#186 Supercool Earth: Making It Rain, Literally

Josh Muccio (0:00)

Welcome to The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. I'm Josh Muccio.

Lisa Muccio (0:05)

And I'm Lisa Muccio. And on the show today, we have Dacia with Supercool Earth. She's raising $3 million.

Josh Muccio (0:12)

Do you remember when we had a dry spell where no deep debt companies had ever gotten funding on our show?

Lisa Muccio (0:17)

I do remember that vividly.

Josh Muccio (0:19)

And then we brought on Gecko Materials.

Yes. And Capella raised over a million dollars just from our fund and SPV.

Lisa Muccio (0:28)

Yes.

Josh Muccio (0:28)

Which is insane. And that was the moment that I realized that you all, listening, love science. You love deep tech. Yeah. Y'all are like, forget B2B SaaS.

Give me something interesting.

Lisa Muccio (0:41)

Yeah.

Josh Muccio (0:42)

So I'm proud to say we're back with some hard science to make it rain.

Lisa Muccio (0:47)

Or snow using cloud seeding with natural proteins. It's super cool.

Josh Muccio (0:51)

But it could be a little nefarious to control the weather.

Will that cause a storm in the pitch room? Or will Dacia be able to make it rain in more ways than one?

Lisa Muccio (1:02)

The Pitch for Supercool Earth is coming up after this.

Josh Muccio (1:06)

But first, we are hosting two live shows this season. One at SF Tech Week in October, and another one in November in Brooklyn. We're also hosting our big pitch event to record Season 17 in San Francisco this November. You'll get to hear all the pitches live and ask questions that might get featured on the show. To learn more about any of these events, go to pitch.show.events.

Welcome back to The Pitch for Supercool Earth. Let's meet the investors.

Mike Ma with Sidecut Ventures.

Mike Ma (1:38)

I got strings. I'm not an easy guess.

Josh Muccio (1:40)

Rohit Gupta with Future Communities Capital.

Rohit Gupta (1:42)

Sloshing money around all over the place.

Josh Muccio (1:44)

Michelle Kwok with Draper Associates.

Michelle Kwok (1:46)

We were deep in the cut for three hours. My brain just lit up.

Josh Muccio (1:51)

Jesse Middleton with Flybridge.

Jesse Middleton (1:53)

I'm so sick of people that are building stuff for building stuff's sake.

Josh Muccio (1:57)

And Elizabeth Yin with Hustle Fund.

Elizabeth Yin (1:59)

My best deals have been the ones that I've committed on the spot.

Jesse Middleton (2:08)

Supercool Earth. Hello.

Josh Muccio (2:13)

Hello. Hi.

SPEAKER_9 (2:14)

How are you? Good.

Josh Muccio (2:15)

How are you?

Michelle Kwok (2:15)

Hi, I'm Michelle. Hi.

SPEAKER_9 (2:16)

Nice to meet you.

Rohit Gupta (2:17)

Jesse. Hi, Jesse. Elizabeth. Hi, Elizabeth. Hey, great to see you again.

Dacia Leon (2:20)

Hey, Rohit.

I love your sweater. It's my power sweater.

You got to put your power shirt on when you're coming to Pitch, right? So my name is Dacia and I am CEO and co-founder of Supercool Earth. Our big vision at Supercool Earth is to make it rain and snow on demand.

Couple years ago, I was talking to a lettuce grower in Salinas Valley, and he said to me, water is something that I think about every single day. I have to make a trade-off between generating too much material waste or water waste. And as he was talking, I started thinking that there have to be better solutions, not just for growers, but for everybody. We need more tools in our toolbox for water. Let me add another layer to this tragedy sandwich that I'm building here. The technology for making it rain and snow already exists. It's existed for 50 years. It's called cloud seeding, and it's held back by the chemical that is used for cloud seeding. That chemical has poor activity. It is also not great for the environment. At Supercool Earth, we are building a natural product that is two times as effective as the traditional cloud seeding chemical that's used today, which means we can get two times more water out of clouds. We can target more geographies, more seasonalities, and it is compatible with the environment. Think about it like a probiotic for clouds. We are leveraging the natural mechanisms that already exist in clouds, nudging clouds to precipitate when they otherwise wouldn't or getting more out of storms that are already going to happen. And this is big. Think about any market that is connected to precipitation, ski resorts, water districts, hydropower, agriculture, disaster mitigation. And we're not just making it rain and snow from clouds. We have an early revenue product where we're making snow from snow making machines. The same natural product that goes into the clouds, we're putting inside of snow making machines to make snow at higher temperatures. We have two pilots lined up for this winter with two major ski resorts for our snow making additive, and many folks within our BD pipeline for cloud seeding. I'm here raising a $3 million round to validate our cloud seeding technology in the field, to become a revenue generating company, and to realize our big, big dreams of reliable precipitation.