Rainmaker, a weather modification startup founded by Augustus Doricko, has grown from roughly 8–9 employees to over 50 in about 15 months, vertically integrated its entire technology stack, and expanded operations across multiple U.S. states, the Middle East, and Argentina—all while proving its ability to enhance precipitation through cloud seeding.
The company’s journey from a small service integrator relying on off-the-shelf hardware to a fully vertically integrated deep tech operation was forced by regulatory rejection in California and the lack of viable commercial components, culminating in a grueling but transformative six-month deployment to Pendleton, Oregon, where the team lived in a freezing warehouse, built their own drones and radar, and achieved their first evidence of anthropogenic precipitation enhancement by December 2024.
Rainmaker now operates its own drone platform (Elijah), custom radar, and proprietary aerosol particle design, and has acquired one of only four legacy cloud seeding companies in the U.S. to gain immediate commercial contracts and inject its superior tech stack into an existing operation—a strategic move initially seen by some investors as reckless but now recognized as a blueprint for deep tech companies entering legacy industries with long B2G sales cycles.
The company is preparing for what Doricko calls the largest weather modification program outside of China, aiming to match the output of the biggest U.S. desalination plant (about 10 billion gallons in six months) during the 2025–2026 operating season, which would establish cloud seeding as legitimate water infrastructure and position Rainmaker to become the largest water utility in the western U.S. within a year or two.
The Pendleton Crucible
In September 2024, Rainmaker was blocked from continuing tests in California’s Central Valley due to regulatory and airspace constraints, forcing the entire company—about a dozen people at the time—to relocate to Pendleton, Oregon, a small farming and prison town on the Idaho border.
The move was decided in roughly two weeks; the team converted warehouse offices into bedrooms, endured subzero temperatures with broken heating, and lived in those conditions for six months.
Off-the-shelf hardware providers had either lied about capabilities, had year-long lead times, or simply didn’t offer the specifications Rainmaker needed, so the team was forced to vertically integrate everything: drones, radar, aerosol dispersion systems, and particle design.
Engineers iterated through drone versions (V0 through V0.999) on a weekly or faster cadence, frequently losing drones in severe icing conditions and then searching for them on foot through mud at night in freezing temperatures—once getting three trucks stuck and digging them out by hand because they hadn’t packed shovels.
By late November 2024 they had functional custom drones; by April 2025 they had their own radar deployed in the field. December 2024 brought the first evidence that their seeding was actually producing precipitation.
Vertical Integration and the Acquisition Strategy
Rainmaker’s core thesis from the start was to acquire a legacy cloud seeding company rather than try to win government contracts from scratch, because B2G sales cycles are too long (appropriation cycles exceed 12 months) and the cloud seeding market, while real, is small, old-school, and relationship-driven.
There were only four to five legacy cloud seeding companies in the U.S. (in Texas, California, Utah, North Dakota, and Colorado). Rainmaker bought one, roughly doubling its headcount overnight, taking on debt and using venture equity to do so.
The acquisition gave Rainmaker immediate commercial operations and contracts, which it is now upgrading with its own tech stack. Doricko sees this “roll-up” model as broadly applicable to deep tech: buy legacy operators in industries with long sales cycles, inject superior technology, and scale 10x faster than organic competition would allow.
To minimize dilution, Doricko advocates for creative capital structures: using debt for equipment and sales teams, setting up project finance through subsidiary LLCs for capital-intensive assets like factories, and reserving venture equity for core R&D rather than infrastructure.
Operations and Hiring: The Forward Operations Corps
Rainmaker is hiring 40–50 “forward operating specialists” to be fully onboarded by August 1, 2025, for the fall operating season. These are field operators who will live on remote mountains for months at a time, running drones in severe weather.
The hiring filter is extreme: candidates are explicitly told they cannot return home to see family and must commit to living on-site until the job is done. Doricko asks directly in interviews, “Are you prepared to go live on a mountain for six months?”
The company draws from a pool of adventurers—military veterans, national parks workers, former financial analysts from firms like Blackstone who are seeking meaning and challenge over comfort. Retention is extremely high; people who visit for a week typically don’t want to leave.
About 30% of the needed forward operators have been hired so far. The rest must be trained and deployed before October, when the northern hemisphere operating season begins.
