The AI Arms Race Heats Up — Who’s Really Winning?

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Hey Los Angeles.

Last year, we introduced you to an El Segundo startup that had raised $25M to make it rain.

This year, rain is apparently just the beginning.

Rainmaker raised a $100M Series B to expand its cloud-seeding technology and pursue a much larger ambition: building the scientific and technical infrastructure to understand, influence and eventually mitigate extreme weather.

In startup parlance, it is a pivot from “make it rain” to “solve the weather.” Subtle.

The round included NOA VC, DCVC, Lowercarbon Capital, Dream Ventures and LA-based Upfront Ventures.

When we covered Rainmaker last year, the company was preparing to expand its drone fleet, atmospheric research and commercial partnerships.

It now says it has generated more than 145M verified gallons of precipitation during a four-month period. During a summer research program near Homer, Alaska, Rainmaker says one operation produced 19M gallons in three hours.

Those are eye-catching numbers. The company’s ambitions are considerably larger.

Rainmaker is working to build what it calls a “Weather Prime,” combining atmospheric science, autonomous aircraft, sensors and predictive software into an infrastructure platform capable of responding to water scarcity and extreme weather.

The idea is to make cloud seeding cheaper, more measurable and easier to deploy at scale. Rainmaker’s drones deliver specialized particles into carefully selected clouds, while radar and software help determine where to operate and measure how much additional rain or snow may have been produced.

The new funding will help Rainmaker hire more atmospheric scientists, meteorologists, chemists and engineers while expanding its research and data-collection capabilities. The company also plans to move toward increasingly autonomous operations, allowing more missions to be conducted at a lower cost.

Rainmaker expects its cost per acre-foot of water to fall below alternatives such as desalination and agricultural fallowing in the Colorado River Basin during the upcoming water season. If that projection holds, cloud seeding could begin looking less like an experimental intervention and more like another piece of water infrastructure.

That “if” is doing some serious atmospheric lifting.

Cloud seeding has existed for decades, but measuring its precise effects remains scientifically difficult. A successful operation requires the right type of cloud at the right moment, and proving exactly how much precipitation would have fallen without intervention is no simple task.

Rainmaker’s next challenge, therefore, is not merely to produce more rain. It must make the results measurable, repeatable and credible enough for governments, farmers and communities to trust.

That responsibility becomes even more important as the company expands its vision beyond water. Rainmaker describes cloud seeding as the first step toward eventually mitigating hail, heat and other weather-related threats.

It is a grand ambition, even by startup standards. Most founders promise to disrupt an industry. Rainmaker wants to influence the atmosphere.

The company’s location makes the mission particularly fitting. El Segundo has become a center for startups tackling physical problems with drones, satellites, factories and defense systems. Rainmaker is applying that same aerospace-minded approach to one of the West’s oldest constraints.

For Los Angeles, this story is about more than another substantial funding round. Rainmaker has progressed from proposing that cloud-seeding technology could be modernized to claiming it has produced rainfall at a meaningful scale.

Now, with four times the capital it announced last year, the company must prove that those results can become dependable infrastructure.

California has never been shy about reshaping nature to support its growth. Rainmaker is betting that the next great water project will not be built across the landscape.

It will fly into the clouds.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

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Happy Friday, Los Angeles.

Space may not have roads, but it still has a transportation problem.

Rockets have become remarkably good at carrying satellites beyond Earth. Once those satellites reach space, however, getting them from one orbit to another can still be slow, expensive or impossible.

Redondo Beach-based Impulse Space wants to change that, and investors are giving it considerably more fuel for the journey.

The company raised a $308M extension to its Series D, bringing the round’s total to $808M. The new financing comes just over three months after Impulse announced the initial $500M raise and pushes its total capital raised above $1.3B.

Existing investors 137 Ventures, BANNER VC, DFJ Growth, Linse Capital, Lux Capital and Valor Equity Partners participated in the extension. Impulse did not disclose a valuation, but convincing existing backers to commit another $308M so soon after an already substantial round is a strong signal of confidence in both the company and the market it is pursuing.

Founded by former SpaceX propulsion executive Tom Mueller, Impulse is building vehicles designed to move satellites and payloads after they have already reached space. If rockets are responsible for getting cargo off the ground, Impulse wants to handle what happens after delivery.

Impulse Space

Its Mira spacecraft is built for precise maneuvering, payload deployment and proximity operations in orbit. Helios, scheduled for its first flight in 2027, is a high-energy kick stage designed to move payloads from low Earth orbit to destinations such as geostationary orbit in less than a day. The company has also introduced an electric propulsion system called Electra and a rideshare service aimed at making higher-energy orbits more accessible.

Together, those products represent something larger than a collection of spacecraft. Impulse is attempting to build a transportation network for an economy that increasingly needs one.

That need is becoming harder to ignore. More satellites are reaching orbit, governments are prioritizing responsive space capabilities and commercial operators want greater flexibility after launch. A satellite that can change position, reach a different orbit or respond quickly to a new mission is significantly more useful than one permanently tied to its original destination.

