Rainmaker raises $100M Series B to scale cloud-seeding drones and win water contracts with hyperscalers and ski resorts

Speaker 1: I'll I'll need cash. Don't ask questions. Don't ask questions. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Got Auguste Dosto Rico back in the Ultra Dome, back in the waiting room. He's coming in hot off of a series meeting. How are you doing?

Speaker 2: Gentlemen, I'm blessed. It's a pleasure to be chatting again. Congratulations. Dude, you align all this news? Yeah. Was that strategic?

Speaker 1: Was this like a You're like, I need to pump the series b so I'll get engaged to get an extra press cycle going? Oh, yeah. They were close together, I guess. That was coincidence. Both embargoed. Same weekend, maybe. Yeah. That they were. Obviously. Congratulations. We're very happy for you on on on the engagement, but also the series b. How are things going? What's new in your world? How much rain are you making these days?

Speaker 8: Yeah. Well, first of all, the the $100,000,000 that we raised, I'm super grateful to have done that with with some great partners.

Speaker 4: Hey.

Speaker 2: Goodness. Keep we need we're gonna need a bigger gong the next round. We are. We've been with I feel like we've been riding with you for every round to date. Day one. And, yeah, time to upgrade for us.

Speaker 8: No. You were there you were there early. I I was wondering whether a $100,000,000 bag was big enough for the size gone. But Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. The the reality is it's it's it's a drop in the bucket relative to what the Chinese Meteorological Administration is spending. Wait. What are they spending? They understand say again? Yeah. What what what are they spending? Order of magnitude? So so so they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their weather modification program because they understand that water and the weather is a strategic capability and resource. We talk about critical minerals. We talk about oil and natural gas. Water is this fundamental input to our industrial economy, to our ag, to healthy agricultural and food. And if we don't produce more and cloud seeding is the foremost option to produce more, the Colorado River, the Great Salt Lake, the the bodies of water across The United States are going to be impaired to the point of mass evacuation. So we need to make more for the sake of the strategic health of the country and then also for our allies overseas that need more water, like Jordan in The Middle East, like Morocco, and so on. Did you get saved by data center backlash?

Speaker 1: Because there was some backlash brewing to your crazy scheme to make it rain. And then I feel like it's been real quiet since the data center started sucking all the air out of the discourse.

Speaker 8: Well, the data centers have been sucking water out of our reservoirs. How real is that from your perspective? You're the water expert.

Speaker 1: Talk to data center people. They'll be like, it's closed loop. It's like a car wash. Yeah. We use water, but we recycle it. At the same time, you know, water usage, it it's low, but everyone's saying we're gonna build a thousand times more data centers. So at a certain point, might be significant. What what's your take on it?

Speaker 8: Well, the reality is, yes, American agriculture is using far more water, orders of magnitude more than data centers. So so does municipal use. The showers that we take, the dishes that we wash, orders of magnitude more water than data centers, but data centers do consume water. Yeah. And when you have as great a shortage of supply as we do in the American West, do you want to give water to computer or to your shower and your faucet? Probably computer. Probably

Speaker 2: probably computer. You're asking the guy that's playing video games? All weekend generating AI videos.

Speaker 1: But If it's generating AI videos and playing video games, I'll skip the shower. I'll walk in. But,

Speaker 8: John Jordy, you can have AI slot videos in the shower if you just make it via cloud seeding. I can have my cake and eat it too with cloud seeding. Precisely.

Speaker 1: Precisely. Is there actually any any closed any any near term flywheel there where cloud seeding can alleviate water usage from data centers, or is that, like, further out?

Speaker 8: Raymaker already has one deal closed with hyperscaler, and we're in negotiation and engineering feasibility with multiple others. Offsetting their consumption and riding the wave of hyperscalers to produce more water for the American interior, that's a spectacular positive externality that those businesses can provide. And so I look forward to that. Maybe not as much as I do the ski resorts that we're negotiating with, but keep an eye out for the cantons of Switzerland and your favorite resorts around there in this upcoming winter. That's cool.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Talk yeah. Talk I talk more about that as personally as a skier. I'm I'm I'm quite fascinated. But but like what what are what are those deployments gonna look like? Like, are you is that basically you have a team that's set up at an individual mountain and then you're basically I mean, these are businesses that have basically dealt with making artificial snow for such a long period of time. I'm sure they took, like, very naturally to the concept, but what are these deployments gonna actually look like?

Speaker 8: So they haven't taken supernaturally to it initially because cloud seeding and weather modification has mostly been full of Fugazi and snake oil for the last hundred years. Right? There, are many, many people in the last couple decades that have claimed to be able to modify the weather, but they can't physically measure it and prove it in real time. If you can't do that, then, why would somebody bother paying you? It's only because of the recent results that we had in Alaska and Oregon, Idaho, Utah, where we're making hundreds of millions of gallons of new water that they've taken an interest, and we wouldn't be able to do that if not for our efforts to build the best atmospheric science lab in the world. The weather is something that's historically underinvested in by basically everyone besides commodities desks. We need to put way more sensors into the field. We need to build far more sophisticated models in order to understand our interventions and then actually harvest the resources available to us in the sustainable and renewable reservoir that is the atmosphere, be it for ski resorts or farms or data centers.

