Turns out The Ocean Company spends a lot of their time working in the ocean!
Excited to start showing some more behind the scenes at Ulysses.
We are just keeping it pretty raw and passing a camcorder around the office.
We went future hires to have a pretty unvarnished view on what it’s like to work at the ocean company.
We hope you enjoy!
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
My sister’s house burned down in the LA fires and they lost everything.
To add salt in the wound, they have undergone a harrowing experience learning how poorly equipped insurance products were to address the devastation.
It is insane that in 2026 our own financial instruments still can’t account for natural disasters. @standinsurance is working to change that reality. Proud to support what their team has built @lowercarbon.
The full stack matters.
To add salt in the wound, they have undergone a harrowing experience learning how poorly equipped insurance products were to address the devastation.
It is insane that in 2026 our own financial instruments still can’t account for natural disasters. @standinsurance is working to change that reality. Proud to support what their team has built @lowercarbon.
The full stack matters.
Today @standinsurance announced $70M at a $1B valuation, led by @Saga_Ventures. A year ago, we insured $1B of property. Today it's $10B. Disasters follow the laws of physics. Insurance should too. Here's what our team is building:
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
Is Arbor Energy the key to power AND water for data centers? They just cracked the code to supercritical CO2 turbines, which have been something of a holy grail in power generation, especially in Arbor's case, because:
1. Using sCO2 as a working fluid can achieve energy ge combined cycle gas plants in a much smaller footprint––e.g. behind the meter at data centers. No one had pulled it off though because it requires engineering a system capable of withstanding immense pressure, temperature, speed, and corrosion. Until now!
2. Combining this with oxycombustion of natural gas (CH4) means the outputs are only CO2 (used, recycled, and/or sequestered) and water. Arbor's power modules will PRODUCE tons of water while powering data centers... a MILLION gallons per megawatt, to be exact. So not only will their 25MW Halcyon system power data centers, it can ELIMINATE their water burden and even produce surplus water for local communities!
3. The key components can be 3D PRINTED! You've surely heard of the bottleneck in gas turbines, which is primarily due to the way in which combined cycle turbine blades must be produced (single-crystal casting).
I'm extremely proud that @cantos was Arbor's very first investor and has invested in every round since then. Watch this company!
1. Using sCO2 as a working fluid can achieve energy ge combined cycle gas plants in a much smaller footprint––e.g. behind the meter at data centers. No one had pulled it off though because it requires engineering a system capable of withstanding immense pressure, temperature, speed, and corrosion. Until now!
2. Combining this with oxycombustion of natural gas (CH4) means the outputs are only CO2 (used, recycled, and/or sequestered) and water. Arbor's power modules will PRODUCE tons of water while powering data centers... a MILLION gallons per megawatt, to be exact. So not only will their 25MW Halcyon system power data centers, it can ELIMINATE their water burden and even produce surplus water for local communities!
3. The key components can be 3D PRINTED! You've surely heard of the bottleneck in gas turbines, which is primarily due to the way in which combined cycle turbine blades must be produced (single-crystal casting).
I'm extremely proud that @cantos was Arbor's very first investor and has invested in every round since then. Watch this company!
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Working with a great growth investor like @CaieKelley has made my early stage thinking infinitely sharper, almost wish she wouldn’t share her secrets!
"Truth is that most of the time, by the time it becomes a narrative noise that you can hear about, the moment to invest in that has probably already passed. Most of the investors who are looking in this space will have invested in that heavily 12 to 24 months ago."
I had the n with @CaieKelley . She's a General Partner at @lowercarbon where she leads growth investing, backing companies at the Series B / C right as they hit their first real commercial proof points. Before venture she was in tech investment banking at JP Morgan and then private equity, so she's the investor you want when a company needs its second factory, not its first prototype. She's also our first growth-stage guest on Fun Raising!
The quote above came up when I asked what she wishes founders understood about VCs. She wasn't saying to ignore the trends. Her point was that when you reshape your company to fit whatever is loud on Twitter or LinkedIn that week, investors can tell, and the lack of authenticity costs you more than being off-narrative. You're picking partners for ten years, and the momentum will shift a few times in that window.
