Whereas billionaires hoard water rights and traders play Monopoly with farmland, one 20-something founder is making an attempt one thing utterly totally different: creating water from skinny air.
Meet Augustus Doricko, the CEO of Rainmaker — a Southern California startup utilizing drone-based cloud seeding to artificially enhance rainfall over drought-stricken farmland. If it feels like science fiction, that’s as a result of it sort of is. Nevertheless it’s additionally very actual, very funded, and probably crucial.
Right here’s what it’s good to know.
Supply: The Hustle YouTube
What Even Is Cloud Seeding?
“Cloud seeding is simply altering the quantity of water that falls onto the bottom,” Doricko mentioned.
The science behind it’s surprisingly easy.
Doricko defined the method in easier phrases: They discover clouds with water droplets which are too small to fall as rain, fly drones into them, and spray a mineral that helps these tiny droplets freeze collectively and turn out to be heavy sufficient to fall as rain or snow.
It is mainly tricking clouds into raining once they naturally would not.
From Zero to Seed Spherical
Augustus Doricko didn’t graduate faculty. He was one class away from a level at UC Berkeley when he dropped out to run a water compliance startup in Texas.
That job led him to California — and to the belief that regulation alone wouldn’t remedy the water disaster. So he began wanting into methods to provide extra water.
The outcome? A brand new firm, a $6.3M seed spherical (with backers like Garry Tan), and a scrappy staff understanding of a warehouse in El Segundo, a former aerospace hub turned frontier tech hotspot.
His pitch to traders? Lifeless easy.
“It was fairly easy to say, ‘Hey, individuals want water. We are able to make it.’ That one was simple,” Doricko mentioned.
At one level, Rainmaker even picked up its whole staff and moved to rural Oregon to get round drone laws. That’s startup power.
The Stakes Are Greater Than California
In accordance with Doricko, failing to resolve the West’s water disaster may lead…
