US Air Force awards WindBorne up to $49M for AI weather balloon data

The U.S. Air Force has signed a contract with WindBorne Systems to purchase atmospheric data collected by the company's fleet of autonomous weather balloons. The contract is worth up to $49 million, with the Air Force placing orders as needed. So far, it has ordered $1.7 million worth of data. The deal was awarded without competitive bidding and is the largest single contract the startup has participated in.

WindBorne operates about 700 weather balloons worldwide, gathering atmospheric sensor readings that it sells to customers and also feeds into its own AI weather forecasting model. Founded in 2015 and based in Redwood City, California, the company is one of the first organizations to feed empirical data directly into a deep-learning weather model.

WindBorne co-founder and CTO Andrey Sushko said the contract is largely a vehicle to support continued growth of the balloon constellation and some R&D work to improve the hardware and performance of the balloons. He added that the non-competitive award reflects the government's determination that WindBorne was the only company able to provide the global data collection capability in the way that met its needs.

In August 2026, WindBorne said it had raised a $37 million Series B round. Earlier that summer, it released WeatherMesh 6, its latest forecasting model, which it says outperforms the traditional physics-based model run by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). In August 2026, WindBorne also became the first organization to send an unpowered flight system into the eye of a typhoon to collect data, an effort Sushko described as one of the first times a deep-learning model was used for actual operational decisions.