A startup dogged by conspiracy theories is trying to change the way Washington views technologies that coax snowflakes from the clouds, one Metro station at a time.
Rainmaker Technology uses drones, artificial intelligence weather forecasting and particles of snow-forming silver iodide to squeeze additional precipitation from certain types of clouds. That led some conservative influencers and lawmakers last year to accuse the cloud-seeding startup of triggering deadly flooding. It responded to those erroneous claims with a surge of media appearances, lobbying and meetings with Trump administration officials.
Now Rainmaker is trying to reach policymakers on their commutes. A series of gold-framed ads showed up in the Capitol South Metro station at the beginning of January.
“Rivers are running low.”
“Farms are drying out.”
“We build rain,” the ads say.
The text in large white lettering appears over painted images of idyllic, cloud-covered Western landscapes. They have sparked the type of awareness-building conversations that brand strategists dream of.
“DC metro ads are so weird man like what the fuck do you mean ‘we build rain,'” wrote Sam Jeske, a spokesperson for Washington Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat, on his personal X account earlier this month.
It’s a valid question — and it generated a response directly from Rainmaker.
“That’s literally exactly what we do,” replied Augustus Doricko, the startup’s CEO.
Rainmaker’s Metro ad campaign — a strategy more commonly pursued by defense contractors than tech startups — cost around $100,000, according to Outfront, the company that manages ad space in the Metro system, and is part of a larger influence effort by the fledgling company. Public affairs experts say it’s a case study of how in the Trump era, it’s better for a startup to be talked about in Washington — even inaccurately — than not known at all.
The public relations and lobbying push by the California startup comes as President Donald Trump blocks efforts to limit or adapt to climate change and as federal and state lawmakers consider bills that would ban cloud seeding and other technologies that could alter the atmosphere.
“When a 25-year-old mullet man in Los Angeles talks about releasing dust into clouds to change the weather, it raises a lot of eyebrows — and rightfully so,” said Doricko, referring to himself, in an interview with POLITICO’s E&E News.
“People have had very, very legitimate questions about what cloud seeding is and whether it’s safe and whether it should be allowed at all,” said Doricko, a self-described conservative Christian who is developing a system that some Republicans have conflated with “playing God.” They argue that people shouldn’t be intentionally altering the weather or global temperatures.
“My first priority is just making sure that America and American farms and communities have the option to use this technology,” added Doricko, who said he views cloud seeding as a way to help restore landscapes to the way God intended.
Cloud seeding has been practiced in the U.S. since the 1940s — and its effectiveness has been in doubt for almost as long.
Doricko and his supporters believe new technologies can change that.
He founded Rainmaker in 2023 with the support of a Thiel Fellowship, a $100,000 grant program established by the conservative billionaire Peter Thiel that is limited to people who are younger than 22 and don’t have a college degree. Before dropping out of the University of California, Berkeley, Doricko had established the school’s chapter of America First Students, a group affiliated with white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Rainmaker has inked contracts with dozens of Western states and municipal water authorities and raised more than $50 million from investors including Lowercarbon Capital, a climate tech venture capital firm co-founded by Clay Dumas, a former Obama White House adviser, according to private investment data compiled by the financial firm PitchBook.
The company began lobbying federal officials in mid-2024, when it hired the bipartisan firm LSN Partners and Capitol Pillar. The latter is led by Casey Hammond, who served in the first Trump administration as the Interior Department’s acting assistant secretary for lands and minerals.
LSN has advocated in Congress and at the Federal Aviation Administration on issues related to “drone waivers and certification” and “drought control,” disclosure filings show. Capitol Pillar met with lawmakers and Interior officials on “water resilience solutions and education.”
Hammond declined to comment on his work for Rainmaker. LSN didn’t respond to emailed questions.
Rainmaker ‘in the spotlight’
When catastrophic flooding killed at least 135 people in central Texas in July 2025, some social media posters began connecting the disaster to cloud seeding work Rainmaker had done days earlier and hundreds of miles away.
“Given the deadly consequences of the July 4 flooding and ongoing speculation about the potential role of weather modification, the public is owed full transparency and factual clarity,” conservative influencer Brian Gamble wrote at the time, highlighting a weather modification form that mentioned Rainmaker. Gamble’s X post and a repost of it by former national security adviser Mike Flynn have been viewed more than 1.6 million times.
Doricko responded to Flynn on X that Rainmaker did not contribute to the floods and said his “prayers are with Texas.”
