Augustus Doricko

He grew up in ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, where, National Geographic writes, water problems were rare.⁠[1]

By his own account he grew up an atheist, describing his younger self as “very much an angsty, philosophically inclined existential nihilist.”⁠[2]

Fast Company writes that he once hoped to enter the Naval Academy and become an astronaut. He says he was a “provocateur” in high school and that he joined the 2018 school-safety walkout inspired by the Parkland shooting, which he says he did to keep his own school safe. Of the 2017 Charlottesville rally he says: “I was in high school. I was listening to my dad’s clips of Ronald ReaganRonald ReaganRonald Reagan (1911–2004) was an American politician and actor who worked as a radio sports announcer and film actor before serving as governor of California from 1967 to 1975 and as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989.Open the full entry speeches.”⁠[3]

He enrolled at the University of California, BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry, to study physics. National Geographic writes that during his first year at Berkeley, wildfires fed by dry brush and worsened by CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry’s drought kept students indoors for a week; he says: “Seeing what the West was going through was eye-opening.”⁠[1][3]

Fast Company writes that he describes his lifestyle at Berkeley as “hedonistic.”⁠[3]

The Deseret News writes that he was studying physics at the University of California, Berkeley, when Covid-19 shut the world down, and that he then moved to Fort Worth, Texas, and started working as a personal trainer.⁠[2]

The Deseret News writes that at the gym he met Jason Flynt, one of the biggest water-well drillers in Dallas; the two began talking about water and by December 2021 had co-founded Terra Seco Solutions, which he describes as “basically like TurboTax for farmers to report their water usage.” Fast Company also writes that he previously ran a Texas groundwater-monitoring startup.⁠[2][3]

He learned about the water problem while working with farmers across Texas and concluded: “We have to make more water.”⁠[2]

On February 7, 2023, he published the essay “Cloud seeding is like alchemy but better” in his Substack newsletter Water Bro, subtitled “Why we should use ~pseudoscientific~ magic to make water abundant.” The essay likens cloud seeding to a forgotten alchemy that produces almost magical results by scientific means and can “produce gold”; it takes the shrinking Salton Sea as an example, contrasts a roughly $50 billion desalination pipeline with cloud seeding at about $15 million a year, recounts cloud-seeding projects from the 1940s to the 1970s, notes that China and the United Arab Emirates now run such programs, and calls for more cloud seeding to save the American Southwest and “make water abundant.”⁠[4]

Fast Company writes that he founded Rainmaker in 2023 after dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley. The Deseret News writes that the cloud-seeding company began in the spring of 2023, when he was debating whether to start another groundwater company and read Genesis 1:26–28; he says: “So starting Rainmaker happened when I read that verse.”⁠[3][2]

Marketplace’s episode summary relates that in 2023, at 23, he attended a weather-modification conference in ColoradoColoradoColorado is a U.S. state classified as one of the Mountain states, with Denver as its capital. It was admitted to the Union on August 1, 1876, as the 38th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,773,714.Open the full entry wearing a Kid Cudi and Kanye WestKanye WestKanye West, who has called himself Ye since 2018, is an American rapper, record producer and fashion designer. He first made his name producing for artists including JAY-Z and released his debut solo album, The College Dropout, in 2004. From 2022 his antisemitic remarks led Adidas to end their partnership and social platforms to suspend him; after releasing the song “Heil Hitler” in 2025 his Australian visa was cancelled, and following an apology letter in January 2026 he was barred from entering the United Kingdom that April.Open the full entry collaboration hoodie and a mullet; he says: “I set expectations low with my appearance so that I can pleasantly surprise people in conversation later.” There he learned of a recent experiment in which scientists seeded winter clouds with silver iodide and detected the resulting precipitation with radar and airborne sensors, which he calls his “aha” moment; he started Rainmaker shortly afterwards. The episode notes that Jeff French, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wyoming, was part of a cloud-seeding study that originally inspired him to pursue the field. Fast Company writes that at a conference he learned that operators could record precipitation but could not prove they had caused it; a 2017 study suggested that seeding in a zigzag flight pattern would produce precipitation with a recognizably human-made signature, and Rainmaker’s drones fly such patterns.⁠[5][3]

