The Colorado River, a lifeline for 40 million Americans, is so dry these days that the Hoover Dam’s turbines barely spin for months each year. Phoenix has halted some housing permits because the aquifer is just about tapped out. In the last few years, Mexico City and Cape Town nearly hit “Day Zero,” when residents turn on the faucet and nothing comes out. Desalination? Great if you live on a coast, have billions to spend, and decades to wait. For everyone else: tough luck.
We led Rainmaker’s $25M Series A because they’ve figured out the solution. Augustus Doricko, Rainmaker’s founder and CEO, knows water problems firsthand. Before launching Rainmaker, he developed technology to manage Texas water wells more efficiently. Then he hit the ultimate reality check: you can drill cheaper or drill deeper, but you can’t pump what isn’t there. Major aquifers worldwide are shrinking faster than they can be recharged. You don’t need a degree in hydrology to understand that’s bad news.
Augustus searched far and wide to find a solution, and eventually, his gaze turned toward the sky above. Puffy white clouds above us carry five times more water than all of Earth’s rivers combined. If we could harness just a fraction of those clouds to increase precipitation in the right places systematically, water shortages would be a thing of the past.
Better, faster, cheaper?
When considering a new investment, we first ask whether and how a given technology will become better, faster, and/or cheaper than the status quo. To understand how Rainmaker will fundamentally transform global water infrastructure, you first must appreciate how bad, slow, and expensive water is today.
In California, a staggering 12% of the state’s electricity goes to water-related uses. Even where water exists, moving it is an energy nightmare. Despite everyone from data centers to EVs already fighting for grid capacity, the single largest use of California’s electricity remains “water conveyance,” aka pumping.
What about the cost? The western US spends around $10 billion per year just to move, store, and deliver water, not counting the even larger variable costs of upgrading and maintaining infrastructure, most of which dates back to the New Deal.
To free up that energy and money, we need our water where gravity can do the work: high in mountains, deepening snowpack, raising river levels, and feeding the reservoirs we’ve already spent centuries building.
Clouds aren’t just vapor. They’re complex systems made from water droplets of various sizes in different phases. Rainmaker targets clouds containing supercooled liquid water. These are liquid droplets below freezing temperature, but that, critically, have not yet frozen. By precisely releasing silver iodide seeding particles at the optimal moment, they trigger these droplets to crystallize into ice. More droplets accumulate around these crystals until they’re heavy enough to fall as rain or snow. Of course, silver iodide has a robust safety record with decades of historical use and extensive government and university research demonstrating its safety to humans and ecosystems when used in cloud seeding operations.
Conveniently, the places best geophysically suited for this type of cloud seeding are higher elevations and mountain slopes, so this water can fill high-elevation reservoirs, increase snowpack, and raise river levels – helping to mitigate, not contribute to, the incredible energy use and cost of water pumping from other sources.
Why now?
When you’re searching for generational companies, you’ve got to make sure it’s the right generation for that company. So, another question we try to get at in our investment memos is, “Why now?” If this is such a great idea, you need to understand why no one has done it before.
Cloud seeding isn’t a new idea. It’s been around in some form since the 1940s. It got its fifteen minutes of fame during the 2008 Beijing Olympics when it was famously deployed by the Chinese hosts to make it rain in the days leading up to the Summer Games so that the sky would be clear during the opening ceremonies. But, in the US, it’s more accurate to describe it as a hobbyist activity than an industry. Tiny Cessnas, daredevil pilots, and a whole lot of wishful thinking. “Did it actually work?” Without cold, wet proof, it’s just an elaborate rain dance.
The seeds of change were planted in 2017. That year, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) demonstrated how to identify a “seeding signature” using advanced radar, detection algorithms, and specialized flight planning. Their research clearly showed millions of gallons of unambiguously human-caused precipitation, which in their case added crucial snowpack to the mountains of Idaho. Other university labs have since replicated their approach. It works.
This science is foundational to Rainmaker’s work. Earlier this year, Augustus and his team of forward-deployed atmospheric scientists and mechanical engineers successfully detected their seeding signature in the awe-inspiring Blue Mountains of Oregon. After securing the first permit from the Oregon Department of Agriculture to enhance rainfall since 1976, they provided clear evidence that their operations directly generated net-new precipitation.
That red box? It’s water that would not have fallen in Oregon on March 4, 2025, if not for Rainmaker’s intervention. This isn’t fuzzy theoretical modeling. Fresh water fell from the sky because humans made it so. Let that sink in.