The pitch that sounds most like the moment is usually the one investors have already heard fifty times. The story that's actually yours (why you started, what you believe, who you've convinced to join you) is the one that finds the right partner. It's also the one you can still tell in year six, after the narrative has moved on.
BUT if the trend also is what you are most authentic to, and your super powers shine when talking about it. Then keep it. Just don't change your narrative to fit the current trends.
We also got into:
🔎 How growth investors actually find you (Hint: it's not your cold email)
📈 Why your Excel model matters even though it's always wrong
🏭 Going from a founder who does everything to scaling a real team
🌍 Building the two-sentence test for why the world is better if you win
🗒️ What to do before your first board meeting after the round closes
It was a real treat to dive into the growth stage of investing. Many of the conversations that we have here are early-stage. This is a great one for founders that are a little further along!
Watch the full episode right here on X! Thanks Caie!
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Looks like the forecast is calling for a lot more rain.
Stoked to double down on @ADoricko and the team building a world where we can do more than just hope for better weather!
Stoked to double down on @ADoricko and the team building a world where we can do more than just hope for better weather!
Rainmaker has raised $100M to become the world’s best lab for weather modification and atmospheric science.
Thank you @noavctech @upfrontvc @DCVC @lowercarbon @DreamVenturesVC and other visionary partners.
We are aggressively hiring and scaling our research org to create a data collection, synthesis, understanding, and intervention.
We will solve the weather and we will set the stage for the terraformation of Earth.
More in my essay below.
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
I wrote an essay about why the next frontier for AI is the world outside the data center
Nature is a system more complex than anything we've ever created
AI can learn how the system fits together, so we can finally understand how to shape it
How?
naturalgeneralintelligence.ai
Nature is a system more complex than anything we've ever created
AI can learn how the system fits together, so we can finally understand how to shape it
How?
naturalgeneralintelligence.ai
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
China has 40,000 staff in their weather modification office and explicit aspirations to become a weather superpower
The question is not whether weather modification comes to pass
The question is "who will steward and deploy this technology, America or China?" from @OANN
The question is not whether weather modification comes to pass
The question is "who will steward and deploy this technology, America or China?" from @OANN
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My time building landfills for a living is finally relevant to the SF intellectual discourse!
Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.
- Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it.
- Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality.
- The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use.
- Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled.
Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently.
New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. worksinprogress.co/issue/just-bur…
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There’s next gen American manufacturing stories everywhere for those with the eyes to see them. Few understand the scale and depth of technology development going on at Rainmaker.
Quick update on Rainmaker science
Last year Rainmaker identified, produced and file patents for a series of biodegradable alternatives to silver iodide.
Not only are these materials are found in natural American soil, they’re also more effective than AgI per particle!
However, for operational seeding is difficult and our chemistry team has been optimizing the process for the last 9 months.
So it doesn’t really matter until it brings down more water for Americans in need, but we’ll keep you posted on our development and testing!
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We can solve drought.
Rainmaker just produced ~19M gallons of water in Alaska via next-gen cloud seeding over 3 hours of operations.
We are the first company to provably produce precipitation in Alaska. As promised, we’ve linked our white paper and relevant data.
In the future, Rainmaker will protect and restore glaciers with man-made snowfall.
Immediately, this demonstration shows how Rainmaker will add new water to the Colorado River and Great Salt Lake in the coming months.
We turned around this analysis and white paper just a couple days after operating. There are many data sources I want to deepen our understanding of the atmosphere and increase our provable production; we’re building the instruments to collect that data in subsequent operations. But at Rainmaker, we won’t tout LOIs, simulations, or lab tests. What matters is physically measuring that you’ve affected the atmosphere; proving that we’ve produced water. We prefer sharing only the tech that has proven to make more water for farms, industries, and ecosystems in need.
Expect a regular cadence of these from us as we build the best atmospheric science lab in the world. Feedback is welcome in the interim.