The company’s full name is Rainmaker Technology Corporation, and it is headquartered in El Segundo, California. Fortune wrote in May 2024 that the company had moved into its lab the previous December and hired its first engineers in January.⁠[6][7]

Deseret Magazine writes that he contacted Jonathan Jennings, a meteorologist with UtahUtahUtah is a U.S. state bordered by Idaho to the north, Wyoming to the northeast, Colorado to the east, Arizona to the south and Nevada to the west, with its capital at Salt Lake City. It was admitted to the Union on January 4, 1896, as the 45th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 3,271,616 residents.Open the full entry’s Division of Water Resources, in February 2024. Jennings recalls that when he opened Rainmaker’s website and his social-media page he saw a man with a “huge mullet,” a jean jacket and a “Jesus T-shirt” underneath, and was skeptical at first; the article states that Jennings now sees him as an inspirational leader and strategic thinker.⁠[8]

On March 20, 2024, the Thiel Foundation announced its new class of 20 Thiel Fellows, and he was selected for the Thiel Fellowship. The announcement states that the Thiel Fellowship, established in 2011, provides each fellow with $100,000 and access to a network of tech founders, investors, scientists and former fellows, and that fellows commit to working full-time on their projects. The list of fellows gives him as from Stamford, Connecticut, with the project Rainmaker: advanced cloud seeding to fight drought and make deserts habitable.⁠[9]

Fast Company writes that he won a Thiel Fellowship the year after founding Rainmaker; Rainmaker’s press kit and his Deep Tech Week speaker profile also describe him as a Thiel Fellow. The Los Angeles Business Journal gives a different account: that he had been working on a software platform and dropped out to join the Thiel Fellowship, and that Rainmaker came out of that move.⁠[3][6][10][11]

On May 7, 2024, Fortune wrote that Rainmaker had raised a $6.3 million seed round from investors including Long Journey Ventures, Day One Ventures, Tamarack Global, 1517 Fund, Starship VC and Champion Hill Ventures, with Garry TanGarry TanGarry Tan is a Canadian-born ethnically Chinese technology entrepreneur, product design and engineering practitioner, and venture capitalist who currently serves as president, CEO, and general partner of Y Combinator. He worked on early product and engineering at Palantir, co-founded Posterous, Posthaven, and Initialized Capital, led early investments in companies including Coinbase, and has long been involved in San Francisco local public affairs.Open the full entry and the former Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry partner Balaji SrinivasanBalaji SrinivasanBalaji Srinivasan is an entrepreneur, investor and the author of The Network State, the founder of Network School, and a former chief technology officer of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded Counsyl and 21, along with its successor product Earn.com, was involved in projects such as Coin Center, and has backed companies such as fomo as an angel investor.Open the full entry also investing. The article describes him as 24 years old and a fixture of El Segundo.⁠[7]

Asked in the article how often people call him crazy, he answers: “Every single day!” He says that seeding works in a laboratory tank but is hard to measure in real clouds, which are dynamic and uncontrolled, and that quantifying how much precipitation was produced is an unsolved problem on its way to being solved. The article states that Rainmaker had not yet made it rain in the field; he says the season ended before the product was ready and that the options were to fly to AlaskaAlaskaAlaska is the largest U.S. state by area and borders Canada to the east; its capital is Juneau and its largest city is Anchorage. Alaska was admitted to the Union on January 3, 1959, as the 49th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 733,391.Open the full entry or to focus on engineering and enter the field in September.⁠[7]

E&E News writes that Rainmaker began lobbying at the federal level in mid-2024, hiring LSN Partners and Capitol Pillar, the latter led by Casey Hammond, a former Interior Department official in the Trump administration. LSN lobbied Congress and the Federal Aviation Administration on drone waivers, certification and “drought control,” while Capitol Pillar met lawmakers and Interior officials on water resilience.⁠[12]

