Brightband is a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company on a mission to democratize weather and climate forecasting and make it predictable for everyone. The company is fundamentally rethinking how forecasts are produced by pairing modern machine learning with raw weather observations from satellites, radar, weather balloons, and surface stations, rather than relying solely on the computationally expensive numerical models that government agencies have used for decades. The result is an end-to-end AI Earth System designed to deliver fast, accurate, and probabilistic forecasts of both routine conditions and high-impact extreme events.
The founding team brings together deep expertise in AI and atmospheric science. It includes Ryan Keisler, a physical scientist whose 2022 research helped ignite the current wave of AI-based weather modeling; Amy McGovern, director of an NSF AI institute focused on trustworthy AI for weather and climate; Daniel Rothenberg, an MIT-trained meteorologist with experience at Google Research and Tomorrow.io; and Julian Green, a serial deep-tech entrepreneur who previously ran AI moonshots at Google X. This blend of research credibility and commercial experience positions Brightband to translate cutting-edge models into deployable products.
A distinctive part of Brightband's strategy is its commitment to open science. The company plans to release benchmark datasets, model architectures, and evaluation metrics to establish a common task for global weather forecasting, helping the entire research community accelerate progress. It also collaborates with established institutions including NOAA, ECMWF, AWS, and Google Cloud, giving it access to authoritative data and computing infrastructure.
Brightband targets a broad set of users who depend on accurate forecasts to manage risk: energy and utility operators balancing supply and demand, insurers and reinsurers pricing catastrophe exposure, agriculture and logistics firms planning around weather, and public-sector agencies protecting communities from floods, storms, and heat. In September 2024 the company raised a $10 million Series A led by Prelude Ventures to scale its team and bring its forecasting tools to market.