Rainmaker’s Rise and Fall: A Startup’s Bold Plan to End Drought—and the Backlash that Blamed It for a Flood

On July 2, a small California startup called Rainmaker Technology sent a drone high above the parched Texas Hill Country and seeded two clouds with microscopic particles of silver iodide. The aim was audacious: coax a bit of rain from the sky to help relieve drought. By Rainmaker’s own account, those seeded clouds produced very modest precipitation and dissipated within a couple of hours. The team stood down operations that same day due to “unusually high moisture” in the atmosphere – perhaps an early sign of storms brewing. Two days later, on July 4, torrential rains unleashed deadly flash floods across central Texas,

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