Cloud seeding startup Rainmaker raises $6.3 million

Somewhere in El Segundo, surrounded by Moon Pods and a mysteriously large water jug, Rainmaker cofounder Augustus Doricko and I are talking about faith.

Doricko—mulleted, casual, and an El Segundo fixture—went looking for God in his late teens and (really) early 20s.

"I studied under two nondenominational pastors, a Catholic priest and Anglican priests, a Sunni Imam, an Orthodox rabbi, a Reform rabbi, and a Buddhist monk––the Buddhist monk really quickly dropped off,” he told me with a smile.

It may seem like a non sequitur (if you’re wondering, Doricko now identifies as a Christian). But it’s groundwork for the sort of philosophical, existential kind of person who, at 24, has founded a startup devoted to cloud seeding, a weather modification technique that seeks to introduce ice nuclei to clouds, causing precipitation to form—in short, making it rain. And lest you think this is a crackpot idea with no backers, you’d be sorely mistaken.

Rainmaker has raised $6.3 million for its seed round, the company announced today. The group of investors includes Long Journey Ventures, Day One Ventures, Tamarack Global, 1517 Fund, Starship VC, and Champion Hill Ventures, along with Garry Tan and (among other things) former Andreessen Horowitz partner Balaji Srinivasan.

And Doricko (a Thiel Fellow) knows you think this is wild. I asked him how often he gets told he’s crazy.

“Every single day!”

There’s a glee to it, especially since as we dig deeper he’s armed with something pretty persuasive: history.

As it turns out, cloud seeding actually has a long, colorful history in the U.S. Cloud seeding was invented in Schenectady, N.Y. in 1946, and that group of inventors included atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut, the brother of novelist Kurt Vonnegut. And, from 1962 to 1983, the U.S. government’s Project Stormfury sought to weaken cyclones by flying airplanes dispensing silver iodide into them.

But Project Stormfury had a data problem—it was really hard to tell that it was working with the technology that existed up into the 80s. But the long-entrenched government program proved literally making rain is possible, just hard to quantify.

“We know that in a tank with the right conditions that our magic beans work and that we can make it rain, but clouds are super dynamic systems,” said Doricko. “There’s no control in nature, right? One cloud versus another, they’re totally different…Then, just because you caused it to rain, how much did you make it rain or snow? It was totally unquantifiable.”

This is a problem that’s en route to being solved, said Doricko. And recently cloud seeding has been the subject of international headlines (consider the floods in Dubai, as people clamor over whether cloud seeding is the cause) and, in China, the country’s cloud seeding operation is among the largest in the world.

I ask Doricko if they’ve made it rain yet.

"Not yet,” he said. “We moved into our lab in December, hired our first engineers in January…then the season was over by the time our product was mature enough. So right now, our options are to fly to Alaska…or focus heads down in engineering now, then get out in the field in September.”

And in the end, even though the phrase “weather modification” sounds grandiose, it’s actually in some ways more muted than it seems, particularly when it comes to the “modification” part.

"You can't delete a hurricane, but you can reduce the amount of flooding caused by it, by reducing the velocity,” said Doricko.

I point out to Doricko that there’s an irony here—that one could argue that, on the surface, modifying the weather is a way of playing God.

“We already intentionally modify the environment in a variety of ways,” said Doricko. “I totally understand that, aesthetically, on vibes, weather and rain is something that conventionally has been very much like God’s domain. But in just the same way that a dam is modifying creation, so is modifying the weather."

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com