The hardest startup in America 

Augustus Doricko, founder and CEO of cloud-seeding startup Rainmaker, surveys the sky from a sunbaked hillside 5 miles from Utah’s Great Salt Lake. On this balmy Sunday afternoon in late September, the lake is calm, but its serenity belies a potentially catastrophic problem: The Great Salt Lake is shrinking—and is at risk of disappearing altogether.

At its peak 40 years ago, the lake covered 2,300 square miles; today, more than 800 square miles of lake bed are exposed. As more of the lake dries, scientists warn that dust storms made up of toxic heavy metals could plague the Salt Lake Valley, home to 1.2 million people, and beyond.

Rainmaker’s futuristic technology could solve the state’s water woes by harnessing nature. The startup flies drones into the troposphere, where they probe for precipitation-friendly conditions before releasing silver iodide particles that “seed” rain and snow.

The weather today is too idyllic for umbrellas. But Doricko’s mind, as usual, is in the clouds. “There’s hella-supercooled liquid water today between six and nine thousand feet,” he says. “So basically, we gotta start blasting.”

With just weeks to go before the start of prime cloud-seeding season—silver iodide is more effective in colder temperatures, where it can produce snow—a dozen Rainmaker drone operator trainees have assembled on this pasture to log flight time before relocating to the Bear River Basin, which feeds the lake.

As they compare notes, Doricko, in cowboy boots, winds his way between dried cow dung and yellow rabbitbrush to reach his startup’s signature innovation, resting in the dirt: a custom-built, 3-foot-by-3-foot quadcopter drone dubbed Elijah.

In a small red tent nearby, a drone operator huddles over a laptop that serves as the command center. Elijah isn’t registering its coordinates, but after a teammate reorients its antennas, it blinks to life on the laptop screen’s topographical map. The operator checks for nearby air traffic before configuring a set of instructions.

“We’re going to take off,” he calls out. “Start mission.” There’s a dull mechanical buzz. A dozen pairs of eyes squint upward as Elijah rises into the blue.

Doricko lights an American Spirit and leans against the pasture fence, brushing his unruly mullet out of his face. He looks the part of frontier hotshot. But in practice, he’s trying to impose an unprecedented degree of scientific discipline on an industry that operates like the Wild West.

Cloud seeding, which first emerged in experimental form in the 1940s, has traditionally been conducted by small airplanes that use flares to release particles like silver iodide or salt. Longtime operators attest to cloud seeding’s benefits, but they have a hard time proving the specific efficacy of each mission.

Rainmaker is betting that its drones will be cheaper to fly and more precise, allowing the company to conduct operations at greater scale and with greater assurance of impact. Doricko has $31 million in venture capital riding on that conviction.

The 25-year-old founded Rainmaker in 2023 after dropping out of UC Berkeley, where he had been studying physics. He won a Thiel Fellowship the next year and now has the backing of investors like Naval Ravikant, Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital, and Michael Gibson’s 1517 Fund, as well as 120 employees and a growing list of customers, including state governments and farming associations.

Though Rainmaker has piloted its tech across the U.S. and even Argentina, it faces its biggest test this winter: demonstrating that it can reliably use Elijah to generate rain and snow, forestalling disaster at the Great Salt Lake. At the same time, Doricko needs to persuade skeptics that cloud seeding is safe and legitimate.

Surmounting these obstacles is more than a business imperative for Doricko, who quotes the Bible and Elon Musk in the same breath. He was baptized in Texas two days before his twenty-first birthday, after turning away from a “hedonistic” Berkeley lifestyle that he looks back on with dismay.

Doricko has taken to heart the first chapter of Genesis, in which God blesses humanity, commanding that it “replenish the earth, and subdue it,” while granting people dominion over the seas, the air, and other living creatures.

“My deepest, heartfelt core motivation is to serve God,” he says. “And I think the best way to do that is to put water on the ground for people and ecosystems and industries in need.” While not every member of the Rainmaker team shares his faith, they share his purpose, which he distills as “the betterment of our country and the world.”

