Can WindBorne make AI weather prediction lucrative? Plus, Hark previews its browser use agent for completing tasks

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0:50So you can focus on other important things, like savoring that last bit of pumpkin pie. From early startups to Fortune 500 companies, thousands are turning to Framer to build a website they'll love. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off. Rules and restrictions may apply. The new deep learning techniques behind LLMs have also given us weather simulations that can run on laptops instead of supercomputers, changing meteorology.

1:32But the bigger task for AI may be making it easier for people and organizations to put those forecasts to work. Windborne Systems, a startup that collects data with the world's longest flying weather balloons and feeds it into a powerful forecasting model, has raised a$37 million Series B round to take on that challenge. The new round was co-led by Coastal Ventures and Galvanize, with additional investments from TransLink Capital, Lux Capital, and previous investors, and it values the company after this round of funding at$250 million. Founded back in 2019, Windborn started with a plan to acquire a novel set of weather data with its low-cost weather sensors and endurance balloons.

2:20The development of AI weather forecasting models in the last four years has allowed them to make their own forecasts, something that was not previously possible for most private companies because of the cost of the supercomputers previously required to simulate the atmosphere. Well, today, the company has 20 launch sites around the world and about 600 balloons in the air at any given time, collecting data in hard-to-reach areas, like the eye of a typhoon. Now the company is beginning to deploy aerial sensor packages that can fall into the ocean and continue collecting measurements as floating buoys.

2:58The proprietary dataset generated by this planetary nervous system, as CEO John Dean likes to call it, creates a moat for their weather model, which also ingests datasets generated by government weather agencies around the world. Dean said, we demonstrated that when you add balloons to the forecast, you get more accurate forecasts, and the value per data point is much stronger than satellites. We've also been growing revenue while we're doing that, so that de-risks the demand signal to VCs. So the company's main customers today are government agencies. The U.S. National Weather Service purchases the company's data, while the U.S.

3:41Air Force and U.S. Navy are paying windborne through research partnerships, including an effort to develop forecasting models that can be run on board ships that may have intermittent connections to the rest of the world. What's next is commercial business. Right now, that's mainly focused on investment funds that use weather data to predict commodity prices and other business outcomes. Besides spending on compute and an effort to replace the balloon network's satellite communications with a mesh radio network, this round will let Windborne build out its go-to-market team to expand its customer base in the private sector.

4:20Now, that is not always easy. In the last decade, a variety of startups have tried to scale up sensing businesses like earth-observing satellite networks, but found it difficult to break through to the private sector because extracting value from that data requires experience and established workflows. Most turn to government agencies that are used to employing that data already. Private weather forecast companies do exist, but make most of their money repackaging or refining government forecasts for the news media, servicing specialized needs like plane de-icing and ship routing, or the above-mentioned speculators.

5:03That, however, may change as AI tools make data crunching more efficient. Saloni Multani, a partner at Galvanize who co-led the round, said that the private weather market has been limited because integrating weather forecasts into broader business decision-making has traditionally been expensive and difficult. So Maltani thinks that AI changes that equation. Better forecasts make the effort worthwhile, and AI makes it much easier to connect those forecasts to the decisions businesses are really trying to make. Hark is a startup that raised$700 million in Series A funding back in May. And today, it launched its agent Hark Handoff, which can use a browser efficiently to complete tasks.

5:54The company claims that Handoff can easily navigate websites that have no official APIs, including Target, Walmart, OpenTable, and LinkedIn. It said that the handoff agent looks at website structure and visual data to understand if it needs to click buttons or type information. The premise is similar to tons of browser-based agents released before. Issue a command, and it will complete tasks for you, including ordering food or coffee, booking travel tickets, filing returns, shopping for essentials, reserving a table at a restaurant, or researching on your behalf by looking at various sources. In a video demo, the company's CEO, Brett Adcock, showed that the assistant can take a command to build a bouquet with flowers that users specify, along with accommodating fuzzy terms like some of the florist's choice.

6:50Notably, the video shows only part of the process, so we can't really gauge its true effectiveness. The company said that for this release, it's using a post-trained model and plans to pre-train later this year. Hark said that with this approach, it can refine its data pipeline, training infrastructure, and techniques more quickly. Hark also claims that unlike large language models predicting the next token, its model can predict the next action, which could be a clock or a keyboard input at a specific place. There are many companies working on computer use agents, including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, with VC-funded startups working on browser-based task automation, such as Browser Use, Polar, Strawberry, and Aside.

7:42Hark said that its handoff agent is faster than the competition and also costs much less than other models like GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. The startup has opened a waitlist for its platform and plans to release it by the end of the summer. that's all for now for the latest in startup tech news go to techcrunch.com

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