Our Partnership with Windborne
WindBorne sits at the forefront of a once in a generation revolution in weather forecasting.
We’re excited to announce our partnership and investment in WindBorne: a vertically integrated weather platform whose data insights power critical decision making for financial institutions and government partners. WindBorne designs, builds, and launches high altitude weather balloons that capture critical data from the atmosphere, which is then employed to develop proprietary weather models for real world applications. Accurately predicting weather 2X further into the future, WindBorne helps investment funds and insurance carriers develop more accurate forecasting and actuarial models. We joined WindBorne’s Seed financing round with Footwork VC, Khosla Ventures, Ubiquity, and Pear VC.
Traditional weather data collection methods are fast becoming obsolete as climate change creates new levels of atmospheric unpredictability. Short duration weather balloons and incremental forecasting flights stuffed with archaic equipment are struggling with current climate patterns and will be rendered useless as time moves forward. One does not have to look hard to see the marketplace impacts of climate change in real time, like State Farm’s recent decision to pull out of insuring California homeowners due to increased fire risk.
WindBorne is coming into this space as a vertically integrated solution; tying hardware, software, and services together. WindBorne’s stratospheric balloons have a duration of up to a month; a significant improvement over traditional methodologies and a number that’s only increasing. In turn, this increases forecast accuracy by 30% all the while collecting over 10,000X more data points — per flight. Uniquely, this allows WindBorne to capture current market opportunity in basic weather forecasting while simultaneously, creating the product for and market of the future.
And that’s what really excites us about WindBorne. By design, the Company’s technology will decrease the cost of data collection enough, over time, to eventually allow nearly any customer the ability to create their own proprietary weather applications via an automated input mechanism. The potential impacts of this on predictive and actuarial modeling are hard to quantify because this an entirely new market opportunity.
WindBorne is, first and foremost, an engineering driven company with extremely deep technical expertise. We first met Kai Marshland, one of the Founders, over 10 years ago, while he was still in high school and won numerous programming competitions. Once we got to know the rest of the team including John Dean, the CEO, and Andrey Sushko, the CTO, we became convinced that if there was a team to create disruptive change in this space, this was the one to do it.
We are excited to take this journey with WindBorne and watch as they transform one of the most technically complex but rewarding opportunities we’ve ever seen.