Angie Kathleen, a meteorologist writing for the radio station KPQ in 2025, states that Rainmaker achieved its first success on December 12, 2024, in Pendleton, OregonOregonOregon (officially the State of Oregon) is a state on the Pacific coast of the western United States; its capital is Salem and its largest city is Portland. It was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1859, as the 33rd state. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 4,237,256.Open the full entry, with several drones taking turns delivering silver iodide to the clouds. The Deseret News writes that the engineers the company sent to Pendleton in its early days lived in a hangar for a time; chief operating officer Parker Cardwell says that after commercial drones failed in icing conditions the team built about 60 drones in roughly three weeks, and local farming families hosted team members for chili nights and bonfires. The drone test area at Pendleton was authorized by the FAA in collaboration with the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Lockheed MartinLockheed MartinLockheed Martin is an American aerospace and defense company whose main businesses include military aircraft, missile defense, rotary-wing aircraft and mission systems, and space systems.Open the full entry, Anduril IndustriesAnduril IndustriesAnduril Industries is a defense technology company headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, United States, co-founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and several former Palantir and Oculus employees. It develops autonomous drones, unmanned undersea vehicles, border surveillance towers, counter-drone systems, and the Lattice command-and-control software, and builds its own large-scale weapons manufacturing facilities. As of May 2026, the company was valued at $61 billion.Open the full entry and AeroVironment also test technology there.⁠[13][2]

On May 6, 2025, Contrary Research published an interview with him conducted by Eric Tarczynski. He describes Rainmaker as “a next-generation cloud seeding company” that uses novel anti-icing-capable drones together with its own weatherized radar and processing algorithms, and calls attribution “the primary problem,” which radar tracking addresses. He says the company sells cost-plus services to state, municipal and federal customers, some of them abroad, installing its radar and bringing its drones and teams; it has vertically integrated radar production and plans to install radars first across the rocky Western United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, and he wants to move to success-based contracts that sell water by the acre-foot.⁠[14]

In May 2025, Rainmaker announced a $25 million Series A round led by Lowercarbon Capital, with Starship Ventures, Long Journey Ventures and 1517 Fund participating; dot.LA also lists Naval RavikantNaval RavikantNaval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor and a co-founder of AngelList. Early on he co-founded the review site Epinions; he and Babak Nivi later grew AngelList out of the startup-fundraising blog Venture Hacks, and he co-founded the cryptocurrency hedge fund MetaStable Capital and Spearhead, which backs founders to make angel investments. His views on startups and life were compiled into the book The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.Open the full entry among the investors and writes that the money would go to growing the drone fleet, investing in atmospheric science and expanding commercial partnerships with utilities and governments.⁠[11][15]

The Los Angeles Business Journal, in an article dated May 26, 2025, writes that he called the paper from Italy, where he was taking part in a conference that discussed the Kardashev scale. The article states that Rainmaker focuses on municipal uses and a couple of ski resorts, with clients including state departments in Utah and Colorado, the cities of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo, and several counties in Texas. He says in the article: “This is exclusively man-made precipitation,” and: “I’ve always been really interested in terraforming.”⁠[11]

An article published by the radio station KPQ on June 15, 2025, states that its author had watched his interview on The Shawn RyanShawn RyanShawn Ryan is a podcast host, former U.S. Navy SEAL and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) security contractor, and founder of the training company Vigilance Elite, who hosts the long-form interview program The Shawn Ryan Show. The show began with interviews of special operations veterans, later expanded to guests such as politicians and to current affairs, and ranked among Spotify’s top ten U.S. podcasts of 2024.Open the full entry Show, hosted by Shawn Ryan. His Deep Tech Week speaker page lists him as a speaker at “Ascending Kardashev Type II with Starship Ventures” at Deep Tech Week in San Francisco on June 24, 2025, and as moderator of Lowercarbon Capital’s “Energy and Climate Night” on June 25; the page describes him as a member of El Segundo’s hardtech scene.⁠[13][10]

On the afternoon of July 2, 2025, Rainmaker carried out an operation at Runge, Texas, which Fast Company writes was for the South Texas Weather Modification Association. CBS NewsCBS NewsCBS News is the news organization of the U.S. CBS system, part of Paramount, providing news coverage through television, the web and streaming. Its history extends from radio newsgathering to television and digital platforms; its signature programs include CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes and Face the Nation, and CBS News 24/7 is its streaming news service.Open the full entry writes that Rainmaker confirmed the operation and that he published the flight logs and said that the company had seeded two small clouds over Runge, about 150 miles south of Kerr County, and that the clouds dissipated within hours. CBS News also writes that the company had been paid to try to boost water supplies in reservoirs and aquifers in the area but suspended operations after its meteorologist noticed moisture flowing in from the Gulf.⁠[3][16]