The U.S. government is already putting Impulse’s thesis to work. Helios was selected for the U.S. Space Force’s National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 program, making it the first upper-stage prime awarded a position in the program. Impulse also received a $28M contract extension to provide two Mira spacecraft for additional Space Systems Command missions.

The company says its headcount has more than doubled over the past year as it expanded its facilities in Redondo Beach, Mojave, Boulder and Washington, D.C. The new capital will support further hiring, product development and facility growth as Impulse works to serve commercial, civil and defense customers.

It also recently appointed its first chief financial officer, Adam Townsend, who previously helped guide Vizio through an IPO and its eventual sale to Walmart. The hire is another sign that Impulse is preparing for a more complex chapter, one defined not only by engineering milestones but also by a growing capital base, government contracts and large-scale operations.

That is where this announcement becomes more interesting than its considerable price tag.

Impulse has already shown that Mira can operate in space. Now it must prove that it can turn several ambitious vehicles into dependable infrastructure. The difference between a promising spacecraft company and a transportation network is repetition: more missions, more customers and systems that work reliably enough to become part of how the space economy operates.

An $808M round gives Impulse the resources to pursue that vision. It also raises the expectations attached to it.

For Southern California, the financing reinforces the region’s role in the new space economy. Los Angeles helped build the original aerospace industry, and a new generation of companies is now developing the vehicles, factories and infrastructure intended to support life beyond the launchpad.

Impulse Space is tackling what may be the next big bottleneck. Getting to space is only the beginning.

Someone still has to get you where you are going.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

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Hey there, Los Angeles.

For the past decade, Alex Heath has made a career out of figuring out what the technology industry is doing before everyone else.

Now, he is going to invest in it.

Heath announced this week that he is joining Los Angeles-based Sound Ventures as a partner on its investing team. The veteran technology journalist will continue independently operating Sources, the newsletter and podcast business he launched after leaving The Verge last year.

It is an unusual career move, but perhaps not as unusual as it initially appears.

Journalists and venture capitalists spend much of their time doing surprisingly similar work. Both look for signals before they become obvious, build relationships with people who know what is coming next and attempt to distinguish a lasting shift from a convincing story.

The crucial difference is what happens after they find one.

A journalist publishes. An investor writes a check.

Heath has spent years reporting on some of the technology industry’s most powerful companies and executives. At The Verge, where he served as deputy editor, his work focused on the internal decisions shaping companies such as Meta. More recently, Sources has taken readers inside the AI race through reporting and interviews with executives including Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg.

That experience gives Sound something venture firms increasingly want: someone who already understands the founders, companies and narratives competing to define the next era of technology.

Sound Ventures is not exactly starting from scratch. Led in Los Angeles by Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein, the firm manages nearly $2B and has backed companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, World Labs, Brex, Affirm and GitLab. According to The Wall Street Journal, Sound deployed more than $800M into early positions in OpenAI, Anthropic and World Labs as it intensified its focus on artificial intelligence.

Heath is joining during an important transition for the firm. Ashton Kutcher, who co-founded Sound with Oseary in 2015, departed earlier this year to launch a new venture firm. Oseary and Epstein are continuing to lead Sound while raising its fifth flagship fund and sharpening its strategy around companies with the potential to reach meaningful commercial scale.

Adding Heath suggests that Sound’s next phase will not be defined by capital alone.

As AI makes it faster and less expensive to build software, technical capability may become less effective as a differentiator. More startups will be able to create credible products, and more of them will compete for the same finite supply of customers, talent and attention.

In that environment, knowing how to identify a compelling founder is only part of the job. Venture firms also need to understand how companies earn trust, communicate what makes them different and remain culturally relevant in an increasingly crowded market.

That is familiar territory for Sound. Oseary built his career managing artists including Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, where recognizing talent was inseparable from helping that talent connect with an audience. Heath brings a different version of the same instinct, developed through finding important stories and understanding why people should pay attention to them.

Heath will continue owning and operating Sources independently while expanding its podcast and interviewing prominent voices across the technology industry. That means he is not abandoning the platform or audience he built. He is adding a new vantage point.

The combination could prove especially valuable to Sound. Heath brings the instincts of a reporter, the reach of an independent media founder and years of relationships with the people shaping technology. Now, he can apply that experience to finding and supporting the next generation of founders.

It is a fitting evolution for someone who has spent his career identifying important technology stories early.

This time, he will have the opportunity to help write what happens next.

Venture firms once competed primarily through capital, networks and operating expertise. Now, access to attention is becoming an asset of its own. Founders need help reaching customers and shaping public understanding, while investors want better ways to recognize which people and ideas will command that attention next.

Sound Ventures hired someone who has spent a decade doing exactly that.

Heath used to decide which technology stories were worth following.

Now, he will help decide which ones get funded.

More from this week’s LA startup and venture scene below.

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