Speaker 1: Are you gonna stay with drone delivery for the foreseeable future, or is there a howitzer in the pipeline? Because I I I I've seen those some ski resorts actually have howitzer cannons that will just launch conventional munitions to cause avalanches to clear avalanches for safety. But they already have some of the equipment, and I imagine with the right round, you fire the right chemical and disperse it at the right it doesn't seem that crazy to me. It might be cheaper, but I'm sure you've looked at it. What's the decision tree for you?

Speaker 8: At the end of the day, what I care about is delivering on the effect that our customer wants. Right? Do you want more snow? What's the best way to get it to you? If it's a rocket or a howitzer or me skydiving and halo jumping through a cloud with with silver iodide in my hands. Like, whichever way is best works. We're taking a really big and deliberate bet on autonomy. Drones, they the ones that Raymakers built are unparalleled in their capability to fly in these severe atmospheric conditions much more wide a flight envelope than most manned aircraft. Mhmm. But in the limit, what we get out of autonomy is more flights, more cost effective observations, and and significantly lower cost per volume of water or snow delivered to our customers. So we're gonna keep using, our drones and make them increasingly autonomous.

Speaker 2: Although, we'll probably do some research with plans in the not too distant future. How does El Nino affect your sales cycle? Like Like Yeah. Is that gonna put you out of business? It's gonna be rough in a couple of months. But I just but I just imagine there there's some players that are like, I think we're gonna be good this year. Yeah. Let's check back. No. No. It's it's kind of a cyclical business. Right? Shift your focus to other parts of The US.

Speaker 8: It's it's a you know, I think Time Morris commented recently that building rainmaker is like playing Diablo on insanity mode for startups. Not only is it a seasonal business because we're making snow in the winter, but also it is annually cyclical because of El Nino, El Nino, La Nina. Some regions are gonna get a lot more natural snow, but other regions will get a lot less, and Rainmaker will be working harder there. That said, even in the regions around this Pacific Northwest, Northern Rockies that are getting more snow, they're so critically depleted that they need excess snow melt relative to the baseline year in order to refill Lake Powell, Lake Mead, the Great Salt Lake, etcetera. So we're geographically hedged in order to accommodate this, not just within The United States, but across the world. That is going to scale up the extent to which, you know, we're we're hedged across multiple different climates simultaneously.

Speaker 1: Mhmm. What does the team look like? Where are you are are you have you expanded beyond the Gundo? I know you have, like, four deployed operating bases, but what's the footprint of the company right now?

Speaker 8: Well, you asked first what does the team look like. I first would say drippy.

Speaker 1: Oh. Oh, look at that. You a series

Speaker 8: a series of Hermes ties that we've decided to tell you to be with. I love it. This is a nice collection of different ties that have

Speaker 2: clouds on them. And here we go.

Speaker 1: Are you are you donning ties more or less often than you were last year when I saw you on local TV every week?

Speaker 3: More. More. More often. And,

Speaker 8: you know, the the Gunda thing, it's great. I love it. I am a Gunda supremacist. Absolutely. And we couldn't have built Rainmaker if not for that, but we wanna serve water for everybody. Sure. We wanna serve water to the federal government, to nations around the world. And in order to do so, we need to collaborate with the best national labs and universities across the country. Being the, mulleted guy in Yeezy, is not necessarily the, outfit and persona that you wanna don when you're talking about those research scopes of work. So I'm wearing a lot more Hermes. I am wearing a little bit less Yeezy, and that'll probably persist for a while.

Speaker 2: Last question last question for me. As as some of these open problems, Millennium Prize problems have been solved, a lot of people outside of San Francisco are like, cool. The the nerd solved another math problem. Like, you know, they don't they're not like as as captivated by it. But something that I've been thinking about is like for for every one of those sort of high profile open problems, there's tons of businesses that have access to the same models or models with close to the same capabilities that are just applying them to their industries. And I feel like for you and your category, it just feels like having intelligence on demand that you can apply to these problems that like hasn't had 10,000 PhDs working on it. You talked about how hedge funds have paid a lot of attention to the weather weather because of commodities trading. But are you feeling like an acceleration in in in your team's abilities because of new models, or are you not feeling it yet?

Speaker 8: To give credit where credit is due, the nerds in San Francisco have done a spectacular thing.

Speaker 1: And A tip of the fedora,

Speaker 8: perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tip of the old fedora. We're we're taking a point too. Right? Like, Richard Feynman was a spectacular scientist. Oppenheimer, spectacular scientist. We can do great in frontier science without being total nerds. Just a reminder to the San Francisco audience listening. But, again, you can you can see the rate of hypothesis generation and experimentation accelerating at Rainmaker because of the models available. Astra has been a spectacular lever for Rainmaker, and we're gonna continue using it. And and then also, like, developing better and better models with the informed participation of the LLMs critiquing the output. Like, that is something that is actually genuinely accretive to our understanding of the atmosphere, and and it's gonna become all the more so in time. It's amazing. Awesome. Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the engagement and safe trips. Yeah. Massive travels. We'll talk to you soon. Great progress, dude. Great to see you. Goodbye.

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