From July 4, floods struck central Texas; E&E News writes that at least 135 people died, and Fast Company that 130 died, with the worst flooding about 125 miles from Runge (National Geographic gives about 100 miles). Fast Company writes that he was in Manhattan Beach, California, when the flooding began. Social-media users linked the floods to Rainmaker’s operation days earlier: E&E News writes that the influencer Brian Gamble posted that the public was owed “full transparency and factual clarity,” and that his post and a repost by Mike Flynn were viewed more than 1.6 million times; Fast Company writes that rumors also spread online that Rainmaker proved “deep state” control of the weather. He says that things became very surreal when Mike Flynn posted about the company on July 5.⁠[12][3][1]

He replied to Mike Flynn on X that Rainmaker had not contributed to the floods, writing that his “prayers are with Texas.” He called the natural disaster “a tragedy,” said that the company “did not operate in the affected area on the 3rd or 4th,” and that such a short operation could not have affected the broader conditions behind it. Fast Company writes that he says the Hill Country storms produced about 4 trillion gallons of rain, while a successful seeding mission produces at most about 10 million gallons, and that he was not surprised by the uproar because chemtrail conspiracy theorists had targeted cloud seeding for years.⁠[12][16][3]

E&E News writes that he gave interviews to The Washington PostThe Washington PostThe Washington Post is an American daily newspaper founded in Washington in 1877, known for its role in the Pentagon Papers case and the Watergate investigation. Run by the Meyer–Graham family for eighty years from 1933, it has been owned personally by Jeff Bezos since 2013.Open the full entry, Newsweek, CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry and The Free Press and appeared on at least five conservative podcasts within two days; Fast Company writes that he defended the company on shows hosted by Dinesh D’Souza, Shawn Ryan and Tim Pool, and said on Timcast IRL: “You ever heard of aerosol invigoration of convection, bro?” Deseret Magazine writes that he said on CNN that cloud seeding could not have produced that much rain. Alex Conant, a partner at Firehouse Strategies, said: “This company was in the spotlight and made this strategic decision to be proactive.”⁠[12][3][8]

CBS News writes that a company spokesperson said employees received multiple threats through the company website and on X after the floods; Fast Company writes that he received hundreds of emailed death threats and now travels with security.⁠[16][3]

CBS News writes that experts said cloud seeding is not powerful enough to have caused or contributed to the flooding, which came from heavy rain as storms converged with the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry; the Houston meteorologist Travis Herzog said that seeding can enhance rainfall in existing clouds by up to 20 percent and “cannot create a storm of this magnitude or size.” Senator Ted Cruz said there was “zero evidence of anything related to weather modification.”⁠[16]

E&E News writes that in July 2025 then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced the “Clear Skies Act,” which would criminalize releasing chemicals with the intent of altering the weather, temperature or climate, co-sponsored by Representatives Tony Wied and Tom Massie; the bill was modeled on state bans considered in at least 10 states and enacted in TennesseeTennesseeTennessee is a U.S. state in the southeast-central United States, with its capital at Nashville. It was admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 6,910,840 residents.Open the full entry and FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and chipping away at support for such legislation is a top priority for Rainmaker. Fast Company writes that Florida passed its ban in April 2025, effective that fall, and that by mid-September 2025 cloud-seeding bans had been proposed in 32 states, mostly by Republican lawmakers.⁠[12][3]

E&E News writes that, by his account, chief operating officer Parker Cardwell and another company official visited the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in July 2025, and that the company wants the agency to refrain from regulating silver iodide.⁠[12]

On August 11, 2025, he published the op-ed “Cloud-seeding is not a threat — it’s a time-tested tool to deal with water scarcity” in The Hill. It opens with the farmers’ saying “Pray for rain, but keep the plow in the ground” and calls farmers “the canary in the coal mine”; it states that cloud seeding was invented in the United States and has been used for over 80 years, that 10 states invest in programs, and that under the right conditions it can raise precipitation by “as much as 10 to 15 percent,” but that it cannot create clouds, control large weather systems or cause disasters. He criticizes the bill introduced by Marjorie Taylor Greene to “criminalize precipitation enhancement nationwide” as resting on conspiracy theories, and writes that adversaries such as China are investing billions in the field. The piece concludes that “Cloud seeding is neither a silver bullet nor a boogeyman”; he describes himself as a person of faith who believes in science and says stewardship means to “leave it better than we found it.”⁠[17]

