Drone-Powered Rainmaker Raises $100M Series B to Scale Cloud Seeding

The American West has settled into chronic drought. Reservoirs along the Colorado River have hit historic lows, and snowpack after the winter of 2025–2026 was the lowest on record. The remaining ways to find new water — desalination, paying farmers to leave fields unplanted — are either expensive or come with their own downsides.

Turning Clouds Into Rain, By Drone

Rainmaker said it has raised $100 million in a Series B round. The company flies weather-resistant drones into winter storm clouds and releases silver iodide, a particle that ice crystals form around; once heavy enough, those crystals fall as rain or snow. Its own radar and validation systems then measure how much additional precipitation each operation actually produced — the step the cloud-seeding industry has historically lacked.

Earlier this year, Rainmaker became the first private company to physically validate cloud-seeding results, recording 82 unambiguous seeding signatures over four months for more than 145 million verified gallons of freshwater, close to the annual water use of 1,800 American households. In August, it produced 19 million gallons in about three hours near Homer, Alaska — enough to fill roughly 28 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Rainmaker says its cost per acre-foot of water falls sharply as it scales, and expects that by the November 2026–April 2027 season, its water will cost less than other new-supply options like desalination or fallowing payments. Doricko has said the company’s larger ambition goes beyond farms — to replenishing shrinking water bodies like the Colorado River and the Great Salt Lake.

$131M Raised in Three Years

Rainmaker was founded in 2023 by Augustus Doricko, CEO — a UC Berkeley dropout and Thiel Fellow who sold his stake in a groundwater startup before starting Rainmaker.

The Series B drew NOA VC, Upfront Ventures, DCVC, Lowercarbon Capital, and Dream Ventures. It follows a $6.3 million seed round in 2024 and a $25 million Series A led by Lowercarbon Capital in May 2025, bringing total funding to $131.3 million in three years. The company did not disclose a valuation.

“The future of water is the future of everything,” Doricko said, adding that the funding will let Rainmaker continue frontier atmospheric research and build the tech stack to end drought in the American West.

The new capital will expand a research team of atmospheric scientists, radar and satellite specialists, and materials scientists working out which clouds to seed, how much material to use, and where the resulting precipitation does the most good for a watershed. Rainmaker currently operates in Utah, Idaho, Oregon, California, and Colorado, and is working to expand across the American West and internationally.

The Next Target: AI Data Centers

Rainmaker’s water business is colliding with a newer controversy: the water footprint of AI data centers. The nationwide push to build facilities to power the AI boom has run into local and political resistance over noise, power draw, and water use. A University of Texas at Austin study estimates data centers could account for up to 9% of Texas’s total water use by 2040, up from under 1% today, and an analysis found that roughly two-thirds of 809 planned U.S. data centers sit in areas that have experienced drought in the past year.

Doricko told The Standard that Rainmaker is in talks with Big Tech companies to seed rain near data centers, and has already signed a deal with one data center provider it declined to name, saying it wasn’t among the largest builders. “There’s water for them to use, but they want to ensure that there’s more than enough water that they could ever use so the local community benefits from the projects,” he said. Microsoft has committed to refilling water systems and Google has funded water-recycling initiatives near its facilities, but data center operators mostly don’t disclose how much water they actually use.

Skepticism runs deep, though. UC Riverside’s Shaolei Ren notes cloud seeding only works under specific weather conditions, calling it “nonconventional” rather than a blanket fix. University of Wyoming atmospheric scientist Bart Geerts called the Alaska experiment “promising” but said it will take much more rain to quiet the doubters. Tyson Slocum, a director at the think tank Public Citizen and a leading critic of data centers, went further: “A lack of sustainability in a business model cannot be solved by artificially changing weather patterns. It’s an absurdly irresponsible concept that should be killed before it goes any further.”

The Competition

Cloud seeding itself isn’t new — Rainmaker’s disruption has come from buying up the old guard.

According to analyst firm Sacra, Rainmaker acquired North American Weather Consultants, a cloud-seeding firm founded in 1968, in October 2024. That company’s approach — manned aircraft and ground-based generators dispensing silver iodide — is considered less precise than Rainmaker’s drones, which inject particles directly into a cloud.

Its largest remaining rival is Weather Modification, Inc., which runs North Dakota’s 50-year-old hail-suppression program and supplies aircraft, flares, and pilots under multi-year state contracts. The Desert Research Institute, which built Nevada’s cloud-seeding program in the 1960s, functions more as a government research partner than a commercial rival. Rainmaker has also partnered with AI forecasting startup Atmo to sharpen predictions of which clouds to seed.

A Regulatory Wild Card

The US has no unified federal permitting regime for weather modification. Operators must report plans to NOAA under a 1976 law, but NOAA only tracks activity — it has no power to approve or block it. Real authority sits with the states, and the ones where Rainmaker operates — Colorado, Utah, Oregon, and others — have run cloud seeding as water policy for decades, with established permitting processes. Last year Rainmaker secured Oregon’s first precipitation-enhancement permit since 1976.

Outside that supportive base, the politics are moving the other way. Starting with Tennessee in 2024, Florida and Louisiana passed laws banning weather modification and geoengineering outright — in Florida, cloud seeding is now a felony. Roughly 30 states have introduced similar bans in 2025–2026, and a federal bill, the ‘Clear Skies Act’, would ban weather modification nationwide.

That momentum got a boost from the deadly Texas Hill Country floods last July. Rainmaker had run a seeding mission nearby two days before the flood that killed 119 people, and social media quickly blamed the company for causing it. Meteorologists, fact-checkers, and NOAA itself rejected any physical basis for cloud seeding causing flooding at that scale — but the controversy still helped accelerate ban legislation elsewhere. The gap between Rainmaker’s friendly home turf and the fast-spreading bans elsewhere remains a real variable for its expansion plans.

Three funding rounds in as many years have brought Rainmaker $131.3 million. It’s now chasing two large markets at once — agricultural drought and the water anxieties of the AI boom — while eyeing further expansion into hail damage and soil quality.