LA Hard Tech Spotlight: Rainmaker
LA Hard Tech Spotlight: Rainmaker
Making it rain. Literally.
Imagine a world where humans control when and where it rains. We could shape deserts into fertile lands, combat droughts, and deliver fresh water to the ecosystems and populations that need it most. Cloud seeding may promise that world, and Augustus Doricko from Rainmaker is trying to create it.
You may have seen cloud seeding in the news recently. After a year’s worth of rain fell on Dubai in one day, speculation grew that the weather modification technology played a role in the heavy flooding.
Interest clearly spiked on the news, but for Augustus, it was just another day to educate people on the potential of cloud seeding. As he said to The Free Press:
“Historically, cloud seeding has been viewed as pseudoscience at best or nonsensical conspiracy theories at worst,” he told me Tuesday. “Dubai’s innovation and results is making the science impossible to ignore.” They are “leading the world in one of this century’s most important technologies, and learning lots along the way,” Doricko explained. “Their vision for a better future, an engineered desert oasis, should inspire and catalyze us to action.”
Engineering a desert into an oasis is one of the most audacious missions in hard tech. The team at Rainmaker seeks to make Earth more habitable.
Introducing Rainmaker
CEO & Key People: Augustus Doricko
Founded: 2023
El Segundo, CA
Provider of drone-enabled cloud seeding technology to modify the weather and address water scarcity for farms and ecosystems.
With increasing global water consumption, dwindling freshwater resources, and vast regions of arable land being threatened by drought and climate change, solving water scarcity is one of today’s most critical technology problems. Rainmaker plans to solve this problem by improving and commercializing a technology known as cloud seeding.
What is cloud seeding?
Cloud seeding is a method of weather modification that increases the amount of water and snow that clouds precipitate. Simply put, it’s manipulating clouds to make them rain (or snow) more.
The idea is to encourage cloud condensation and ice crystallization by spreading chemical compounds called nucleating agents into clouds. Adjacent water molecules attach to the compounds, crystallize, and precipitate as water, ice, or snow.
Opportunities
Cloud seeding is typically achieved using ground-based generators or flying cropdusters, but there is room for improvement. Ground-based dispersion can be imprecise and low-efficiency, wasting expensive nucleating agents into the air. Planes have better precision and efficiency but can be prohibitively expensive to operate at scale. Finally, cloud forecasting and modeling software don’t offer sufficient insight to enable efficient nucleating agent targeting, regardless of the deployment system.
Potential for positive-sum
Intuition may lead you to believe that cloud seeding won’t solve water scarcity problems. The process would merely cause clouds to precipitate earlier than anticipated. However, some data suggests that cloud seeding enables a positive-sum improvement in the amount of overall precipitation. While only 9% of atmospheric water typically precipitates, cloud seeding may increase that number by creating additional rain that may never have occurred without it.
The Rainmaker solution
Rainmaker aims to improve on the high costs and poor efficiency of existing cloud seeding methods by developing several capabilities:
Precision numerical weather modeling. Use real-time weather radar and high-resolution weather prediction software to identify optimal targets for cloud seeding in broader cloud formations. This can reduce the amount of nucleating agent expended per unit of precipitation and drive efficiency.
Affordable unmanned drone systems. Design and deploy unmanned weather-resistant drones that enable more precise distribution of nucleating agents and eliminate the high labor costs associated with using piloted aircraft.
Superior nucleating agents. Develop new compounds that can improve the efficiency and safety of silver iodide, the most common nucleating agent used today. Silver iodide is generally safe, but its significant use could result in bioaccumulation in the long run, and almost no research has been conducted to improve upon it since it was discovered for this use in the 1940s.
Made in the USA
Foreign countries have been funding cloud seeding research efforts to promote agriculture and favorable weather conditions around the world. China has used it to fight drought in the Yangtze River basin, and as we noted above, Dubai has used it to promote precipitation in the extremely arid Arabian Desert.
Augustus wants to lead American efforts to harness the abundant water on Earth. He is a charismatic and hard-charging leader who spent the last several years obsessing over the different methods humanity can use to tackle water scarcity. He dropped out of his physics major at Berkeley to found a vertical software business for water resource management before realizing that he wanted to pursue a more foundational solution to the problem. Rainmaker was born.
