Rain announces successful funding round
US technology firm Rain has received $9.7 million in seed funding to support the development of its remotely piloted firefighting aircraft
The oversubscribed seed funding round was led by DBL Partners, with participation from VoLo Earth Ventures, Kapor Capital, and Convective Capital, with additional contributions from a number of individual investors.
The funding will be used by Rain to advance various pilot projects of its remotely controlled aerial firefighting helicopters in the USA. In one such project earlier this year, the company performed a capability demonstration flight in Tennessee that was controlled from California using a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk.
Rain’s autonomous firefighting system employs existing wildfire detection systems to remotely dispatch autonomous firefighting helicopters to the site of a fire. The company claims that the system is capable of ‘deploying the aircraft within seconds, and reaching a nascent fire within minutes’.
Oliver Cuenca
Oliver Cuenca is a Junior Editor at AirMed&Rescue. He was previously a News and Features Journalist for the rail magazine IRJ until 2021, and studied MA Magazine Journalism at Cardiff University. His favourite helicopter is the AW169 – the workhorse of the UK air ambulance sector! He also led the creation of Waypoint: The AirMed&Rescue podcast, serving as its Production Editor and co-host.