We thought we needed to build lightning

In the earliest versions, our mental model was that if lightning affects plant growth, then we should build a lightning machine.

We assumed it would mean high voltage and dramatic electrical discharge. But as we got deeper, we realised something more subtle and more useful. Before lightning ever strikes, storm conditions create electric fields and frequencies in the environment. Plants and seeds don’t need a bolt of lightning; they respond to the field effects that come with it.

If we could deliver specific frequencies into seeds in a controlled way, we could influence how they behave as they germinate and develop.

So we set out to build technology that can deliver targeted electric fields into seeds, essentially reprogramming them toward better establishment and growth.

Why low input cost matters more than people think

A lot of deeptech is powerful but expensive. It requires heavy infrastructure, expensive consumables, or massive energy inputs. That’s fine in some industries, but it becomes a barrier when you want to scale across global supply chains. The beauty of what we’re building is that the input cost is incredibly low.

We use a small amount of electricity to create the frequencies we deliver into seeds. That changes everything. Because when your marginal cost is low, you can afford to test broadly and adapt quickly. You can explore multiple crops, multiple environments, and multiple commercial models without your unit economics collapsing.

It also makes the technology resilient to market uncertainty. If one pathway slows down, you’re not locked into a single capital-intensive route. You can move across the supply chain, find the highest-leverage deployment point, and still maintain a strong cost-to-value ratio.

A surprising go-to-market: from agriculture to mining

We started in agriculture, because that’s where the climate challenge shows up most obviously with drying conditions, harsher weather, more volatility, and the need to keep yields stable. But we realised something interesting once we entered the Founders Factory and Rio Tinto programme.

When you strip the problem down, the mining industry has a similar challenge in mine closure and rehabilitation, particularly in places like the Pilbara. It’s dry, it’s harsh, and it’s difficult for native plants to establish. If plants don’t establish, rehabilitation fails, and the mine can’t close responsibly.

So while the context was different, the biological problem was familiar. Essentially, how do you help seeds establish and reach their growth potential in tough conditions? 

That reframing gave us confidence that what we were doing could transfer to a new market.

Don’t confuse 'high voltage' with 'high impact'

If you’re building frontier tech, especially something that feels like a moonshot, here are a few lessons that have mattered for us:

• Don’t confuse ‘high voltage’ with ‘high impact.’ Sometimes the breakthrough is the subtle mechanism, not the dramatic one.

• Low marginal cost gives you strategic flexibility. It lets you test widely and pivot intelligently.

• With corporates: speed builds trust. Move fast, show results, and don’t overpromise.

Deeptech can feel like it needs to be complex to be valuable. But some of the most scalable innovations are the ones that do something powerful with minimal inputs, fitting into the world as it already works. 

That’s what we’re trying to build at Rainstick. A low-energy, high-leverage way to help plants establish and grow in a world that’s getting hotter, drier and harder to predict. And for me, it also comes back to purpose; that we can’t solve tomorrow’s climate challenges only by looking forward. 

We need to look back too, treating traditional knowledge not as something ‘historic’, but as a living knowledge system that can shape modern tools into new solutions for the future.