The U.S. Air Force will buy data collected by WindBorne Systems‘ fleet of autonomous weather balloons under a new contract that could be worth nearly $50 million to the startup.
WindBorne currently has about 700 weather balloons flying around the globe, collecting atmospheric sensor readings that the company sells to customers and also feeds into its own AI weather forecasting model. WindBorne, founded in 2015 and based in Redwood City, Calif., is one of the first organizations to directly feed empirical data into a deep-learning weather model.