Doricko’s outspoken embrace of Christianity, patriotism, and homegrown technology has made him one of the most prominent figures in a movement that’s centered in El Segundo, California. Over the past three years, the Los Angeles suburb, known for its connection to the aerospace industry, has become a hub for founders tackling nuclear energy, autonomous defense systems, domestic manufacturing, and more—many with a sense of religious mission.

“People’s work and life has been devoid of meaning and consequence,” Doricko opined on a recent podcast, joined by several of his Gundo founder friends. He considers working in crypto, for example, to be “dishonorable.”

The Gundo bro paragons punctuate their noble work with a good time: Picture iron-pumping, beach bonfires, warehouse parties, and a steady stream of Celsius and Zyn. “Reindustrialization and boozin’,” Doricko has joked of the scene. The area’s founders have attracted media attention and the backing of so-called “tech right” investors like Peter Thiel and Katherine Boyle, who is the cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism practice.

Doricko, though, has also been tied to more extreme voices on the right. Fast Company uncovered a tweet that he sent in 2020, while still at Berkeley, to white nationalist and far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, requesting to start a student chapter of Fuentes’s then-nascent organization, America First. Other publications have linked Doricko to a church in Santa Clarita, California that’s part of a denomination led by Christian nationalist Doug Wilson.

Doricko says this reporting paints an incomplete portrait of who he is and what he believes. “I’m not a white nationalist,” he says, adding that he didn’t know the full extent of Fuentes’s views in 2020 and that the campus chapter never came together. He has attended the Santa Clarita church “less than 10 times” in the past, he acknowledges, but today considers an Eastern Orthodox congregation his church home.

At the same time, Doricko has become the target of conspiracy theorists, who accuse Rainmaker of causing the devastating July fourth flooding in Texas. The company had been working in Texas two days prior, but cloud seeding isn’t capable of producing anywhere near as much rain as inundated the Guadalupe River.

That hasn’t stopped rumors from proliferating online: Doricko and Rainmaker are, at last, “proof” that shadowy “deep state” forces control the weather. By mid-September, cloud-seeding bans had been proposed by primarily Republican lawmakers in 32 states. (Florida passed a ban in April that went into effect this fall.) After receiving death threats over the summer, Doricko now travels with security.

Caught between accusations that cloud seeding is too powerful and doubts that it can ever be effective, Rainmaker is charting a narrow path. Doricko acknowledges that navigating the political crosscurrents while building a startup and maturing his faith has taken a toll.

Two years ago, in a widely viewed interview with tech-world chronicler John Coogan, Doricko was jacked and tanned, a high-wattage presence at ease in his role as Gundo “super-connector,” as Coogan describes him. These days, Doricko shuttles between cold warehouses on early-morning flights. In more recent interviews, shadows mark his face, and there is a wary fatigue to his posture.

“On the one hand, I get to rely on God, which definitely hardens and strengthens me,” he says. “On the other hand, because the stakes are cosmic, when I fail, it definitely feels like I’m taking a step towards eternal hellfire.”

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Before Elijah, there were 62 prototype quadcopters, all of which have been retired. To perform effectively, Rainmaker’s drones must fly far higher into the atmosphere than off-the-shelf models—up to 15,000 feet—to reach the clouds that are the best candidates for seeding. That’s the easy part.

“The drones have to be able to fly in the most severe icing conditions, because the more cooled liquid in the atmosphere, the more water we can bring down,” Doricko says as we walk through the startup’s bare-bones Utah warehouse, home to failed experiments, custom radar systems bound for mountaintops, and a Cat Wars calendar. “But the more cooled liquid is in the atmosphere, the more dangerous it is for any aircraft.”

The breakthrough came in the form of an innovative deicing system. Doricko picks up a black drone propeller, its aerodynamic wing lined with what looks like a yellow maze. “You take battery power, basically, and then you just port it to the propellers,” he says. “[The resistors] heat up the blades and melt the ice off as it accretes.”

The system also doubles as a gauge for how much liquid is in the cloud, a challenging but essential data point for Rainmaker to collect. “If you know the [air] temperature and how much power it takes to melt the ice, then you can infer how much liquid is in the cloud based on the rate at which it’s icing. So, it doubles as this crazy probe.”