Rainmaker Century.
rainmaker.com/blog/alaska-va…
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Rainmaker Century.
Rainmaker is the first and only company in history to physically measure and prove that we’re generating anthropogenic precipitation.
We have the largest catalogue of unambiguous seeding signatures in history.
But, thus far, we’ve been slow to share our data because of the er review is great and absolutely useful for scrutinizing new discoveries. However, if we publicize the data from our submitted papers before peer review is complete (which takes a long time!) it reduces the likelihood of our paper’s acceptance in a high impact journal.
Rainmaker’s development will continue to outpace conventional journal submission timelines, but we want to share our results. So starting today, we’ll be releasing periodic white papers on our results for all of you to scrutinize! I expect and am excited for lots of scrutiny! When we make step step-function breakthroughs with methods unfamiliar to academia, we will still be more inclined to peer review.
This is auspicious timing, as Rainmaker is the first company to physically measure and prove anthropogenic precipitation production in Alaska as of ~36 hours ago. I was lucky enough to be on the operation myself! Our first public white paper on our methodology and results from AK will be up today.
I’m stoked to begin sharing more of the insane progress the brilliant scientists, engineers and operators have been making quietly in the last 4 months.
More importantly, I’m excited to save the Great Salt Lake and Colorado River with this technology. More on that later.
Rainmaker Century
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
I’m excited to announce the Rainmaker Fellowship
Our goal is to build the best atmospheric science lab in the world, specializing in weather modification. This program exists to:
1. bring the best specialists’ perspective to Rainmaker’s research
2. support the researchers at our existing national labs
3. cultivate the next generation of weather modification post-graduate researchers at American universities
Rainmaker is hiring aggressively for atmospheric talent of all kinds, but is excited to bring in professors and grad students as fellows who remain committed to academic research.
China has multiple weather modification degree programs. I hope this program accelerates development in the field both at Rainmaker and beyond.
If you are a dedicated researcher that wants to solve the weather and make Earth habitable, you are welcome to apply
Our goal is to build the best atmospheric science lab in the world, specializing in weather modification. This program exists to:
1. bring the best specialists’ perspective to Rainmaker’s research
2. support the researchers at our existing national labs
3. cultivate the next generation of weather modification post-graduate researchers at American universities
Rainmaker is hiring aggressively for atmospheric talent of all kinds, but is excited to bring in professors and grad students as fellows who remain committed to academic research.
China has multiple weather modification degree programs. I hope this program accelerates development in the field both at Rainmaker and beyond.
If you are a dedicated researcher that wants to solve the weather and make Earth habitable, you are welcome to apply
Today we are introducing Rainmaker Fellows, a three-month program supporting high-impact research in weather modification and developing the next generation of scientific and technical talent.
We are looking for applicants interested in scientific and engineering questions that velopment of effective, measurable, and scalable weather modification systems.
Read more in the comments, and join us on our mission to solve the weather, and make Earth habitable.
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
Get in the business of making contact with reality.
Today we placed posters around the country telling the story of what it means to Become a Rainmaker.
Modifying the weather requires frontier research.
Meteorology, physics, machine learning, solid state radar and optics systems, we are hiring for across all these disciplines
l hardware or hours spent in the lab can actually modify the weather unless our systems are tested and deployed by humans in the field
Until teams of gritty, relentless, disciplined mountaineers deploy our tech in remote locations during freezing snowstorms—it’s all just theory.
And Rainmaker is in the business of contacting reality.
So we are hiring teams of Forward Operating Specialists to bring theory into practice again this coming winter.
In the hardest conditions imaginable, the FOS is responsible for using all the systems Rainmaker has built.
They are Rainmakers in the truest sense of the word.
They are the ones who work with nature.
They are the ones who modify the weather.
Their field work is the final factor determining whether our operations produce more water.
It is a tough job in service of a beautiful mission.
We are in search of gritty, soulful, dutiful people who want to work with nature, harness the elements, befriend the locals, and bring water where it’s needed most.