Fast Company writes that in September 2025 the Environmental Protection Agency published a report that rebutted chemtrail conspiracy theories and distinguished cloud seeding from solar radiation modification, which the article calls “a modest victory” for him; he says he is grateful for the “level head” of the agency and its administrator, Lee Zeldin.⁠[3]

Deseret Magazine wrote in October 2025 that he, then 25, says there is a way to actually “restore the Great Salt Lake,” predicts that in 10 years “All of this will be water,” and likens the company to “big-league ‘Twisters.’” The article states that Rainmaker’s Utah operations are based in an un-air-conditioned warehouse in Bountiful, with director of operations Parker Cardwell and Jared Smith managing the Utah site; the company injects silver iodide into winter storms with mobile cannons on the ground and drones in the sky, says that it does not create clouds or water but teases more snow from existing storms, estimates that it can increase a storm’s precipitation by 5 to 15 percent, and plans to bring in radars and other technology to prove its results to investors and the public. Utah now contracts with Rainmaker for cloud seeding.⁠[8]

In the article he calls atmospheric rivers “new Colorado Rivers of the sky” and says of the company’s culture: “We like the taste of blood in our mouth.” The article notes that some environmentalists and tribal governments oppose cloud seeding over concerns about silver iodide’s safety, and cites a 2024 report by the Government Accountability Office that found no documented risk at current levels of use.⁠[8]

On December 11, 2025, Fast Company published Ainsley Harris’s feature “The hardest startup in America.” It states that he, then 25, had raised $31 million in venture capital for Rainmaker from investors including Naval Ravikant, Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital and Michael Gibson’s 1517 Fund, and that the company had 120 employees, customers including state governments and farming associations, and pilots across the United States and in Argentina.⁠[3]

The article describes his test site on a hillside near the Great Salt Lake: Rainmaker flies Elijah, a custom 3-foot-by-3-foot quadcopter, into the troposphere to look for conditions favorable to precipitation and then releases silver iodide particles. The company has retired 62 prototypes; because the drones must fly up to 15,000 feet, it developed a de-icing system that heats the propeller blades and doubles as a probe estimating liquid water in clouds, and it says Elijah has flown in 25-meter-per-second winds at 14,999 feet, with 75 ready for use. Darrion Vinson, head of software, joined in 2024 from the aerospace and defense startup Hadrian after meeting him at a bar in El Segundo. Kaitlyn Suski, head of research and one of his first hires, will track operations in the Great Salt Lake basin with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and researchers from the University of Utah and Utah State University; he has asked her to research alternatives to silver iodide, and he hopes to take the model worldwide, including to governments in arid Middle Eastern regions and to farm regions that need irrigation, at 1,000 times its current scale.⁠[3]

On January 29, 2026, E&E News wrote that Rainmaker uses drones, AI weather forecasting and silver iodide particles to wring precipitation from certain clouds, has contracts with dozens of Western states and municipal water authorities, and has raised more than $50 million. The article states that, in addition to its earlier lobbyists, the company hired an in-house lobbyist and Crossroads Strategies, which briefed the White House, the U.S. Department of DefenseU.S. Department of DefenseThe U.S. Department of Defense is an executive department of the United States federal government, formed in 1949 from the National Military Establishment created in 1947 and headquartered at the Pentagon. The department’s website describes it as America’s oldest and largest government agency.Open the full entry and the Commerce and State departments on “water resilience,” and that Rainmaker spent $450,000 on federal lobbying in 2025, more than three times its 2024 spending. He says the company wants to sell cloud-seeding services to the Trump administration, talks with anyone interested in more water, and that the uses of cloud seeding are “open for discussion.”⁠[12]

The article states that at the beginning of January 2026 a series of gold-framed Rainmaker ads appeared in the Capitol South Metro station in Washington, which Outfront, the company that manages the ad space, puts at around $100,000; when Sam Jeske, a spokesperson for Representative Pramila Jayapal, questioned the slogan “we build rain” on his personal X account, he replied: “That’s literally exactly what we do.” He describes himself as a conservative Christian, says that people have “very, very legitimate questions” about the safety of cloud seeding, and says that his “first priority” is ensuring that American farms and communities can use the technology.⁠[12]