It took the company more than a year to arrive at Elijah, which has been engineered to withstand winter winds and three kinds of ice (smooth glaze, rough rime, and a combination of the two). In testing, the model successfully flew in 25-meters-per-second winds at 14,999 feet. According to Rainmaker, no other quadcopter can perform in those conditions (fixed-wing drones can manage it but cost at least $2,000 apiece and require a runway). Already, the startup has 75 Elijah drones ready to go.

That’s the hardware. Doricko is also trying to operationalize a new approach to cloud seeding. Before Rainmaker, he founded a startup that monitored groundwater for customers in Texas. At a conference, he learned about cloud seeding’s attribution problem: Though operators could record precipitation after their flights, they couldn’t prove they caused it. A 2017 study suggested that seeding in a zigzag flight pattern would lead to precipitation that fell with an anthropogenic (or human) signature.

“What I started with was, okay, if you can now measure where you should be seeding and what the yields are,” says Doricko, “you can actually scale this technology and sell it.” Today, Rainmaker’s drones move in distinctly human-made flight patterns.

In keeping with Rainmaker’s disciplined approach, head of software Darrion Vinson is developing what he calls a “manufacturing execution system.” He wants to turn cloud seeding into a replicable, reliable technology.

He joined Rainmaker in 2024 from Hadrian, an aerospace and defense startup, though he and Doricko originally met at an El Segundo bar: Vinson was reading Robert Caro’s multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson; the two hit it off talking about infrastructure development in postwar America.

Doricko hopes to one day take Vinson’s rain manufacturing model around the world. Demand for new sources of water is growing due to drought, climate change, and groundwater depletion. Doricko envisions working for governments in arid regions like the Middle East as well as clients in breadbasket areas struggling to irrigate crops.

Kaitlyn Suski, Rainmaker’s head of research, oversees the data that will demonstrate Rainmaker’s effectiveness. One of Doricko’s first hires, Suski initially felt out of place in Gundo culture after spending years in academia studying aerosol cloud interactions and ice nucleation.

“They have a bunch of swords and things in the office,” she says of her colleagues. “At first I was sort of like, ‘Who cares about swords?’” But she’s found a way to make it work: She’s added a disco ball to the mix.

Suski will be tracking the company’s Great Salt Lake operations this winter in coordination with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, as well as scientists from the University of Utah and Utah State. “That’s how cloud seeding is going to get bigger, to have more people trust it and want to invest in it,” she says.

Doricko is confident enough in cloud seeding’s prospects that he has already tasked Suski with researching alternatives to silver iodide. When released into a cloud, silver iodide serves as an “ice-nucleating particle,” around which water forms ice crystals and then falls to the ground as precipitation.

Silver iodide has been shown to be safe at the concentrations Rainmaker is currently utilizing. But Doricko dreams of operating around the world at a thousand times his current scale.

“In nature, a lot of the best ice-nucleating particles are biological things, either bacteria or fungi or things like that, which are more active than silver iodide,” Suski says. A more active, organic particle would have the added benefit of performing well in warmer temperatures, extending both Rainmaker’s active season and the geographies where it could operate.

But conducting this kind of science in public view at a time when science itself is under attack isn’t for the faint of heart.

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Doricko was watching the July fourth fireworks on Manhattan Beach in California when news about catastrophic floods in Texas started to appear. Rain was pounding the Texas Hill Country, and the Guadalupe River was surging. By the time the storm cleared, 130 people had died.

Doricko remembers thinking that evening that there would likely be questions about Rainmaker’s role. Two days earlier, the company had worked in Runge, Texas, for the South Texas Weather Modification Association, which represents local farmers. Rainmaker released silver iodide into two clouds, then suspended operations when forecasts showed a system moving in. The worst of the flooding took place 125 miles from Runge.

“The moment where everything became very surreal was on [July] fifth, when General Mike Flynn tweeted about us,” Doricko says.

In a series of posts on X that racked up 2.3 million views, The President’s former national security adviser pointed a finger at Rainmaker and said, “Anyone who calls this out as a conspiracy theory can go F themselves.” Two weeks later, Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene proposed legislation that would ban weather modification at the federal level.

Doricko wasn’t completely surprised by the uproar—chemtrail conspiracy theorists have been targeting cloud seeding for years. (Chemtrail conspiracists believe that airplane contrails are harmful chemicals released by the government.)