Then he hit the media circuit, doing interviews with The Washington Post, Newsweek, CNN and the Free Press as well as appearing on at least five conservative podcasts in two days. It might have helped him limit the spread of misinformation, public affairs experts said — while introducing the startup to a national audience.
“That sounds like a pretty standard playbook, to define yourself before internet trolls could define you,” said Alex Conant, a partner at Firehouse Strategies who previously served as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Marco Rubio during his time in the Senate. “This company was in the spotlight and made this strategic decision to be proactive, which I think is normally the right one, and it worked out.”
At the same time, Rainmaker ramped up its advocacy work, hiring an in-house lobbyist and bringing on Crossroads Strategies to provide “water resilience” briefings to the White House, Pentagon and departments of Commerce and State, disclosure filings show. Crossroads didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Last year, Rainmaker devoted $450,000 to federal lobbying, more than three times what it had spent on U.S. advocacy in all of 2024.
Blocking bans, pursuing contracts
A top priority for the company is chipping away at support for legislation like the “Clear Skies Act,” which would criminalize the release of chemicals into the atmosphere if they are intended to change the weather, temperature or climate.
The bill was introduced last July by then-Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who left office earlier this month, and is co-sponsored by Republican Reps. Tony Wied of Wisconsin and Tom Massie of Kentucky.
Greene’s legislation was modeled on state-level bans that have been considered in at least 10 states and enacted in Tennessee and Florida.
Rainmaker is also eager to distinguish cloud seeding, which has been safely practiced in the U.S. for decades and has localized impacts, from emerging solar geoengineering technologies, which seek to limit global warming by reflecting sunlight back into space at regional or planetary scales.
Cloud seeding, like solar geoengineering, “has to do with the atmosphere and so people easily confuse them,” Doricko said. But he added, “it’s an altogether different technology.”
The startup’s other U.S. policy goals include avoiding regulation of silver iodide, a compound with a chemical structure similar to ice that attracts water droplets in the cottony stratiform clouds that often dot skylines in the West. That’s why Parker Cardwell, Rainmaker’s chief operating officer, and another company official visited EPA’s headquarters last July, according to Doricko.
Rainmaker would also like to sell its cloud-seeding services to the Trump administration, Doricko said, despite the president’s rejection of scientific findings related to climate change, which has contributed to intensifying drought, dangerous heat waves and other pressures on water availability.
It wouldn’t be the first time the federal government has tried to make it rain. In the 1960s, the Interior Department had a major effort dubbed Project Skywater.
“The program had a decidedly mixed cost-benefit, environmental, and operational record that never convincingly supported a sound basis for a national, extensively funded weather modification program,” the Bureau of Reclamation said in a 2009 history of Skywater.
What’s changed since then, according to Doricko, are the advent of drone systems, which eliminated the need for human pilots, and advancements in radar technologies that allow Rainmaker “to physically measure in real time how much precipitation you’re producing.”
‘Open for discussion’
The company is currently working with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Utah and Utah State University to quantify the effectiveness of its cloud-seeding work in the Bear River Basin, which flows into the receding Great Salt Lake.
The Trump administration is seeking to dismantle NCAR, which it has accused without evidence of promoting “left-wing climate lunacy.” Lawmakers failed to protect the Colorado-based research institution in a spending bill awaiting the president’s signature.
“Although it appears extremely unlikely that NCAR would be completely dissolved, the end of NCAR would not be the end of our study,” Rainmaker spokesperson John Seibels said in an email. He joined the startup last October after serving as a Republican staffer on the House Natural Resources Committee.
The precarious position of NCAR illustrates the challenge facing climate tech companies like Rainmaker. They rely on scientists’ work to validate and improve their systems. But they also need the support of conservative policymakers in the White House and Utah — as well as the leaders of blue states like California and New Mexico.
In that challenging context, “the risk of not engaging is greater than the risk of engaging,” said Julian Graham, a senior director at the public affairs firm the Signal Group who previously worked for a centrist Democratic congressman and the British Conservative Party.
Rainmaker is “talking to anybody that’s interested in bringing more water to American farms and ecosystems,” Doricko said.
“Water’s a bipartisan thing. More water for everybody is good. How do we get there?” he added. “Whether cloud seeding is one of the tools that we want to use is open for discussion.”
Timothy Cama and Kevin Bogardus contributed to this report.
