A California startup wants skiers to subscribe to snow. Rainmaker, founded in 2025 by 28-year-old CEO Augustus Doriko, has built a fleet of cold-resistant drones that seed clouds with silver iodide, and it has signed Utah's Snowbird as its first resort partner. Talks with other Utah mountains, a couple in Colorado and one in California are reportedly underway, with the company aiming to run drone-based snow enhancement at several resorts before this winter ends.
The tech itself isn't radically new. Cloud seeding dates back to 1946, when General Electric discovered that ice-nucleating agents like silver iodide can kickstart freezing in super-cooled clouds. What Rainmaker claims is new is delivery and proof. Its 'Elijah' drones weigh about 30 pounds, fly for an hour, and are piloted by laptop into the coldest parts of a cloud, where silver iodide flares ignite in steel tubes. More importantly, the company says it can measure results in real time using NEXRAD radar, GOES satellites and polar-orbiting satellites — something earlier ground and plane-based programs, including past experiments at Vail, Aspen, Deer Valley, Park City and Snowbird, never managed. Most of those resort programs were quietly shelved after a few seasons.
There's been some early proof. In January 2026, Rainmaker ran validated experiments in Pendleton, Oregon, and in August, after a four-month research program in Homer, Alaska, its drones produced measurable seeding signatures in two clouds — the company says 19 million gallons of rain over the Kenai Peninsula in three hours, using essentially one drone.
Here's the catch, and it's a big one for skiers. Those 19 million gallons fell across 100 square miles — roughly a hundredth of an inch of rain, or about a tenth of an inch of snow. Not exactly a powder day. Atmospheric scientist Bart Geerts of the University of Wyoming, who has studied cloud seeding since 2011, acknowledges the measurement breakthrough but questions whether it scales: in the big storm systems that actually dump feet of snow, there's simply too much going on inside the cloud to tell what the seeding contributed. He also notes that the super-cooled clouds seeding depends on are common in places like coastal Alaska but much rarer in the interior mountains of Utah, Colorado and Wyoming — exactly where resorts would want the help.
So why should holidaymakers pay attention? The American ski industry is worth over $58 billion a year and serves more than 50 million skiers and riders, and the 2025-26 season's historically poor snowpack showed how fragile that is getting. Resorts are already pouring money into snowmaking, and subscription-style weather modification is the logical next bet. Doriko even floats seeding around the 2034 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. Whether drone seeding turns out to be genuine season-extension or very expensive wishful thinking, the fact that resorts are lining up tells you how nervous the industry is about warm winters — and how much the odds of a good snow holiday may shift in the years ahead.
Via Ski Magazine.
