TBPN Sep 21, 2026
With Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of Rainmaker
Rainmaker raised $100 million in a Series B, and the first thing its founder said about the number was that it is small. China's Meteorological Administration, on his account, spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on weather modification.
The usual framing for cloud seeding is environmental. Augustus Doricko's is strategic: water is an industrial input, the American West is short of it, and the country that treats rainfall as a capability rather than a weather report gets to decide who runs out.
"Water is this fundamental input to our industrial economy, to our ag, to healthy agriculture and food."
Doricko founded Rainmaker in El Segundo and has taken it from a company people compared to snake-oil weather men to one with four deployed operating bases, results in Alaska, Oregon, Idaho and Utah, one signed hyperscaler contract and a negotiation running with Swiss cantons.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 7 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
China spends "hundreds of millions of dollars a year" on weather modification, against Rainmaker's $100 million Series B Doricko frames water the way policy people frame critical minerals and natural gas
A hyperscaler has already signed a contract to have Rainmaker produce water against its data-center consumption
Agriculture and household use dwarf data-center water use, and Doricko says so plainly — the problem is the shortage, not the computers
The industry's credibility problem was measurement, not science: nobody could prove in real time that an intervention worked His pitch is that Alaska, Oregon, Idaho and Utah produced "hundreds of millions of gallons of new water"
Weather is underinvested in by everyone except commodities desks, which is the gap Rainmaker is built into
Autonomy is the cost curve: more flights, cheaper observations, lower cost per volume of water delivered
El Niño makes the business cyclical as well as seasonal, so the hedge is geographic — and increasingly international
1. $100M Against China's Budget
Doricko came on the day after announcing both a $100 million Series B and his engagement, and the hosts asked whether the round was big enough for the office gong.
The round is small next to what a state program spends
The reality is, it's a drop in the bucket relative to what the Chinese Meteorological Administration is spending.
Augustus Doricko
Asked for the order of magnitude, he gave a figure and a reason.
China treats weather as a strategic resource, and funds it that way
So they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their weather modification program because they understand that water and the weather is a strategic capability and resource.
Augustus Doricko
His case for the United States doing the same puts water alongside the inputs that already get national-security treatment.
Water belongs in the same sentence as critical minerals and oil
We talk about critical minerals. We talk about oil and natural gas. Water is this fundamental input to our industrial economy, to our ag, to healthy agriculture and food.
Augustus Doricko
If supply does not rise, he said, the Colorado River, the Great Salt Lake and other bodies of water will be impaired to the point of mass evacuation. He also named allies he expects to sell into on the same logic, Jordan and Morocco among them.
2. Who Gets the Water
The hosts asked whether the backlash building against cloud seeding had been displaced by the backlash against data centers, and then put the data-center water question to him directly. Their own framing was the industry's: closed loop, like a car wash, low usage — but multiplied by a thousand times more facilities.
Doricko did not take the bait offered to him.
The honest comparison is agriculture and showers, and both are far larger
Well, the reality is, yes, American agriculture is using far more water, orders of magnitude more than data centers. So does municipal use, the showers that we take, the dishes that we wash, orders of magnitude more water than data centers.
Augustus Doricko
The problem is the shortage, not the computers
But data centers do consume water.
Augustus Doricko
Where supply is as short as it is in the American West, he said, the allocation question becomes real: computers or faucets. The hosts, who had spent the weekend generating AI video, volunteered the computer.
3. The Hyperscaler Deal
Asked whether there is a near-term commercial loop between cloud seeding and data-center consumption, Doricko said there already is one under contract, with more in engineering feasibility.
Offsetting data-center consumption is the shape of the deal
Offsetting their consumption and riding the wave of hypers to produce more water for the American interior, that's a spectacular positive externality that those businesses can provide.
Augustus Doricko
The customer he was more visibly enthusiastic about is the ski industry.
Swiss resorts are the next deployment
But keep an eye out for the cantons of Switzerland and your favorite resorts around there in this upcoming winter.
Augustus Doricko
4. Why Ski Resorts Held Back
A host assumed resorts would take naturally to this, given they have made artificial snow for decades. Doricko said the opposite happened, and the reason was not the science.
A hundred years of unfalsifiable claims is the industry Rainmaker inherited
There are many, many people in the last a couple decades that have claimed to be able to modify the weather, but they can't physically measure it and prove it in real time. If you can't do that, then why would somebody bother paying you?
Augustus Doricko
What changed the conversation was measurable output in four states.
