Announcing Rainmaker’s $100M Series B

Today I’m grateful to announce that Rainmaker has raised $100M to accelerate our ability to make Earth habitable.

We will do this by mitigating harm from extreme weather, foremost by providing abundant freshwater for farms, ecosystems, communities, and industry more elegantly and efficiently than ever before imagined.

Investing in this mission are NOA VC, Upfront Ventures, DCVC, Lowercarbon Capital, and Dream Ventures, among other trusted visionaries.

Rainmaker exists to make Earth more habitable. We do this by deliberately and measurably relieving the physical constraints that limit productive, verdant land. Today this is accomplished through cloud seeding, enhancing the water supply that is the most binding and most solvable of those constraints; it is the first wedge of a larger work, the intentional terraforming of Earth.

What, exactly, do we mean by “terraforming?”

To the extent terraforming is used today, it pertains to reshaping extraterrestrial planets in the image of Earth such that flora, fauna, and human life can inhabit it and thrive. At Rainmaker we believe, due to both human pollution and natural trends, Earth can be made habitable; it can be terraformed.

Humanity has already terraformed. The Hoover Dam is terraformation. So too are Las Vegas, Phoenix, California’s Central Valley, and China’s Great Green Wall.

In today’s age of abundance, the truly scarce commodity is not just any land; it is habitable, productive, arable, verdant land. Land that people can develop, live on, and do so in symbiosis with nature.

The extent to which any land has this potential is primarily a function of its weather, specifically, how reliably and abundantly its precipitation supplies freshwater. Reliable freshwater availability is the cornerstone, the most solvable constraint on the concentration of people, industry, and nature in a region.

Put simply, in order to terraform, we must first produce much, much more water. And in order to produce orders of magnitude more water faster and more efficiently than any other method on the planet, we have to solve the weather.

Solve the Weather

In the status quo, ecosystems, civilizations, and economies around the planet face undue strain because of their environment’s volatility. Droughts beget wildfires that incinerate cities and forests alike. Hailstones smash our energy infrastructure and farms. The extent to which this volatility comes because of our previous careless pollution or millenia old terrestrial trends (and surely both are somewhat culpable) is important only insofar as it informs how we can best intervene. And we will intervene.

Earlier this year, Rainmaker became the first private company in history to unambiguously prove we could modify the weather and generate rain, snow, and freshwater at scale via glaciogenic cloud seeding.

We produced over 145 million verified gallons of precipitation, nearly 1800 annual American households’ water demand, over the course of a four month period.

This summer, our technology and deployments improved so much that we provably produced 19 million gallons of precipitation in just three hours as a culmination of our summer research program near Homer, Alaska.

This also provided us a foothold in perhaps the most complex, mystifying, and underinvested field of science today: the study of weather and the atmosphere.

In the mid century, some of America’s most respected scientific minds, working on the Manhattan Project, dreamed of undertaking an even more challenging and ambitious project than splitting the atom: the understanding and stewardly modification of the weather.

Yet during their era, they simply did not have access to the data, the compute, the exquisite sensors, or the flight platforms to collect and synthesize this unimaginably complex dataset.

Today, Rainmaker has all of these within reach.

The intelligence of Rainmaker’s interventions is determined by data. How much precipitation a seeded cloud can yield, where and when to seed, what concentration of ice nucleating particles induces the most precipitation, where precipitation should land to maximize its utility to the basin, answering these questions all require more data.

The accuracy of our answers to questions like these, and subsequently the predictability and scale of the effect we can have, is a function of how well we observe and model the environment.

We also need the monumentally intelligent human beings who know how to collect, synthesize, and act upon the insights the data provides. Rainmaker already employs a small but brilliant army of atmospheric scientists, chemists and aerosol researchers, radar and satellite specialists, and meteorologists with scores of PhDs and advanced degrees among them.

We are growing our ranks. With this new round of funding, we will aggressively hire and scale our research organization to create a flywheel of atmospheric data collection, synthesis, understanding, and intervention – to solve the weather and set the stage for the terraformation of Earth.

