U.S. startup CivilGrid has raised $26 million in Series A funding to expand its customer base and develop a platform that combines scattered data about buried underground infrastructure. The platform targets utilities, civil engineering firms, and government agencies that need to know what lies beneath their project sites before beginning excavation or laying new lines.
Josh Mackanic founded the company in 2020, after spending 10 years working in engineering at Pacific Gas and Electric, commonly known as PG&E. The idea came from an incident that halted a project when a buried pipe appeared that work crews did not know existed. Identifying the pipe’s owner and what it carried took three days and, according to Mackanic, the delay resulted in a cost of $60,000.
Scattered Data and Costly Risks
Utilities typically do not have a complete view of everything underground. An electricity or gas company knows its own lines, but water and sewage pipes may belong to other entities, while ownership information and precise locations may be distributed among different companies, agencies, and records. The source links this lack of visibility to about 200,000 utility-strike incidents annually, which can lead to project delays, additional costs, or safety risks.
CivilGrid collects utility asset data, property ownership information, and environmental regulations, then displays them in a unified layer that the company describes, by analogy, as “Google Maps for what’s underground.” The company sells access to this data to government agencies, engineering firms, and utilities, including PG&E, the former employer of its founder.
New Funding and a Demonstrated Use Case at PG&E
Spark Capital led the funding round, with participation from Afore, A*, Ford Street Ventures, and SNR, along with Energy Impact Partners, a fund whose limited partners include a number of utilities. Mackanic said the fund’s participation is an indication of the sector’s interest in this problem.
According to a case study conducted by PG&E, using CivilGrid helped identify $60 million in avoidable repaving costs across 1,600 planned gas-distribution projects. Christine Cowsert, PG&E’s senior vice president of business and enterprise technology modernization, also said the tool helps teams identify risks earlier and build projects more efficiently.
What Does the Company Want to Automate Next?
The platform is currently used to provide engineers with the data and constraints needed to make decisions about infrastructure locations. Mackanic believes the database the company has built could eventually suggest a suitable location for a pipe, identify the required permits, and perhaps even submit permit applications on behalf of project teams.
However, these future capabilities remain a proposal from the company’s founder and are not functions that the source said are available at full scale. The platform’s value also depends on collecting accurate data from multiple entities and securing it, a problem Mackanic describes as lacking a practical, widespread solution so far.
Why Does This News Matter?
The change is not the launch of another consumer map, but an attempt to turn scattered utility records into a tool for making early decisions in energy and construction projects. If CivilGrid expands, some work could shift from manual inquiries after a problem is discovered to planning based on a unified picture before excavation. Nevertheless, the reported results remain tied to a PG&E case study, and the source does not provide independent data demonstrating the platform’s performance across all markets or types of projects.