The cutting-edge attribution algorithms that underpin the images above solve a central conundrum for someone building a cloud seeding business: proving to your customers that you made good on your end of the bargain. Rainmaker has now developed this powerful software that helps them locate the most promising clouds to seed in real time and pinpoint the impact of their operations on rain and snowfall for the local, state, and federal water agencies to whom they sell their services.
They’ve already built the full stack
But, you might point out that NCAR’s models aren’t exactly proprietary to Rainmaker. What’s to stop another hydromaniac with AI from building their own version of a precipitation attribution dashboard?
In our experience at Lowercarbon, the primary determinant of success isn’t how deep a company digs a technical moat. It’s how fast.
The attribution models are foundational to Rainmaker but aren’t the only part of the cloud-seeding stack that got a tune-up. Augustus realized early on that as much as the software had to evolve, the hardware was the fundamental enabler of his hydrological vision. It would be reckless, financially and in the eyes of OSHA, to operate a fleet of single-engine prop planes. The solution would be unmanned aircraft.
The challenge is that any off-the-shelf delivery vehicles for silver iodide would have trouble flying into the harsh sub-zero conditions of icing clouds. So, he and his team got to work building custom electric drones that are tough enough to withstand severe weather and carry real payloads. As a perk, they don’t burn any jet fuel or put any pilots at risk.
Their custom drones are so safe and robust that the FAA recently granted Rainmaker a Part 107 waiver to fly their drones beyond the visual line of sight, within clouds, during icing conditions, day or night, even when visibility is low, throughout the entire U.S. If you aren’t someone who has previously had to engage with the FAA on a Part 107 waiver, it will be hard to impart upon you just how exceptional it is to score such a broad waiver. It would be like getting the FDA to approve your new drug in a few weeks.
Rainmaker paired these drones with custom-built meteorological radar. This is another area where the equipment you could order from existing suppliers was underperforming and too expensive. Rainmaker needed sturdy boxes full of specialized radar and sensors that could quickly drop into harsh, remote locations on short notice. What they built cost 1/10th of the top-of-the-line commercial systems.
The first time we visited Rainmaker’s El Segundo offices in fall 2023, neither the drones nor the radar rigs existed. But, in the time since, the team has spun up a manufacturing operation that has enabled them to spread like wildfire. In addition to the aforementioned deal in Oregon, Rainmaker has been approved or licensed and is conducting precipitation enhancement operations in Texas, California, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, and especially Utah where they’ve partnered with the Division of Water Resources to conduct America’s first commercial drone-based cloud seeding operation to help replenish the Great Salt Lake.
Not just another drop in the bucket
So, was Rainmaker offering a better, faster, cheaper solution to the decrepit pipes and pumps that pass for our water infrastructure? Check. Did they have a good answer when we asked why this company couldn’t have been built ten years ago, and why waiting ten more years would be too late? Check. Have we seen evidence that Augustus and his merry band of engineers move too fast for mere mortals who don’t have the grit to camp out deep in the Wasatch testing drones in freezing winds to catch up? Check.
But hopefully, I’ve also given you a sense of why a simple box-checking exercise doesn’t quite cut it for a company like Rainmaker. They are a cloud-seeding startup being built in the shadows of a Chevron oil refinery in El Segundo, California — just down the road from where NIMBY activists famously defeated a multi-decade effort to build a desalination plant. If our home state weren’t suffering such severe droughts, we would be tempted to say the circumstances were dripping with symbolism.
Water access is fundamentally a mass transfer problem, getting molecules of H2O from here to there. The current solutions, desalinating and/or pumping water, are slow, expensive, and resource-intensive. Since water access can also become a life-and-death problem, we need better solutions.
By comparison, cloud seeding enables 40-million-to-1 leverage on mass transfer because of the shocking efficiency of ice nucleation. NCAR’s research showed that you can produce ten thousand gallons of net-new rain from just a gram of particles added to clouds in the right way and at the right time. Rainmaker is developing the hardware, software, and chemistry to shake up one of the world’s largest and most critical industries and revolutionize how we all think about water infrastructure.
Circling back to that $25m Series A. We backed Augustus for his bold tenacity as much as his singular vision to manifest water abundance. Come hell or low water, this team is delivering. It’s not just about replacing pipes. It’s about delivering this civilization-affirming technology from the bone-dry American West to the water-stressed, conflict-rich parts of the world, such as the Sahel and the Punjab. If this is the sort of work you want to get mixed up in, you too can help make it rain. Rainmaker is hiring engineers, atmospheric scientists, and operations specialists at their El Segundo, CA headquarters and in field operations across the western states. And rest assured, they will provide you with a very nice rain jacket.
The post Abundance from Above appeared first on Lowercarbon Capital.