How WindBorne Systems is scaling a global weather balloon network on Brex

A banking relationship that couldn't keep up with the mission

Before Brex, WindBorne banked with Silicon Valley Bank. As the company grew and started expanding its global launch network, the cracks in SVB’s platform began to show.

The platform itself was painfully slow. A single wire approval could take 10 minutes just to load the page, long enough to earn an all-team message from the CEO about lost time. On top of that, approvals would sometimes vanish entirely, with wires that had already been processed showing up as still pending the next morning, requiring someone to go back in and start over.

Credit limits were an even bigger headache. SVB repeatedly refused to increase WindBorne's limit, which froze all company purchasing at the worst possible times. At one point, the company was down to $28 in available credit. To keep things moving, a co-founder started covering essential supplies out of her own pocket, including helium for the balloons.

Expense tracking wasn't much better. The finance team had to manually build a spreadsheet for each cardholder and chase people down every week for descriptions and project codes. Reimbursements ran through a completely separate system with no unified view of what was being spent or why. The SVB-QuickBooks integration broke so frequently that WindBorne’s CPO had to manually reconnect it every single morning, a daily frustration that became one of the clearest signs it was time to find something better.

Credit, controls, and automation to grow globally without any friction

When WindBorne joined Brex, they finally had the credit they needed to operate without interruption. No more frozen purchasing, no more rejected limit requests, and no more per-wire fees eating into every transaction. WindBorne could scale its spend as the business demanded, all without waiting on a bank to catch up.

The card program grew to support over 90 active cardholders, with spend limits tailored to each team. Machine learning, software, manufacturing, and field operations each have their own card with category controls built in, so no team is competing for budget and the finance team always has a clear picture of where money is going. A receipt policy with a clear, auto-enforced spend limit is built directly into Brex, not buried in a document somewhere.

For global expansion, the setup is refreshingly simple. Team members can use their cards seamlessly anywhere in the world, in local currency, and can pay international wires without FX fees. This allows the global launch leads to easily manage recurring costs like helium and hydrogen delivery, and the rest of the team can travel to stand up new sites, and spend confidently wherever the work takes them. "Brex makes the process frictionless," says Ellie. "Sourcing the gas, buying the shipping containers, getting things to where they need to go."

WindBorne also built WindSpend, an internal tool on top of the Brex API that automatically pulls transactions, assigns them to the right person, and feeds a clean export into accounting. The weekly spreadsheet chase is gone. Reimbursements that used to take days now come back almost immediately, and employees who had been doing it the old way quickly came around. "Once people adjusted to Brex," says Ellie, "they were like, this process is just so much easier."

“The global power of Brex is why I wanted to tell this story. Brex supporting our mission to build a global constellation of weather balloons? That's kind of amazing.”

— Ellie Yoon, Head of Marketing and Communications, WindBorne Systems

200+ hours saved annually, zero purchasing freezes, and a finance platform built to scale

When WindBorne onboarded with Brex in 2021, it had 3 global launch sites. Today it has 16, adding 6 in the last year alone. Brex has been the financial backbone behind every one of them.

The efficiency gains have added up fast. Wire approvals that used to take 10 to 20 minutes each are now instant, recovering over 4 hours of the finance team’s time every month. Expense reporting that consumed 4 to 8 hours of manual work per week now runs automatically through WindSpend, saving the finance team more than 200 hours a year.

Onboarding a new employee or contractor to the finance system, once a multi-step process across SVB, Gusto, and a bookkeeper's spreadsheet, is now a single Brex enrollment. And the daily QuickBooks reconnection that started every morning is gone entirely, saving another 40-plus hours a year in reconciliation work alone.

Most importantly, the purchasing freezes haven't happened once since the switch. No more $28 in available credit. No more co-founders covering helium on a personal card. No more spreadsheets.

For a company building weather infrastructure on multiple continents, that kind of reliability is everything. "In the last three years, we've gone from 3 launch sites to 16," says Ellie. "Brex has genuinely allowed us to scale to the size we’re at now."

Ready to see how Brex can streamline your financial operations? Sign up for Brex today and discover how our integrated platform can eliminate the complexity of managing multiple financial tools while delivering measurable time and cost savings.