Between collaborations with El Segundo Mayor Drew Boyles and hosting defense tech hackathons at Rainmaker HQ, Augustus has been a lightning rod for the LA Hard Tech community. He and a few of his founder friends have made enormous contributions to El Segundo and its public reemergence as an entrepreneurial hotspot in LA.
Q&A with CEO, Augustus Doricko
What had to be true so Rainmaker could exist? Why now?
Historically, cloud seeding efforts have been nearly impossible to commercialize because operators couldn't precisely and confidently attribute precipitation to their intervention. Clouds that were seeded may have precipitated without intervention, and even if one accepts that seeding precipitation, quantifying exactly how much precipitated was difficult. While rain gauges spread over a large area are informative, they aren't high enough resolution.
The SNOWIE experiment, conducted in 2017, made a seminal breakthrough in cloud seeding research and a giant leap toward solving the attribution problem. Researchers from across the country hypothesized that, with high enough resolution radar, they would be able to measure an increase in reflectivity in the track of the seeding aircraft that would indicate anthropogenic ice formation. These tracks could then be mapped to precipitation outcomes as the reflectivity signatures were traced to the ground. After conducting their experiment the researchers saw the seeding signatures they anticipated across multiple flights.
Much more research needs to be funded and conducted in order to quantify seeding outcomes. However, this study radically demystified the value prop of cloud seeding for commercial precipitation enhancement.
How will the world change when you succeed?
The first relevant gradation of success at Rainmaker is ending drought-ridden regions like the American West. When we win, squabbles over water rights will be unthinkable. Farms will no longer worry about whether the state will be able to allocate them the water they need to survive and expand. Environmentalists won't have to weigh the survival of endangered ecosystems against the economic benefits of human water use.
The ultimate version of success will make all of Earth habitable. We will have a garden planet where the weather and climate is tuned as precisely as your home's thermostat. Barren deserts will be greened and hurricanes will no longer flood coastal cities. Atmospheric rivers ten times larger than the Nile will convey water through the skies across continents wherever we choose. That is the ultimate end state of Rainmaker.
What motivates you to build this company every day?
The practical motivation for building Rainmaker is to prefer ecological, agricultural, and economic growth over degrowth. I want to see people and nature flourish in the desert, but the status quo is trending towards a future where water is so scarce that both will become impossible. Phoenix, Arizona is banning new housing developments due to insufficient water supplies. Flora and fauna are going extinct in the Colorado River Delta because of its reduced flow. This trend is unacceptable, and thus Rainmaker must produce more water.
The ultimate motivation to build Rainmaker every day is a belief that it is the best means by which I can serve God. In Genesis, man is commanded to steward and take dominion over creation. It's mankind's abdication of our obligation to care for the Earth, to steward and take dominion over it, whenever we allow droughts to occur. My hope and aspiration is for Rainmaker to fulfill this God given responsibility.
Why is LA the right place for you to build your business?
LA is the right place to build Rainmaker because El Segundo is in it. The builders in the Gundo remind me of the biblical story of Gideon. Gideon was a soldier of God and had an army of 30,000 men, they were tasked with saving their nation against all odds. God instructed Gideon to let any men who were afraid leave the army. After the wheat was separated from the chaff, only 300 men remained in the army, but they were the most dedicated, fearless, and honorable of all. Despite being outnumbered hundreds of times over, they won in battle and freed their nation. There are no men in the world I would rather beat the odds and build the next American century alongside than those in the Gundo. It is a pleasure to work with and learn from them. Also there is lots of great engineering talent.
Behind every successful person there are people who play or have played significant roles in making it happen. Who’s one person who has helped you get to this point? How have they helped?
Rainmaker and I are indebted to many dear friends and mentors. One person to whom I am especially grateful is my friend, Cameron Schiller. In the Spring of 2023 I was debating where to headquarter Rainmaker. SF, Santa Monica, Boulder, and Phoenix were all in the running. The Gundo wasn't even on my radar, but Cameron was one of few founders who discovered the city's potential and he clued me in. Not long after, we moved in together. Since then, he and I have spent countless late nights strategizing about our companies. In those chats, it became obvious to me that Cameron is a relentless technologist, seemingly impervious to distraction. Although the frequency with which he reminds people "I just build bro," may come off as abrasive, it radically honed my focus. His dedication to technical literacy and hypothesis testing inspired in me a rigor for which I will always be grateful.
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