Rob Thomas wrote a verse in 1996, wondering what it’s like to be a Rainmaker.
Well — just ask the folks over at Rainmaker.
Rainmaker Technology Corporation is a cloud seeding company. They fly drones into the sky, seed clouds, and produce rain or snow in places that desperately need it. Farms in droughts. Shrinking lakes. And western states that are running out of water.
Cue the rap music, Fat Joe. Let’s dive into this Company and make it rain.
Okay but how
Here's the science in plain English. Clouds are full of supercooled water — water that's below freezing but hasn't formed ice yet. It needs something to crystallize around. Silver iodide has a molecular structure almost identical to ice. Release it into the right cloud, and the water molecules latch on. Ice crystals form, grow, and fall as snow or rain.
Has anyone done this before? Sort of. The idea has been around since the ‘40s — the US military used it in Vietnam, and several western states have tried it for decades. The problem was always the same: nobody could actually prove it worked.
Rainmaker rebuilt it from scratch.
Their Stratus software identifies the optimal seeding window, their Elijah drone — the only one of its kind capable of flying in severe icing conditions — goes directly into the cloud and releases the silver iodide precisely where it matters, then their Eden radar tracks what actually happened.
Eight decades of spray and pray. And now Rainmaker is showing up with receipts.
The guy who started it
Augustus Doricko is a 25-year-old UC Berkeley physics dropout based in El Segundo, California.
Speaking of which, Left Field has now covered three companies headquartered in El Segundo. Varda Space, making drugs in orbit. Radiant Nuclear, shipping portable nuclear reactors on trucks. And now Rainmaker, making it rain from a drone named after a prophet.
What the heck is going on there? Somebody needs to get boots on the ground in El Segundo. Jake? Sam? Katherine? Pick you up on the way? Is that a good use of funds???
Before Rainmaker, Doricko was building technology to manage water wells in Texas. But the problem with water wells is simple: at some point, there's nothing left to pull up. You can optimize the pump. You can go deeper. But eventually the well is just dry.
So, Doricko did what any normal person would do. Put on a pair of sweet shades and looked to the sky.
The atmosphere above us holds more freshwater than all of Earth's rivers combined. It’s just floating up there, abundant, and begging to be optimized like a Chick-fil-A drive-thru.
So, Doricko dropped out of UC Berkeley, won the Thiel Fellowship, and started Rainmaker in 2023. Two years later: 100+ employees, state government contracts across the American West, and tens of millions raised. Also, a few million people on the internet who blamed him for a flood.
When the internet came for a 25-year-old
In July 2025, catastrophic floods struck Texas, killing more than 130 people. Horrible. Rainmaker had conducted a cloud seeding operation in the region a couple of days before — for drought relief — and reported it to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as required by law.
It's important to understand the math here before anything else. A successful cloud seeding mission can produce around 10 million gallons of precipitation. The Texas floods generated roughly 4 trillion gallons. Cloud seeding influences existing weather systems at the margins — it cannot generate a storm anywhere near that magnitude.
That didn't stop it from becoming a significant public moment. Just like the misinformation surrounding Apeel, Rainmaker & Doricko were hit hard. Doricko responded by going on every podcast he could find and walking through the science as patiently as a 25-year-old who'd just been blamed for a natural disaster could manage.
The honest take
Cloud seeding has been labeled "unproven" by the US Government Accountability Office for decades — not because it didn't work, but because nobody could definitively prove any specific mission worked. Weather is too chaotic for clean cause and effect.
Until April 27, 2026.
Rainmaker announced they became the first private company in history to unambiguously validate cloud seeding results. 82 distinct radar signatures proving their operations directly caused precipitation. 140+ million gallons of freshwater delivered to Oregon and Utah this season — and the company says that's likely a small fraction of their total generation.
The headwinds are real though. The airline pilots’ union urged the FAA to tighten or reject Rainmaker's drone permits. Multiple states have introduced or passed outright bans on weather modification. And a meaningful portion of the public still connects this company to weather conspiracy — a reputation problem that data alone doesn't fix.
The science is validated, and trust is still being rebuilt. Both things are true at the same time.
If they pull this off
The American West is not running low on water. It is running out. More than 80 million Americans are affected by drought in some form. Agriculture, cities, ecosystems — all of it depends on freshwater becoming less reliable by the year. If you could add measurable precipitation where and when it's actually needed, you wouldn't just be running a weather company. You'd be operating infrastructure as essential as any pipeline or power grid.
Then there's the Great Salt Lake.
Forty years ago, it covered around 2,300 square miles. Today, ~800 square miles of dry lake bed sit exposed. That has real implications for the million-plus people living in Salt Lake Valley. Rainmaker is conducting America's first commercial drone-based cloud seeding operation to try to reverse it.
That’s just one operation. There are hundreds more like it across the American West.
Go to the field: rainmaker.com
Want to work out here?
Rainmakers Wanted as their careers page notes. Atmospheric scientists, drone engineers, finance, and operations. Heck, they have a “Radar Intern” posting. Santa Fe, New Mexico, Norman, Oklahoma, and El Segundo, California — which, at this point you should know.
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