Become a Rainmaker.
More info in the replies.
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
Mankind has always been at the mercy of the weather.
No longer.
Rainmaker is the first company in history to routinely, unambiguously, modify the weather.
Last quarter, we produced >143MM gallons of unambiguously man-made precipitation.
Here’s how we do it 🧵
No longer.
Rainmaker is the first company in history to routinely, unambiguously, modify the weather.
Last quarter, we produced >143MM gallons of unambiguously man-made precipitation.
Here’s how we do it 🧵
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A couple years ago the Ulysses team wheeled a tub of water and their first robot into our SF office. They said they would give humanity the tools to unlock the ocean frontier.
They’re making good on that promise.
Grateful to have backed them since the beginning 🦈
They’re making good on that promise.
Grateful to have backed them since the beginning 🦈
Ulysses has raised $46M led by a16z American Dynamism.
We are building The Ocean Company.
The ocean is 71% of the planet. But it is less explored than Mars, and full of secrets, waiting to be told.
It is the backbone of global defense. Home to the critical infrastructure that he key to the health of our planet.
This frontier needs technology to protect and steward it.
We are building it. And we need more builders
Join us and explore the Great Blue Frontier: theoceancompany.com/careers
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
Ulysses has raised $46M led by a16z American Dynamism.
We are building The Ocean Company.
The ocean is 71% of the planet. But it is less explored than Mars, and full of secrets, waiting to be told.
It is the backbone of global defense. Home to the critical infrastructure that he key to the health of our planet.
This frontier needs technology to protect and steward it.
We are building it. And we need more builders
Join us and explore the Great Blue Frontier: theoceancompany.com/careers
We are building The Ocean Company.
The ocean is 71% of the planet. But it is less explored than Mars, and full of secrets, waiting to be told.
It is the backbone of global defense. Home to the critical infrastructure that he key to the health of our planet.
This frontier needs technology to protect and steward it.
We are building it. And we need more builders
Join us and explore the Great Blue Frontier: theoceancompany.com/careers
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
We’re going to save the Great Salt Lake and Colorado River from drought by making it rain and snow
Thanks for coming by @GadiNBC !
Thanks for coming by @GadiNBC !
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
A group of sharks is called a shiver.
Which is exactly what you will experience if you ever see a group of these racing toward you.
@ulyssesinc
Which is exactly what you will experience if you ever see a group of these racing toward you.
@ulyssesinc
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DuncanCarlson retweeted
THE OCEAN IS CALLING
Since coming out of stealth one year ago, we haven’t shared many updates about @ulyssesinc.
Our Communications & Public Relations Division profoundly apologizes for this.
But today, we break our silence and make five major announcements:
- MAKO: We are sharr first autonomous underwater vehicle, the “Model T for the ocean”.
- LEVIATHAN: We are announcing Leviathan, our first autonomous surface vehicle, a mothership for other drones and maritime domain awareness platform.
- MAJOR WINS: We are announcing our major accomplishments in 2025 - new customers, lots of missions, and manufacturing and plans for 2026 and beyond.
- NEW WEBSITE & BRAND: We are launching a new website and an updated brand.
- RODEO: A gift for our friends in San Francisco. (Read to the end.)
Please watch this video below & read on for more details.
Since coming out of stealth one year ago, we haven’t shared many updates about @ulyssesinc.
Our Communications & Public Relations Division profoundly apologizes for this.
But today, we break our silence and make five major announcements:
- MAKO: We are sharr first autonomous underwater vehicle, the “Model T for the ocean”.
- LEVIATHAN: We are announcing Leviathan, our first autonomous surface vehicle, a mothership for other drones and maritime domain awareness platform.
- MAJOR WINS: We are announcing our major accomplishments in 2025 - new customers, lots of missions, and manufacturing and plans for 2026 and beyond.
- NEW WEBSITE & BRAND: We are launching a new website and an updated brand.
- RODEO: A gift for our friends in San Francisco. (Read to the end.)
Please watch this video below & read on for more details.
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