Josh Mackanic spent a decade at Pacific Gas and Electric, one of the largest utility companies in the U.S., before leaving in 2020 to build a startup that solves a problem he witnessed firsthand: utilities often don’t know what’s buried beneath their own streets. After a three-day delay on a job site that cost $60,000 because a pipe wasn’t on any map, Mackanic founded CivilGrid, a company that aggregates underground utility data into what he calls “Google Maps for what’s underground.”
This week, CivilGrid announced it has raised $26 million in Series A funding led by Spark Capital, with participation from Afore, A*, Ford Street Ventures, SNR, and Energy Impact Partners — a fund backed by utility companies, which Mackanic sees as a strong signal of industry confidence.
Also read: Chinese automakers are following Tesla’s bet that robots are the next big profit machine
The high cost of blind digging
PG&E, like most utilities, has detailed records of its own electric and gas lines, but the pipes carrying water or sewage belong to other entities, and their locations are often scattered across paper records, outdated CAD files, and proprietary databases. That fragmentation leads to roughly 200,000 utility strikes every year — incidents where excavation crews hit a pipe or cable they didn’t know was there.
Mackanic’s own experience at PG&E made the problem personal. “I had a job that got shut down because a pipe was in the excavation [that] we didn’t know about. Fortunately, we saw it before we impacted it,” he told TechCrunch. But the delay that followed — three days of asking “Whose pipe is this? Can we tap it? Can we not? What’s in it?” — cost $60,000.
Also read: Bluesky adds an ‘algorithmic opt-out’ for users who don’t want their posts to go viral
CivilGrid’s platform pulls together data on utility assets, property boundaries, and environmental regulations, then presents it in a unified digital map. The company sells access to governments, civil engineering firms, and utilities, including PG&E, which is now a customer.
“California’s energy needs are growing rapidly, and our customers expect us to deliver the infrastructure they need safely, reliably, and affordably,” Christine Cowsert, senior vice president of enterprise business and technology modernization at PG&E, said in a statement. “That means planning smarter from the start with tools like CivilGrid, which help our teams identify risks earlier, build more efficiently, and avoid unnecessary costs while keeping safety front and center.”
Real savings, bigger ambitions
CivilGrid’s value proposition is already showing up in PG&E’s numbers. A case study conducted by the utility identified $60 million in avoidable paving costs across 1,600 planned gas distribution projects by using CivilGrid’s data to plan routes more accurately.
Mackanic said the company’s next step is to expand its customer base and eventually automate more of the infrastructure planning process. “Right now, we’re providing engineers the data to be able to make a decision” about where to place infrastructure, he said. But once the constraints are clear, he envisions CivilGrid recommending a pipe route, generating the necessary permits, and even filing them automatically.
“There’s a lot more we could start to automate now that we have built this dataset and kind of captured the core user who’s at the very early stages of making decisions about what’s going to be built,” Mackanic said.
Why solving this from the outside mattered
Creating better visibility into subterranean infrastructure isn’t a new idea, but Mackanic said previous attempts failed because nobody cracked the hard parts: collecting and securing the data, and convincing utilities to pay for it. He left PG&E because he believed the problem was better solved from the outside in.
“Utilities, they run relatively lean, right? Nobody wants to pay more for their gas bill than they have to,” he said.
Mackanic, who studied mechanical engineering in college and graduate school, admitted he once thought utility work was boring. But his time at PG&E changed that perspective. “The reality is, unfortunately, we do ourselves a disservice in not championing the extent to which they work wonders every day,” he said.
With $26 million in new funding, CivilGrid is positioned to scale beyond California and take on more of the red tape that slows infrastructure projects across the U.S. The company’s trajectory suggests that the unglamorous work of mapping what’s underground is becoming a critical piece of modernizing the country’s aging infrastructure.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. The startup funding and infrastructure technology markets are volatile and subject to change. Readers should conduct their own research before making any investment decisions.
