$100M to make it rain, Julian on The Luba Show, another FDA milestone for dog longevity, and more solo founder Ws. Let's get into it!
Get going. Rainmaker's $100M Series B.
“If you had told me three years ago that you're going to be the water tech guy, I wouldn't have believed you.”
Augustus Doricko, the solo founder of Rainmaker, just raised $100M. They fly drones into clouds to make rain and snow.
That's not what he set out to build. He was studying physics at Berkeley when COVID sent him home to Texas, where he ended up at the same gym as one of the biggest water well drillers in the state. The guy was filing his groundwater reports by hand, so they built him what Doricko calls “TurboTax for farmers to report their water usage.” He dropped out to work on it.
He spent two years on that, which really meant two years talking to farmers across Texas. Through that experience, he learned farmers were running out of water. His software could help them measure exactly how fast, but it couldn't make any more of it.
So he sold his stake and went and built the rain company. Rainmaker now has 120 people and says it produced 145 million gallons of precipitation in one four-month season.
I think the lesson here is to just get going. Sometimes the bigger opportunity shows up later, and only because you started.
The co-founder who wouldn't leave.
“The co-founder is probably closer to the car phone, and the solo founder is closer to the cell phone.”
Luba Yudasina, Host of The Luba Show and ex-founder, recently interviewed our very own Julian Weisser, solo founder and CEO of Solo Founders.
Before this Julian co-founded ODF, working with more than a thousand founders who've since raised over $2B. A lot of that job was helping people find co-founders.
Julian isn't against co-founders. He just thinks too many people end up with a co-founder of convenience.
A founder reached out to him recently. His co-founder didn't want to build the company anymore, wouldn't leave, and wanted $400K to walk. They'd been at it a year and two months, on $2M raised. Unfortunately, there was no real mechanism in place that could force him out.
Julian shares how to avoid this type of situation, and why he doesn't think a co-founder has to be forever.
Watch the full conversation:
Creating a new path: Loyal's third FDA acceptance.
“When we started Loyal there was no FDA pathway for any lifespan extension drug.”
Solo founder Celine Halioua and the Loyal team just got their third drug accepted by the FDA as likely to extend a dog's healthy life.
When she started in 2019, that had never happened for any drug, in any species. There was no route through the agency for a lifespan extension drug, so she made one.
The newest, LOY-003, is a daily pill for large and giant breeds, the dogs that die youngest.
Congrats to Celine and the Loyal team!
More Ws in the Solo Founders orbit:
We welcomed 11 incredible solo founders into SFP for the Fall '26 cohort
Solo-founded Ando just announced a $20M raise. Excited to share our conversation with their founder Sara Du on next week’s Solo Founders Podcast.
Solo founder Eugenia Kuyda and the Wabi team were featured in Eric Newcomer's VC Sentiment Report
Solo founders was featured in Barron's, with data from our Solo Founders Annual Report
Know a solo founder who'd like this issue? Forward it to them!
Thanks for reading :)
Solo, together.
Kieran
