Augustus Doricko: Rain Maker exiting stealth mode with weather modification progress across western US and Middle East

Summary

Rain Maker, the weather modification startup founded by Augustus Doricko, is coming out of a deliberate media blackout with plans to publish results across the western United States and the Middle East before the end of March and into April 2025.

The core product is cloud seeding at scale. Rain Maker uses radar, lidar, and satellite data — including proprietary sensing technology it plans to announce later this month — to identify seedable clouds, then flies its own severe-weather-resistant, anti-icing drones into those clouds and sprays silver iodide, which freezes water droplets into snowflakes large enough to fall. Below freezing clouds, that becomes snowpack; above, it melts back into rain. The pitch is cost competitiveness against desalination for arid regions, targeting farms, urban water systems, and degraded ecosystems.

Doricko says the company has been operating in the Middle East — a Fox Business segment he recorded was filmed from a mountaintop there — and has run extensive operations across western U.S. mountain ranges over the past five months. He describes the investor update from that period as showing progress that would surprise most outside observers.

Regulatory headwinds

Tennessee is moving to elevate weather modification to a criminal offense, and Doricko says he plans to return to testify against it. The political positioning is deliberate: he frames water as nonpartisan — farmers, urban developers, and environmentalists all need it — and invokes a Genesis 1:26 stewardship argument to blunt opposition from religious conservatives skeptical of climate intervention.

Long-term targets

The Great Salt Lake is a priority. It runs a deficit of roughly 500,000 acre-feet of water per year, fed primarily by the Bear River system through Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho. Doricko also flags the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City as a showcase moment — Rain Maker wants to replicate and exceed the cloud-seeding demonstration China ran ahead of the 2008 Beijing Games.

Beyond cloud seeding, Doricko frames Rain Maker's long-term ambition as terraforming broadly: reforestation via drone-seeded biologics, and eventually, generating clouds by evaporating ocean water at scale. University labs are experimenting with moisture-activated seed delivery systems, but nothing is commercialized yet.

Team and hiring

The company has grown past the bunk-beds-in-the-factory phase — government officials are now coming through, and serious scientists are being brought on. The three open roles are radar scientists (meteorological or board-level test and qualification backgrounds), aerosol chemists with industrial or large-facility experience, and government affairs professionals with Hill experience. Applications go to rainmaker.com/careers.

Supply chain

Rain Maker is not a defense contractor, which gives it more flexibility than peers like Anduril on component sourcing. Doricko says the company buys American or Taiwanese where possible and uses investment casting from Cameron Schiller's nearby Gundo foundry Rang View. He expects more domestic drone component manufacturing as SoftBank's committed U.S. investment flows through — though he hedges on whether that capital actually materializes.

The broader Gundo ecosystem has a new cohort of founders, mostly aged 19 to 23, including Chris Ottoman building submersible vehicles. Doricko is most excited about Valar Atomics, where Isaiah Taylor is compressing the timeline to a power-positive reactor — and credits Valar's W-Zero unveiling as a model for how hard tech can be made visually compelling without becoming vaporware.