Rainmaker: The Weather Prime

Our goal is to build the best atmospheric science lab in the world, specializing in weather modification. To do this, we will:

1. Bring the best specialists’ perspective to Rainmaker’s research
2. Support the researchers at our existing national labs and complement their initiatives
3. Cultivate the next generation of weather modification postgraduate researchers at American universities
4. Move fast and commit unprecedented amounts of capital to supercharge previously slow-moving and/or long-underfunded atmospheric research projects

Our Western, pioneer spirit has gotten us to where we are today and will always remain. But rigorous science, tireless far-reaching data collection, and a rapid maturation of our research will be the emergent theme of Rainmaker’s next chapter.

Our task is to make observations and interventions so scalable that the speed of scientific breakthroughs and the magnitude of their effects no longer depend on expensive, heroic, once-in-a-century campaigns, but accrue continuously from ever cheaper daily operations.

Case in point, Rainmaker’s internal cost per acre-foot generated via cloud seeding declines rapidly as production increases, reflecting economies of scale, higher asset utilization, and improving unit economics. This curve represents a single drone-operator team; Rainmaker can deploy additional teams in parallel to scale production from thousands to potentially hundreds of thousands of acre-feet per year, before even accounting for the gains we will make through eventual autonomous operations of our proprietary deployment platform.

By the November 2026–April 2027 season, we expect our cost per acre-foot to undercut most, if not all, alternative sources of incremental water, including desalination, fallowing, and other supply substitutes in the Colorado River Basin. Rainmaker’s cost curve will continue falling substantially as the technical and operational platform matures towards increased autonomy.

These same levers that maximize glaciogenic cloud seeding’s potential, intelligence, autonomy and scale, will position Rainmaker to solve subsequent biomic limits. A biome given water but battered by hail, scorched by heat, or sterilized by its poor soil is not Edenic. Thus, despite first focusing on water, we will advance on several constraints at once, applying the most effort and capital to the domain that yields the most marginal habitability.

Rainmaker will ensure, in time, that water will never again constrain our quality of life, ecosystems or industry. Environmental hazard will never again be a cost that need be expected in maintaining an asset or development or polity. Land that is currently barren can become orchards and gardens.

To make Earth habitable, Rainmaker will develop new, sci-fi technologies at a breakneck speed. Novel, affordable, sensors deployed across land, sky, and space. Advanced materials to expand the envelope of what effect humanity can have on the atmosphere. Affordable autonomous vehicles that fly farther and higher into more torturous weather than today’s military aircraft. Superintelligent models that predict the state of the atmosphere competitively with, and eventually better than centabillion dollar hedge funds’ quant traders.

Rainmaker must build what nobody has even attempted to build before because we must answer questions that nobody has ever asked before.

In our end state, Rainmaker endeavors to be the first and only Weather Prime – America’s answer to the Chinese Meteorological Administration, an entity that spends hundreds of millions a year modifying their weather and terraforming nearly half the country’s territory.

Except we will do it better, faster, and with American values and virtues as our true north.

You Have to Water the Garden.

Drought, water scarcity, and extreme weather damage threaten our way of life, our safety, and civilization writ large. In the coming decades, these threats will only multiply and compound.

By 2030, 40% of global water demand will go unmet. The most vital, critical resource for life on our planet will, within three years, be unavailable to nearly half of the people and places that need it.

Yet, at any given moment, the atmosphere holds enough water to meet annual global demand three times over. If only we could look up … and bring that water down.

Where there is water, arable land, amenable weather, and infrequent natural disasters, there are more people and subsequently there is more economic activity. It is estimated that the global economic value of water is approaching $60 trillion. But by 2050, it is also estimated that around 46% of global GDP could come from areas facing high-water risk. Cheap water is liquid gold.

The more amenable the biome, the lower the cost to maintain a given population and economy. Human inventions like air conditioning, canals or refrigeration enable us to build cities (e.g. Las Vegas, Dubai) in harsh biomes, but that carrying-capacity enabling infrastructure is a costly half-measure.

If you could just change a sweltering desert into a mildly more temperate grassland by bringing water, if you could change its weather and terraform it just a bit, you could remove much of the capex and opex for all the fragile infrastructure needed to inhabit the desert. And that is what we intend to do.

Rainmaker will make Earth more habitable.

We will terraform our planet by delivering water at scale elegantly and efficiently.

And, in order to do all of that and more, first we will solve the weather.

- Augustus Doricko, Founder & CEO