The Deseret News wrote in spring 2026 that Rainmaker announced its technology had been “unambiguously validated,” saying it had produced 143 million gallons of fresh water for residents of Utah and Oregon; the company flies distinctive patterns and then compares radar and satellite features with the areas where its drones operated, and as of April 2026 it had found 82 “unambiguous seeding signatures.” The article states that Rainmaker operates in Utah, IdahoIdahoIdaho is a state in the northwestern United States, often classed as a Mountain state and also considered part of the Pacific Northwest; its capital and largest city is Boise. It was admitted to the Union on July 3, 1890, as the 43rd state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 1,839,106.Open the full entry, Oregon, California and Colorado and that it bought North American Weather Consultants, a cloud-seeding company based in Sandy, Utah; the Government Accountability Office calls the technology’s benefits “unproven.” Joel Ferry, head of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources, said: “That kind of validation is critical.”⁠[18]

On June 2, 2026, the Deseret News published Eva Terry’s profile “The making of a rainmaker,” interviewing him, then 26, at the company’s El Segundo headquarters. The article states that Utah lawmakers approved $5 million a year for cloud seeding in 2023; Jonathan Jennings, a meteorologist with Utah’s Division of Water Resources, calls the state’s program the most robust operational program in the country, and the article calls Rainmaker its “heart”; Joel Ferry calls the partnership “the smartest thing we can be doing with our money,” with Utah paying about $55 to $60 per acre-foot of cloud-seeded water compared with about $60,000 for desalination.⁠[2]

In the article he says that when the drones fly in a line and snow appears only along that line, it shows the snow is man-made. The article states that head of research Kaitlyn Suski holds a PhD in physical chemistry from the University of California San Diego and has 18 years of experience in aerosol and cloud microphysics, and that her team plans to seed specific locations in the November 2026–April 2027 season. When interviewing John Tesmer, now deputy director of field operations, he quoted Henry Ford’s line about “faster horses.” Joel Ferry describes him as someone who pushes limits rather than being bound by tradition.⁠[2]

On June 10, 2026, Marketplace’s How We Survive aired the episode “Make It Rain,” hosted by Amy Scott, which states that Rainmaker has almost 120 employees and has operated in six states and on four continents, and that its Salt Lake City lobby displays the sign “We Can Refill The Great Salt Lake.” He says: “I think that you can actually stop the aridification of the lake with cloud seeding, along with the rest of the tools that are available.” Jeff French, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Wyoming, says: “There’s no scientific evidence in terms of what cloud seeding can do to be able to support a claim like that,” and argues that restoring the lake would require changing water use, since increasing precipitation by 5 or 10 percent would not be enough.⁠[5]

National Geographic writes that from early June to late August 2026 about a dozen Rainmaker employees were stationed at a remote cabin on the southern Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, equipped with radars and drones, flying quadcopters to disperse particles into clouds. The company says test flights in August produced 19 million gallons of precipitation over three hours; he calls the Alaska testing a breakthrough, saying the research represents “a significant, precedent-changing shift in our capacity to produce fresh water at scale.”⁠[1][19]

On September 9, 2026, Good Morning America published a story on an interview that ABCABCABC (American Broadcasting Company) is an American commercial broadcast television network. It grew out of NBC’s Blue radio network, took its name after becoming independent in 1943, developed into a national television network after merging with United Paramount Theatres in 1953, was acquired by Capital Cities in 1985, and has been owned by The Walt Disney Company since 1996. With CBS and NBC it is one of the three traditional U.S. broadcast networks, and it is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry News’ Ginger Zee conducted with him at Rainmaker’s California warehouse. He says: “Over the course of hours, we can produce millions of gallons of new precipitation.” He says each seeding adds less than a tenth of an inch over hundreds of miles and that repeating it a couple dozen times over a winter builds snowpack that feeds reservoirs, rivers and streams; the company planned to take advantage of that season’s strong El Niño pattern, and he says, “Our aspiration this winter is to produce more water from cloud seeding,” aiming to exceed California’s combined desalination capacity. He also says: “It’s critically important that the U.S. develops and wins the frontier of this tech.”⁠[20]

