companies

WindBorne Systems

Builds long-duration smart weather balloons and an AI forecasting model, WeatherMesh, benchmarked against major government weather models.

WindBorne Systems was founded in 2019 by Stanford graduates John Dean, Kai Marshland, Paige Brocidiacono, Andrey Sushko, and Joan Creus-Costa, growing out of the Stanford Space Initiative student group. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, and designs, manufactures, and flies its own long-duration weather balloons rather than relying solely on third-party atmospheric data. Its balloon constellation gathers atmospheric readings that feed WeatherMesh, WindBorne's in-house AI forecasting model, alongside satellite and ground-station data. The company has run first-ever balloon-deployed dropsonde missions directly into hurricanes, including Hurricane Milton, and has contracted with the U.S. Navy and Air Force to extend WeatherMesh into subseasonal and tropical cyclone forecasting. WindBorne has published benchmark comparisons claiming WeatherMesh outperforms ECMWF's IFS and AIFS models on several metrics. The company has raised roughly $25-40 million, including a $15 million Series A round led by Khosla Ventures in 2024, and employs around 85 people flying balloons from more than a dozen launch sites globally.

Founded

2019

Headquarters

Palo Alto, United States

Sector

data