While billionaires hoard water rights and investors play Monopoly with farmland, one 20-something founder is trying something completely different: creating water from thin air.
While billionaires hoard water rights and investors play Monopoly with farmland, one 20-something founder is trying something completely different: creating water from thin air.
Meet Augustus Doricko, the CEO of Rainmaker — a Southern California startup using drone-based cloud seeding to artificially increase rainfall over drought-stricken farmland. If it sounds like science fiction, that’s because it kind of is. But it’s also very real, very funded, and potentially very important.
Here’s what you need to know.
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What Even Is Cloud Seeding?
“Cloud seeding is just changing the amount of water that falls onto the ground,” Doricko said.
The science behind it is surprisingly straightforward.
Doricko explained the process in simpler terms: They find clouds with water droplets that are too small to fall as rain, fly drones into them, and spray a mineral that helps those tiny droplets freeze together and become heavy enough to fall as rain or snow.
It’s basically tricking clouds into raining when they naturally wouldn’t.
From Zero to Seed Round
Augustus Doricko didn’t graduate college. He was one class away from a degree at UC Berkeley when he dropped out to run a water compliance startup in Texas.
That job led him to California — and to the realization that regulation alone wouldn’t solve the water crisis. So he started looking into ways to produce more water.
The result? A new company, a $6.3M seed round (with backers like Garry Tan), and a scrappy team working out of a warehouse in El Segundo, a former aerospace hub turned frontier tech hotspot.
His pitch to investors? Dead simple.
“It was pretty straightforward to say, ‘Hey, people need water. We can make it.’ That one was easy,” Doricko said.
At one point, Rainmaker even picked up its entire team and moved to rural Oregon to get around drone regulations. That’s startup energy.
The Stakes Are Bigger Than California
According to Doricko, failing to solve the West’s water crisis could lead to:
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Famine, as California’s Central Valley — which produces 25% of the US food supply — runs dry
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Depopulation, in cities like Phoenix, Salt Lake, and Las Vegas
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Permanent aquifer damage, from overpumping groundwater
“If Rainmaker doesn’t succeed,” he says, “we’ll look back on this time as the beginning of a long, dry decline”
But the impact goes beyond just water availability.
“People don’t think about the loaded costs. Like, if a banana or an orange costs a dollar versus $10, the downstream effects on everybody’s purchasing power is affected meaningfully as well,” Doricko said.
Is It Safe to Mess With the Weather?
Yes, people ask about ethics. And Doricko’s ready with answers.
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Pollution concerns? The seeding material is silver iodide, which is 10x less toxic than aspirin. Used in such tiny amounts it’s nearly undetectable.
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Accidental floods or avalanches? Rainmaker’s programs include strict stop criteria based on soil saturation and avalanche risk.
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Will seeding in one place steal rain from somewhere else? Studies say no. There’s no evidence of “downwind drought.”
Still, he admits: the idea of controlling the weather raises big questions. But he argues the alternative — worsening drought and disaster — is even riskier.
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What’s Next for Rainmaker?
The team is testing their new radar and drone fleet in Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of Argentina, to catch winter clouds year-round.
They’re also building toward the largest weather modification program in the world (outside of China).
If all goes well, Rainmaker could become the largest water utility in the American West within three years.
Eventually, Doricko wants to go even further: terraform deserts, green the Great Plains, and fully automate atmospheric water generation.
Source: The Hustle YouTube
A Different Solution to Water Scarcity
While billionaires hoard water rights like real estate, and firms flip groundwater access for millions, Rainmaker is asking a radically simple question:
What if we just made more water?
Whether drones can solve the West’s water crisis remains to be seen, but one thing’s clear: In a world where everyone’s fighting over the pie, Rainmaker is baking a new one.
Interested in more stories like this? Subscribe to The Hustle on YouTube, and watch the video about the billionaires who are causing the problem that Rainmaker is helping solve in the first place.