On September 21, 2026, Rainmaker announced a $100 million Series B round with participation from NOA VC, Upfront Ventures, DCVCDCVCDCVC (Data Collective) is an American deep tech venture capital firm founded in 2010 by Matt Ocko and Zachary Bogue, with offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, California. It invests in companies that use computing and AI to solve real-world problems in fields such as energy, climate, biomedicine, defense, space, and industry; as of October 2026 it had more than $4 billion in assets under management across 13 funds.Open the full entry, Lowercarbon Capital and Dream Ventures; the company declined to share an updated valuation and had previously raised $50.3 million in venture funding. Fast Company writes that the company says its data link its flights to 145 million incremental gallons of fresh water, that the new money will expand the research team with radar meteorologists, machine-learning specialists and aerosol chemists, and that it has filed patents for several biodegradable seeding agents to be tested that winter. He sees a chance, if cloud seeding is scaled, to reduce the severity of hail, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes: “We will be better situated than anybody in history to conduct these subsequent interventions.”⁠[19]

National Geographic wrote the next day that he estimates Rainmaker is on track to produce several billion more gallons of water that winter. In the article Katja Friedrich, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, sees promise in Rainmaker’s drone approach but doubts its published figures, saying “cloud seeding is being oversold because we have a water crisis,” and notes that the company had not yet measured how much of the precipitation reached the ground; Amie Abramyan, Rainmaker’s director of field research, acknowledged this as a missing piece and said the company is deploying instruments to collect that data.⁠[1]

As of November 2026, the press kit on Rainmaker’s website describes him as founder and CEO of Rainmaker Technology Corporation, headquartered in El Segundo, which enhances precipitation with drones and next-generation radar systems under the tagline “Rain. Made in America.”⁠[6]

Fortune writes that in his late teens and early twenties he went looking for God, studying under two nondenominational pastors, a Catholic priest, Anglican priests, a Sunni imam, an Orthodox rabbi, a Reform rabbi and a Buddhist monk whom he soon dropped, before becoming a Christian. He says in the Deseret News article: “I studied under multiple religious faiths: Muslims, Judaism, then a couple different Christian denominations.”⁠[7][2]

Fast Company writes that he was baptized in Texas two days before his twenty-first birthday; he says he came to faith through logic, by weighing the evidence for Jesus’s death and resurrection, and that he has lately been drawn to Orthodox Christian mysticism. He says: “My deepest, heartfelt core motivation is to serve God.” The article states that he has taken the first chapter of Genesis to heart and often quotes the Bible and Elon MuskElon MuskElon Musk is an entrepreneur who founded SpaceX and has long served as chief executive of Tesla; he also took part in creating PayPal, OpenAI, Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI. He acquired Twitter in 2022, and his businesses span spaceflight, electric vehicles, energy, artificial intelligence, and social media.Open the full entry.⁠[3]

Fast Company writes that he has been linked to a church in Santa Clarita belonging to a denomination led by Doug Wilson; he says he attended it “less than 10 times” and now considers an Eastern Orthodox congregation his church home. The Deseret News writes that he belongs to the Eastern Orthodox Church; he says: “By no means is everybody at Rainmaker Christian, but everybody understands that it’s my animating principle.” In Deseret Magazine he calls Rainmaker “a work of faith.”⁠[3][2][8]

Rainmaker’s systems are named after biblical figures and images: the drone is called Elijah, “because of the story where he prays for rain and gets it,” the atmospheric sensing package deployed in the mountains is Eden, the probe Gideon and the software stack Prophet. The Deseret News writes that the team had to rename the software stack because the name violated blasphemy laws in the Middle East.⁠[2]

Fast Company writes that at the University of California, Berkeley, he was involved with Turning Point USA, became dissatisfied after the pandemic and the death of George Floyd with its messaging, which he felt did not address deeper cultural and religious problems, and says he found Nick Fuentes’s message about Christian revival appealing. The article states that in June 2020 he posted about Black Lives Matter on X and sent posts to Nick Fuentes, whom it describes as a white nationalist and far-right influencer, and to Jaden McNeil, founder of America First Students, requesting to start a Berkeley student chapter of Fuentes’s then-nascent organization America First; he was dropped from a conservative student publication over suspicions that he supported America First, writing at the time that he believed in Christianity, the nuclear family and the American worker and soldier.⁠[3]

