The Launch
A founder posting under the handle Mete Karslioglu announced on X that his company, Meteoric, is launching as part of Y Combinator's S26 batch. According to the post, Meteoric builds drones that clear clouds over solar farms, boosting their annual output by 10 to 30 percent without using any chemicals. The post described the company's long-term goal in stark terms: weakening severe storms and hurricanes. The announcement linked to the company's site, meteoric.earth.
How the Drones Work
Meteoric's own website describes drones that fly into low- and mid-altitude clouds to reduce their reflectivity, effectively recovering sunlight for utility-scale solar plants, without chemicals or new site infrastructure. A LinkedIn post attributed to Karslioglu's father, sharing details from the founders, adds that the drones fly up to five kilometers in altitude and alter the droplets that form clouds, which reduces reflectivity and returns measurable sunlight to panels below. That post identifies the target as low overcast clouds, which it says can cut utility-scale solar generation by 60 to 80 percent while they sit over a site.
The Numbers
The X announcement cites a 10-30 percent annual output increase. A separate LinkedIn post, describing the company's earlier pitch, offered a narrower estimate: recovering generation lost to low overcast clouds could increase annual output by 10 to 25 percent across major U.S. grid regions, worth roughly $5,000 to $28,000 per megawatt each year from existing solar assets. Y Combinator's own company listings summarize Meteoric simply as building drones that clear clouds over solar farms to increase output.
The Founders
Meteoric's website credits two co-founders, identified as Mete and Eric, both holding MEng degrees from the University of Cambridge. Mete specialized in aerospace, energy, and mechanical engineering and previously developed seawater spray nozzles intended to increase cloud reflectivity at the Cambridge Centre for Climate Repair. Eric specialized in electrical, control, and computer engineering and previously worked on systems for removing droplets from LiDAR lenses, along with electronic chips for controlling small volumes of liquid. A LinkedIn post says the pair completed their degrees and began building their first prototype after relocating to San Francisco.
A Bigger, Unproven Ambition
The X post frames weakening severe storms and hurricanes as Meteoric's ultimate target, a far more ambitious and unproven goal than adjusting cloud cover over a single solar site. It sits within a wider, contested field: cloud seeding to influence precipitation has been practiced in various forms since the 1940s, and companies such as Rainmaker have used seeding drones in Utah and Idaho, though the U.S. Government Accountability Office has previously described the broader technology's benefits as unproven, according to reporting cited in industry coverage. Meteoric's own materials do not detail how, or whether, its solar-farm cloud-thinning approach would translate into storm weakening.