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.
Source: The Hustle YouTube
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…