In Rainmaking’s version of 2008, the financial crisis arrives and the founders take long baths. They stop reading newspapers. They cut back, concentrating on the startups showing traction. This is how the company’s culture book remembers the year: less a heroic founding myth than a small group trying to keep its judgement intact while the world misbehaves.
It is a useful beginning for a firm that now helps large organisations create new businesses. Rainmaking understands the attraction of an idea, and the awkwardness of discovering that enthusiasm is not a customer. Its proposition is to bring entrepreneurial habits into institutions that have plenty of resources but often struggle to turn them into something new.
- Build a venture, find a startup partner or invest: the route follows the problem.
- Corporations and public bodies supply assets, access and ambition; Rainmaking supplies builders and programme design.
- The work continues beyond the pilot, into ownership, commercial agreements and rollout.
The idea has to leave the room
Rainmaking’s early mistakes were expensive in time. Carsten Kølbek, a co-founder, told European CEO that the team sometimes spent six to nine months pursuing ideas before discovering little market interest. They also learned that abandoning a venture after the same short interval could be premature. The difficult skill was knowing whether to persist, change direction or stop.
The Copenhagen venture builder’s culture book dates its beginning to 2007. By 2009, it records a substantial exit and a London office. In 2010 came Startupbootcamp, initially bringing ten startups from around the world to Copenhagen. Building its own businesses had supplied experience; the accelerator offered a way to put that experience to work for other founders.
“We try to stay away from innovation for its own sake.”
Carsten Kølbek · European CEO, 2020
That admission gives the present business its useful tension. Rainmaking sells help with innovation while recognising how easily innovation becomes an activity with no commercial consequence. A workshop can be enjoyable. So can a bath. Neither tells you whether somebody will buy the product.
Three doors out of the boardroom
Rainmaking sits between a consultancy, a venture studio and an investment business. Its current offer includes opportunity mapping, new ventures, strategic partnerships and venture investing. Growth Systems combines those approaches. Innovation Ecosystems extends the work to governments, regions and institutions whose problems require several organisations to cooperate.
The underlying distinction is practical. A company might need a new business built from scratch. It might need technology that a startup already possesses. It might gain more by investing in, or acquiring, another business. Rainmaking argues that choosing among these routes should precede the machinery of delivery. Hiring a builder before deciding what needs building is an excellent way to acquire a building.
New business line
Commercial collaboration
Acquisition options
This places it alongside corporate business-building consultancies and independent studios, with accelerator networks and internal innovation departments offering alternatives for particular jobs. Its distinction is the combination: strategists, engineers, operators and founders working across several routes to growth. For a buyer, that breadth is useful when the answer is uncertain and potentially wasteful when the task is already narrow.
A pilot needs an exit door
Consider the published startup-partnership process. It begins with roughly six weeks of opportunity mapping, involving leadership and business units before approaching partners. Scouting then screens hundreds of prospects, assesses 15 to 20 and typically selects three to five. Collaboration design establishes the problem, the dangerous assumptions and the measures of success.
A pilot runs for about three months. At its conclusion, the recommendation is to scale, iterate or kill. Where the evidence supports expansion, the next work is a commercial agreement and a rollout plan. That final step matters: a promising experiment still needs somewhere to live inside the operating business.
A useful practice to copy is deciding the stopping conditions before the experiment starts. Also identify who can approve adoption. Otherwise, the team proving a technology works may be quite different from the team with the budget to use it. Enthusiasm rarely comes with purchasing authority attached.
The business model includes the consequences
Rainmaking’s customers include corporate growth teams, governments and regional bodies; founders participate through venture and accelerator programmes. Its public examples include Barclays in opportunity mapping, Hitachi in venture investing and Maersk in startup collaboration. The service being sold is the ability to organise and execute new-business work, with investment participation in selected ventures.
Some arrangements also share ownership. Rainmaking APAC described taking equity alongside corporate partners as founding shareholders. In 2023, Bain acquired that regional business, which had operations in Singapore, Japan and South Korea. Rainmaking’s announcement explicitly preserved its global operations outside APAC. A regional acquisition makes a poor synonym for buying the entire firm.
Cost, in this model, can include development spending, management attention and equity allocated to partners. A sensible buyer should compare those commitments with the assets each participant contributes and the evidence required before more capital is released. Shared upside is appealing; clear decision rights make it usable.
Sometimes the deliverable has a front door
The Thames Freeport Sustainable Construction Lab makes the approach unusually tangible. Rainmaking designed and leads the programme, bringing together Ramboll, Energiesprong UK, E.ON, Tallarna and BE-ST. In January 2026, it reported the first completed home retrofit on the Becontree Estate, delivered by Energiesprong UK through Transform-ER in four weeks.
The works included prefabricated insulation, solar generation, battery storage and a heat-pump-ready design. The reported move from EPC D to predicted EPC A, and expected bill reductions of up to 50%, are forecasts. The programme’s ambition to unlock up to £200 million in private investment is a target. None should be mistaken for cash already saved or raised.
Permission is part of the product
The same coordinating role appears in Llama Design Drive 2025, the three-month Meta and Startupbootcamp programme for MENA founders building AI agents. It offered technical mentorship, business support and up to US$25,000 in AWS compute credits. Here the valuable combination is technology, guidance and access rather than construction materials.
Across these projects, Rainmaking’s proposition depends on institutions allowing experiments to change decisions. A protected budget, access to customers and permission to redirect a project are practical requirements. Organisations demanding certainty before any test will struggle to use the approach. The lesson from those early baths survives: when resources become scarce, evidence about what people actually need becomes rather precious.