In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev proposed a scale to determine humanity’s level of technological advancement based on how much energy they could tap into. Type 1 civilizations ought to be able to harness and wield all the energy available on the planet – from solar energy to unknown, untapped sources of renewable energy.
Augustus Doricko, the founder and chief executive of cloud seeding startup Rainmaker, called the Los Angeles Business Journal from Italy, where he was participating in a conference that discussed the Kardashev scale.
Rainmaker, a cloud seeding startup based in El Segundo, announced in mid-May that it raised $25 million in series A funding. The round was led by Sawtelle-based Lowercarbon Capital and included participation from firms like Starship Ventures, Long Journey Ventures and 1517 Ventures.
Rainmaker uses drones to not only produce moisture, but to also prove that the rain was indeed caused by Rainmaker and not natural causes.
“If I fly a plane up into a cloud and sprinkle some magic beans and then it rains, that doesn’t mean that I caused the rain. You can’t attribute that rain to your intervention because maybe it happened naturally,” said Doricko. “…if you have the right kind of radar and you fly in a zigzag or in a circle, and you only see the precipitation in your flight track, you can definitively prove that it is perfectly co-located with our flight track. This is exclusively man-made precipitation.”
Cleantech companies mobilize
To harness all the energy of the Earth, one needs to harness the clouds – sometimes dense, opaque masses of what ends up as rain, but other times nothing more than a floating mass on a scorching day. Cloud-seeding, a weather modification technique that has been used for decades to take advantage of existing clouds by injecting them with a substance that makes them rain over drought-stricken farms.
That technology is key to building a client roster of governments, farms, utility companies and ski resorts, all of which rely on consistent weather.
Rainmaker is part of a class of climate-related startups that, in recent years, have been able to focus on enterprise-grade solutions for climate change. Businesses are now able to put a dollar amount to the damage caused by weather inconsistencies in water park tickets, in pounds of crops or in shipment delays from across the ocean.
NanoH2O, based in El Segundo, develops technology for water desalination, which is also used to bring fresh water to drier climates. Sensible Weather, an insurance technology startup based in Santa Monica, is a weather prediction startup aimed at weather-dependent travel destinations and the web of hospitality workers that keep them running.
“I think hospitality is a huge and underserved market for this particular application, both on the consumer side as well as the business side,” said Nick Cavanaugh, the chief executive of Sensible Weather. “So, I think there’s a lot I think there’s a lot of juice to squeeze in the near term in hospitality.”
Rainmaker is focusing on municipal applications, as well as a couple of ski resorts. Since it was founded in 2023, it has nabbed state departments in Utah and Colorado, the cities of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo and multiple counties in Texas.
“We can go to farms and governments and utilities and actually tell them how much water we’re producing for them so they’ll actually be willing to buy it,” Doricko said.
Rainmaker came about when Doricko who was working on a different venture, a software platform, dropped out and joined the Thiel Fellowship.
“I’ve always been really interested in terraforming, like being able to modify the weather, to make it rain more, to make deserts green,” Doricko said. “That seems awesome.”
