Ex-PG&E engineer raises $26M to map what's buried underground

Josh Mackanic left a 10-year engineering career at Pacific Gas and Electric because he kept thinking about what the utility company doesn’t know about what’s buried underground. A job once got shut down after his team found an unmapped pipe in an excavation site — caught, fortunately, before it was hit — but it still took three days of tracking down who owned the pipe and whether it could be tapped, a delay that cost $60,000.

Even a utility as large as PG&E only has visibility into the electric and gas lines it owns; pipes carrying sewage or water belong to other companies, along with the data on where they sit. That gap contributes to around 200,000 so-called “utility strikes” every year in the United States.

Mackanic founded CivilGrid in 2020 to address the problem, gathering disparate data on utility assets, property ownership, and environmental regulations into what he calls “Google Maps for what’s underground,” then selling access to governments, civil engineering firms, and utilities — including his former employer.

CivilGrid has now raised a $26 million Series A led by Spark Capital, with additional investment from early-stage funds Afore, A*, Ford Street Ventures, and SNR, plus Energy Impact Partners, a fund whose limited partners include a number of utility companies. “California’s energy needs are growing rapidly, and our customers expect us to deliver the infrastructure they need safely, reliably, and affordably,” said Christine Cowsert, PG&E’s senior vice president of enterprise business and technology modernization, adding that tools like CivilGrid help teams identify risks earlier and build more efficiently. A PG&E case study has already identified $60 million in avoidable paving costs across 1,600 planned gas distribution projects using CivilGrid.

Mackanic wants to add more customers and eventually move into automating some of the permitting work that follows a siting decision — recommending where to place a pipe and then filing the necessary permits on a customer’s behalf. He said better visibility into underground infrastructure isn’t a novel idea, but that nobody had previously solved the harder problem of collecting, sorting, and securing the data while building the partnerships needed to get paid for it.

Why it matters

CivilGrid’s PG&E case study — $60 million in avoidable costs on 1,600 projects — is a concrete measure of what fragmented utility data costs at scale, and its backing from Energy Impact Partners’ utility-heavy LP base suggests the industry sees the data-aggregation problem as worth paying an outsider to solve rather than building in-house.