As insinuations by Flynn and others went viral, Doricko began receiving hundreds of emailed death threats. He was suddenly cast as a Silicon Valley villain bent on playing God and controlling the weather. “We realized we had to go defend ourselves in public,” he says.

Doricko embarked on a tour of right-wing podcasts, speaking with Dinesh D’Souza (as part of a “Did the Jews Kill Christ?” episode), former Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan (of The Shawn Ryan Show), Tim Pool (Timcast IRL), and others. In conversation after conversation, he took in accusations that cloud seeding is “sky terrorism” and that he himself is the “face of Big Cloud,” even “Oppenheimer.” He calmly walked listeners through the safety of Rainmaker’s techniques. He explained that the Hill Country storms produced 4 trillion gallons of precipitation, while a successful cloud-seeding mission produces 10 million gallons, at most.

He slipped into jargon only occasionally: “You ever heard of aerosol invigoration of convection, bro? We make them bigger, the clouds,” he tried to reason with a fellow guest on Timcast IRL. The guest was unmoved.

Meanwhile, Doricko is seeking allies in Washington. In September, he scored a modest victory: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a report that rebutted chemtrail conspiracies and spelled out the difference between cloud seeding and still theoretical climate-engineering techniques like solar radiation modification, which would reflect the sun’s rays into space.

“I’m super grateful for the level head that [EPA administrator] Lee Zeldin and the rest of the EPA had on that,” Doricko says. “Would I have been even more stoked and grateful if they had said that [cloud seeding] was a useful water supply tool? Totally. But I understand, given the political reality, why they’re measured in their discussion of it.”

Doricko has worked to avoid being pigeonholed politically. In April, he shared a photo of himself, dressed in Nikes and a tan suit, shaking hands with Bill Clinton. “It was a pleasure discussing how cloud seeding can enhance water supplies with #42!” he wrote. Four months later, he smiled alongside Governor Gavin Newsom: “Grateful to @CAgovernor for investing in El Segundo, California.”

“Buddying up with the country’s worst—this is Rainmaker,” one X user sniped of the Newsom photo.

“I love everybody and will work with people that want to give farms and ecosystems the water they need,” Doricko replied.

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In Rainmaker, conspiracy theorists have found an irresistible target. Not only is the startup releasing particles into the air, it’s also viewed as an extension of Big Tech, which is reviled in conspiracy circles for its perceived censorship regime.

The irony is that Doricko is sympathetic to his adversaries’ concerns when it comes to the role of tech platforms as arbiters of speech. “I don’t feel much attachment at all to Silicon Valley,” he says as we drive away from the flight test site in a company pickup truck. “I feel very little even to tech.” He considers the idea that tech companies from the coasts would “lord over” middle America to be “so wrong.”

Doricko’s own path through online political spaces has taken several turns. At Berkeley, he was involved in Turning Point USA, the conservative campus organization founded by Charlie Kirk. When the pandemic led to lockdowns and George Floyd’s death prompted protests, Doricko grew dissatisfied with Turning Point’s slogans.

“It didn’t seem like a broad notion that ‘socialism sucks’ was sufficient to fix the really deeply ingrained cultural and religious issues that we had,” he says of his mindset. A friend showed him a few videos of Nick Fuentes; Doricko says he found Fuentes’s message about Christian revival appealing.

In June 2020, according to the Internet Archive, Doricko was tweeting regularly about BLM, admonishing protesters for taking down statues and rioters for destruction in Santa Monica. Amid these posts, he sent out a pair of tweets to Fuentes and America First Students founder Jaden McNeil about creating a chapter of the organization at Berkeley.

He then announced that he’d been dropped from a conservative student publication “on the grounds of suspecting I support #AmericaFirst,” he wrote. “I thought I’d clear the water by stating that I do explicitly. I believe in Christianity, the nuclear family, the American worker and soldier.” (Before going deaf in his right ear on a trip to Costa Rica, Doricko hoped to enter the Naval Academy and become an astronaut.)

Fuentes was also active on Twitter at the time. “The story of our country is the establishment and the violent mob working together to destroy White, Christian, conservative Americans,” he wrote the same week that Doricko tagged him.