The results are what bought the meetings
It's only because of the recent results that we had in Alaska, in Oregon, Idaho, Utah, where we're making hundreds of millions of gallons of new water that they've taken an interest.
Augustus Doricko
The reason he gives for being able to measure it is that Rainmaker built an atmospheric science operation rather than buying seeding equipment.
Nobody funds weather research except the people trading on it
The weather is something that's historically underinvested in by basically everyone besides commodities desks.
Augustus Doricko
The two things missing are instruments and models
We need to put way more sensors into the field. We need to build far more sophisticated models in order to understand our interventions and then actually harvest the resources available to us in the sustainable and renewable reservoir that is the atmosphere, be it for ski resorts or farms or data centers.
Augustus Doricko
5. Drones, Not Howitzers
One host pointed out that ski resorts already fire artillery to trigger controlled avalanches, and asked why silver iodide could not go up the same way, more cheaply.
The delivery method is whatever works for the customer
At the end of the day, what I care about is delivering on the effect that our customer wants, right? Do you want more snow? What's the best way to get it to you?
Augustus Doricko
He listed rockets, howitzers and skydiving through a cloud by hand as live options in principle, then said the company has made a deliberate bet on autonomy instead. Rainmaker's drones, he said, fly in atmospheric conditions with a wider envelope than most crewed aircraft.
Autonomy is a unit-cost argument, not a technology preference
But in the limit, what we get out of autonomy is more flights, more cost-effective observations, and significantly lower cost per volume of water or snow delivered to our customers.
Augustus Doricko
He did leave the door open to research with planes.
6. El Niño and the Hedge
The hosts asked whether an El Niño year, when some regions get more natural snow than they need, puts him out of business for a couple of seasons.
The business is cyclical twice over
Not only is it a seasonal business because we're making snow in the winter, but also it is annually cyclical because of El Niño
Augustus Doricko
He relayed a comparison somebody had made recently, that building the company is like "playing Diablo on insanity mode for startups."
The answer to the cycle is geography. When one region gets natural snow, another gets less and Rainmaker works harder there. And even in the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies in a wet year, the reservoirs are depleted enough that they need above-baseline melt to refill Lake Powell and the rest. The hedge is across regions inside the United States now and across climates worldwide as the company scales.
7. Models Speed Up the Lab
The last question was whether frontier models are showing up in the work — the observation being that while the public watches open mathematics problems fall, the same capability is quietly landing in industries that never had ten thousand PhDs on their problems.
Doricko said yes, and first gave credit where he thought it was due, with a caveat about the stereotype.
The rate of hypothesis generation is what moved
But again, you can see the rate of hypothesis generation and experimentation accelerating at Rainmaker because of the models available.
Augustus Doricko
Models critiquing model output is the part that compounds
Astra has been a spectacular lever for Rainmaker and we're going to continue using it. And then also developing better and better models. With the informed participation of the LLMs critiquing the output.
Augustus Doricko
That, he said, is genuinely accretive to the company's understanding of the atmosphere, and will become more so.
Bonus Insights
Rainmaker's team is expanding beyond El Segundo, and the reason is procurement
Doricko called himself a "gundo supremacist" and said the company could not have been built anywhere else. But selling to the federal government and to other nations means collaborating with national labs and universities, and that is a different room.
The wardrobe change is a sales decision
Being the mulleted guy in Yeezy is not necessarily the outfit and persona that you want to dawn when you're talking about those research scopes of work.
Augustus Doricko
He arrived in a Hermès tie with clouds on it, one of a set the hosts said was assembled for the round, and said he is wearing more of them and less of the old uniform.
He pushed back on the framing that frontier science requires being a nerd
Asked about the Millennium Prize problems, he credited San Francisco researchers with a spectacular achievement and then named Richard Feynman and Robert Oppenheimer as evidence that the work and the persona are separable.
The engagement and the funding round landed in the same news cycle
The hosts asked whether that was deliberate press management. Doricko said the two were simply close together.
Doricko's bottom line is that cloud seeding stopped being a curiosity the moment someone could measure the output, and that the buyers who follow measurement — hyperscalers, resorts, governments — are the ones now writing the checks.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Rainmaker (Doricko's company. $100 million Series B, four deployed operating bases, autonomous drone cloud seeding, results claimed in Alaska, Oregon, Idaho and Utah)
China Meteorological Administration (The comparison he uses for scale — hundreds of millions of dollars a year on weather modification)
Hermès (The cloud-print ties he wore for the round, and his shorthand for selling to national labs rather than to the internet)
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