons flying worldwide. They collect atmospheric sensor readings that the company sells to customers and also feeds into its own AI weather forecasting model. It is one of the first organizations to feed empirical data directly into a deep-learning weather model. The company already works with the U.S. government, including the National Weather Service, the Air Force and the Navy.
In August, CEO John Dean said the company had raised a $37 million Series B funding round. Earlier this summer it released WeatherMesh 6, the latest version of its forecasting model, which it says is more accurate than the traditional physics-based model run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
Also in August, WindBorne became the first organization to send an unpowered flight system into the eye of a typhoon to collect data. The balloons are steered by adjusting altitude, releasing air or dropping sand ballast to catch winds heading where they need to go. Sushko called it one of the first times a deep-learning model was used for actual operational decisions.