In our first conversation about this period, Doricko argues, somewhat defiantly, that he was drawn to America First as an ideal. “The phrase ‘America First,’ insofar as it exemplifies an interest in caring about the U.S.—that’s where that came from, and that’s still what I believe,” he says, dressed in a red hoodie, on a video call from Rainmaker’s Gundo headquarters. “I love everybody,” he says, “as I think our Lord compels us to, desiring their benefit, no matter anything about them.”

In a later conversation, Doricko is more reflective. He says that he didn’t know about Fuentes’s white nationalist and antisemitic history, including his role as a leader of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“No, dude, I did not know that. I think the only thing that I knew up until 2021 or 2022 [about Charlottesville] was that there was a car accident where someone drove into a bunch of people.” When the rally took place in 2017, Doricko adds, “I was in high school. I was listening to my dad’s clips of Ronald Reagan speeches.”

He also says “the world is a lot more complicated” than he thought it was when he was 19 and 20. “I hadn’t been baptized; I wasn’t fully sold on Christendom at that point. I still have more sin in my life than I ought, but I also believe that I have a lot more love in my heart now than I did back then, too.”

He says he came to his faith through logic, by evaluating evidence of Jesus’s death and resurrection. More recently, he’s been drawn to Orthodox Christianity’s mysticism.

One thing Doricko doesn’t believe in is silence. Even in high school, he says, he was a “provocateur.” Following the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, he was involved in the nationwide student walkout for school safety. (While other students advocated for gun control, he says his motivation was simply keeping his school safe.)

“Why is it that people govern their speech so much? Why is it that people don’t say what they think and how they feel? I do not empathize at all with that,” he says. “The world around us exists only because of the testimony to truth, to faith, to goodness, and the sacrifice of people that came before us, and I don’t think people are aware that it could be lost very easily.”

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The shores of Great Salt Lake State Park are quiet the day after Rainmaker’s flight training. Children on a field trip have tossed their shoes aside and are wading in the shallow water. But the surrounding shoreline is desolate, a reminder that there’s no meaningful recreational constituency fighting to save the ugly duckling of a lake.

Zachary Frankel, executive director of advocacy and research group the Utah Rivers Council, could go on for hours about the problems with water regulation and management in Utah, from the low price that Salt Lake City residents pay for water to the legacy system of agricultural canals that crisscross the state’s new metropolitan areas. Cloud seeding, he notes, doesn’t solve those issues. For years, he’s been pushing to restore the lake to 4,200 feet above sea level. At the moment, it’s at 950 feet.

“Cloud seeding is a politically palatable solution,” he says as we sit in his office, watching a landscaping crew water the sloping grass lawn behind the building. “It’s a nice game for Utah politicians to pretend they’re kissing the Great Salt Lake baby, that this is gonna work. But it’s not.”

There are solutions, such as reining in water rights speculation, that would “deliver vast quantities of water for pennies on the dollar,” but they come with a political cost. “The state of Utah doesn’t want to regulate its way to saving the lake.”

Even at the Utah Division of Water Resources, where the annual cloud-seeding budget ballooned from $350,000 in 2022 to $5 million, officials acknowledge that cloud seeding is no panacea. “Can cloud seeding, alone, save the Great Salt Lake? No, we’re not at that point in terms of the technology,” says Jonathan Jennings, a meteorologist with the state water authority. “I think where we come in is trying to make sure those high-elevation reservoirs are staying full.”

If the reservoirs stay full, the thinking goes, there will be enough water for all parties: agriculture, industry, real estate development, and—yes—the terminal lake itself. But the math is daunting. Separate from any accounting around diversion, the lake loses an estimated 3 million acre feet of water to evaporation each year. At best, Jennings hopes to see Rainmaker produce 250,000 acre feet.

“I am confident that we’re gonna get punched in the face every which way to Sunday trying to produce the results that we want,” Doricko says. Yet, he’s undeterred. This season’s projects in the American West are only the beginning. “We know that this is a solvable problem. What we have to do is just constantly iterate.”

God made the world in six days. But having dominion over creation is the work of a lifetime.

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