How Cloud Seeding Works
Rainmaker targets clouds containing supercooled liquid water—water below 32°F that hasn’t yet frozen (water doesn’t spontaneously freeze until about −38°C). Drones fly into these clouds and disperse silver iodide, which acts as a nucleation agent, turning the supercooled liquid into large snowflakes that fall as snow or rain depending on surface temperatures.
The operating season in the northern hemisphere runs from October through April, when these atmospheric conditions are present. In the southern hemisphere (e.g., Argentina, where Rainmaker is currently testing), the season is inverted.
The company is conducting new particle design and atmospheric research to extend operations into spring, summer, and fall, with the goal of making the atmosphere “engineerable” year-round within about two years.
Selling to Governments and Navigating Politics
Selling cloud seeding to state governments requires extensive in-person relationship building—being in state capitals, getting a regular barber, becoming a trusted local presence. Cold calling doesn’t work. Doricko estimates he circumnavigated the Earth 14 times by air last year.
Cloud seeding has become politically contentious because it gets conflated with conspiracy theories about “chemtrails” (which Doricko says are just contrails—condensation from aircraft engines) and with solar radiation management, a poorly understood and more controversial form of geoengineering.
After Trump’s re-election and RFK Jr.’s vocal opposition to weather modification, multiple states including Florida and Tennessee proposed blanket bans on all forms of geoengineering. Rainmaker’s response has been to educate legislators: cloud seeding uses silver iodide (not colloidal silver), produces no pollution, has no adverse ecological effects, and is simply a water supply tool—distinct from the riskier, global-scale solar radiation modification.
Some states like Montana passed wholesale bans but carved out exceptions for cloud seeding because farmers wanted the water. Florida, which faces recurring wildfires and agricultural water shortages (30,000 acres burned in April alone), is a key battleground. Rainmaker was too late to mobilize local supporters in the current legislative cycle but plans to do so next time.
Terraforming and the Land Fund
Doricko frames Rainmaker’s mission explicitly as terraforming: just as the Central Valley was transformed from desert and swamp into the most productive agricultural region in the U.S. by bringing water to it, Rainmaker aims to make arid regions arable by enhancing precipitation.
The company plans to launch a land fund in Q1 or Q2 of 2026 to purchase desert land that can be terraformed, then either flip the now-viable agricultural assets or own them and profit from what’s grown there—capturing the full value of the water rather than just selling it.
This represents a second layer of value capture beyond the core weather modification business, turning Rainmaker from a water producer into a land and agricultural asset company.
Personal Cost and Philosophy
Doricko’s personal intensity is extreme: during the Pendleton period, chronic sleep deprivation led to a condition where microscopic arachnids (Demodex mites) burrowed into the sebaceous glands of his eyeballs, requiring ivermectin (horse dewormer) to treat. He keeps a lifetime supply on hand.
He traces his tolerance for exhaustion and pain to his junior year of high school, when he simultaneously competed in sports and debate, managed college applications, and led a student experiment on the ISS—staying up until 2–4 a.m. most nights. That period was so meaningful that he came to associate physical exhaustion with deep purpose.
The hardest non-technical challenge of the past year has been the tradeoff between being a good son, brother, and friend versus being fully committed to the company. Doricko acknowledges this is a real and ongoing cost, but one he considers worth paying.
He believes most of Rainmaker’s difficulty is self-imposed by the pace they’ve chosen: “If you are being sufficiently aggressive and ambitious, then reality should be punching you in the face constantly, and in order to tolerate that, you have to Pavlov yourself into loving the sensation of pain.”
Advice for Founders
On finding a mission: don’t search for an idea in the abstract. Join an impressive organization whose mission resonates with you, even if it’s not your life’s work. You’ll encounter real problem sets that give you information about what you can build. Tinkering on side projects won’t produce anything consequential.
On capital structure: most founders don’t think enough about minimizing dilution. Use debt for equipment and sales teams with clear ROI, set up project finance for capital-intensive assets through subsidiary LLCs, and save venture equity for core technology development.
On deep tech go-to-market: demand for hard tech (energy, water, hardware) is usually already there and desperate—the hard part is building the system. Acquire legacy operators to bypass long sales cycles rather than trying to outcompete them organically.
