WindBorne Systems Co-Founders: John Dean, Kai Marshland, Andrey Sushko, and Joan Creus-Costa (Photo: Business Wire)
A team of Stanford graduates in their 20s has overtaken tech giants like Huawei, Nvidia, and Google DeepMind in the competitive field of using artificial intelligence to predict the weather.
Startup WindBorne Systems announced Wednesday that it surpassed DeepMind, the current leader in AI weather prediction, in key benchmarks set by U.S. and European government weather models.
In an exclusive interview with Semafor, the co-founders of the firm, backed by Khosla Ventures and Footwork, said they used an in-air fleet of around 100 inexpensive, hand-built weather balloons made from plastic purchased from a restaurant supply company to gather granular data, which they then analyzed using the same AI techniques that power ChatGPT.
WindBorne has already earned millions of dollars in revenue by contracting with government agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association and the U.S. Air Force. With the new forecasting capability, it plans to go after the commercial market.
Last week, a computer monitor at the company’s headquarters showed six of its balloons rafting toward California in an atmospheric river that was pummeling the southern part of the state. The data the balloons gathered was fed into the company’s algorithms, and to NOAA and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography as part of a research project.
WindBorne says its sensors could help governments better prepare for extreme weather events that can cause billions in damage, such as Hurricane Otis, which last year went from a blip on the radar to a full-blown hurricane in less than 24 hours.
Balloon capabilities were prominent in the news last year when the U.S. shot down what it claimed was a Chinese surveillance balloon over American land; Beijing said it was a weather balloon.
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WindBorne’s WeatherMesh system takes advantage of two technology trends: The rapid evolution of AI algorithms and the precipitous decline in the cost and size of computer hardware and wireless equipment.
WindBorne’s weather balloons, which cost about as much to manufacture as an inexpensive mobile phone, can orbit around the earth for weeks, using AI to precisely control their paths. WindBorne says it already employs the world’s largest constellation of weather balloons, and will increase it 100-fold to 10,000 balloons, giving a tiny startup as much visibility into the earth’s weather systems as heavily funded government agencies.
“As far as I’m aware, this makes us the first company to apply AI-based weather forecasting at scale in the real world,” said WindBorne co-founder Kai Marshland, who said the company markets its forecasts to a wide variety of potential customers, from maritime shipping companies to energy traders. The technology could also provide valuable data to climate researchers and help businesses save fuel, thereby reducing emissions.
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