5 on Funding with Kai Marshland, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of WindBorne Systems

Welcome to 5 on Funding! This weekly newsletter asks venture-backed startups 5 detailed ways they plan to use the new funding to scale their companies.

Quick Facts About WindBorne Systems:

Company Description: WindBorne is a full-stack weather company selling data and forecasts to governments and businesses. They design, build, and operate a constellation of long-duration, smart weather balloons that fly hundreds of times longer than traditional balloons and can cost-effectively access the critical data other technologies can’t. WindBorne’s mission is to solve the atmospheric data gap, enabling access to the previously invisible 85% of the atmosphere and using that intelligence to fight climate change.

Industry: Climate Change

Amount Raised: $7.25M in July

What 5 things will you do with this funding?

Key Priority for Funding:?Scale and expansion

1. Scaling the Number of Soundings?

“The first thing is we are scaling manufacturing and launch capacity to support 10,000 soundings per month by the second quarter of 2024. The value we can deliver to our customers really scales with the amount of data we're collecting.”

2. Expanding Sales and Data Infrastructure

“Next up, we want to grow our Data as a Service revenue to $10 million a year by investing in our sales team and data infrastructure. Our current customers are very excited about us. We need to get in front of new ones. Going to trade shows, doing demos.”

3. Delivering Data-Driven Insights

“We also want to be climbing up the value chain through improvements to our product. So we do have revenue, and our technology advances are improving, but we also need to invest in a product so that customers can get not just information but also insights. And this is what lets us start selling into the private sector as well.”

4. Operationalizing Weather Models

“So then the fourth point, in aid of this, is getting an operational weather model running. So we've demonstrated that our data improves weather forecasts. A key next step is really to operationalize it so that it runs in real-time, and this is what helps us continue expanding up the value chain.”

5. Hiring Key Roles

“And then, the final point is hiring people we need to achieve all of this. We just completed a big hiring push, which filled roles like Product Designer, Manufacturing Engineer, and Meteorological Operations Specialist. We're really excited about how these people will accelerate our progress. And while we're not actively hiring for much at the moment, we're always open to talented people who reach out.”

About the co-founder: Kai Marshland is the co-founder and CPO of WindBorne Systems, a weather and climate tech company consisting of former SpaceX engineers that has developed a world record-breaking balloon system and balloon-based data source to address the atmospheric data gap. Before joining Windborne, Kai graduated from Stanford with a B.S. in Computer Science and has been working at early-stage startups since high school. He helped propel POWr Plugins from thousands to millions of users during his tenure as the first engineer. Additionally, Kai has worked on infrastructure for terabytes of space debris data as one of LeoLabs' earliest employees and optimized the data pipeline for astronaut controls at SpaceX.