He says: “I’m not a white nationalist.” He says that in 2020 he did not know the full extent of Fuentes’s views or his history of white nationalism and antisemitism, and that the campus chapter never came together; he says he came to support the phrase “America First” as a way of caring about the United States, that the world is more complicated than he believed at 19 or 20, when he had not yet been baptized, and that he has “a lot more love” in his heart now. E&E News gives a different account, writing that he founded the school’s America First Students chapter, a group affiliated with Nick Fuentes; Deseret Magazine writes that the student newspaper said he had founded a right-wing student group at Berkeley.⁠[3][12][8]

Fast Company writes that he has tried to avoid a partisan label: in April 2025 he shared a photo of himself, dressed in Nikes and a tan suit, shaking hands with Bill ClintonBill ClintonBill Clinton (born 1946) is an American politician and lawyer, a Democrat who served as attorney general and governor of Arkansas and as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001.Open the full entry, and about four months later he posed with California Governor Gavin NewsomGavin NewsomGavin Newsom is an American Democratic politician who has served as the 40th governor of California since 2019; he previously served as mayor of San Francisco and lieutenant governor of California and founded the PlumpJack Group.Open the full entry; when a user criticized the latter on X, he replied: “I love everybody and will work with people that want to give farms and ecosystems the water they need.” Deseret Magazine writes that Rainmaker insists it is apolitical and that water is a bipartisan issue.⁠[3][8]

Fast Company writes that he is a prominent figure in the Christian, patriotic, homegrown-tech scene around El Segundo, which has attracted investors such as Peter ThielPeter ThielPeter Thiel is an American entrepreneur and investor, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and the first outside investor in Facebook. He is a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and founded the Thiel Fellowship, which funds young people to leave college and build new things; his public skepticism of higher education, his support for Trump in 2016, and his funding of litigation against Gawker Media have drawn controversy.Open the full entry; he says he feels little attachment to Silicon Valley or to tech in general and sympathizes with concerns about tech platforms controlling speech, and he said on a podcast that much of people’s work lacks meaning, calling work in crypto “dishonorable.”⁠[3]

Several reports describe his mullet: Fortune calls him “mulleted,” Deseret Magazine describes a sandy blonde mullet and white sneakers, and in his interview with E&E News he calls himself “a 25-year-old mullet man in Los Angeles.” Fast Company writes that he wore cowboy boots at the Utah test site and smokes American Spirit cigarettes; Deseret Magazine also describes him sitting on the gravel outside the warehouse, smoking a cigarette while on the phone.⁠[7][8][12][3]

Fast Company wrote in December 2025 that in a widely viewed interview two years earlier the tech commentator John Coogan called him a Gundo “super-connector,” and that he has joked about “reindustrialization and boozin’” in the local founder scene. The article states that political pressure and building the company have taken a toll on him, and he says his faith is still maturing: “On the one hand, I get to rely on God.”⁠[3]

In the Contrary Research interview he says that “Cloud seeding is just a water supply tool,” attributing its slow adoption to confusion with chemtrails and to gaps in radar coverage; he frames China’s program as a geopolitical race and argues that U.S. companies, rather than China, should supply water to countries in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America; he describes success as first stabilizing water supplies and then extending farmland across the Southwest, and says that targeting the right clouds does not take water from neighboring regions and that silver iodide is safe.⁠[14]

He says in Fortune’s article that weather modification can reduce flood damage by reducing a storm’s velocity, though it cannot delete a hurricane, and that since humans already modify their environment, modifying the weather is comparable to building a dam. Deseret Magazine writes that he has said it is worthwhile to “control the weather” and that he is on a mission from God to do it; when Pete Buttigieg posted about extreme weather, he replied: “We should just control the weather then.” In Fast Company’s 2026 article he describes his broader vision as to “make Earth more habitable.”⁠[7][8][19]

He says in the Deseret News article that he empathizes with people who believe in chemtrails and that the government has “explicitly and intentionally lied to us without the interest of the people in mind,” but says that samples of jet exhaust show no evidence of chemtrails and that cloud seeding requires large clouds of liquid water and cannot be done on clear days. He encourages skeptics of the company to contact him personally.⁠[2]

Substack newsletter Water Bro: https://doricko.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

X: Public account: https://x.com/ADoricko (opens in a new window).⁠[21][10]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/augustus-doricko-660b20145/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

Rainmaker: Official website: https://www.rainmaker.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[22]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[23]