Former PG&E Engineer Raises $26 Million to Map Urban Underground Infrastructure

Josh Mackanic spent ten years as an engineer at Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), one of the largest utility companies in the United States, and left troubled by a question the company itself couldn't answer: what exactly is buried underground? In an exclusive interview with TechCrunch, he described the episode that became the spark for his startup, CivilGrid.

I had a job that got shut down because there was a pipe in the excavation we didn't know existed. Luckily, we spotted it before hitting it. But then came a three-day saga chasing down: who owns this pipe? Can we cut it? What's running through it?

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-- Josh Mackanic, founder of CivilGrid

The answer came after three days of downtime, a delay that cost $60,000. And, according to Mackanic, this isn't an isolated case: about 200,000 utility strikes happen in the US every year.

The problem: each utility only sees its own pipe

The central point the source describes is information fragmentation. Even a giant like PG&E only has visibility into the power and gas lines it operates itself. Sewer or water pipes belong to other companies, and so does the data on exactly where they run. There is no single, reliable layer that consolidates everything that's underground.

It's into that gap that CivilGrid, founded in 2020, positions itself. The company collects scattered data on infrastructure assets, land ownership, and environmental regulations, and packages it all into what Mackanic jokingly calls "the Google Maps of what's underground." Access is sold to governments, civil engineering firms, and utilities, including PG&E itself, his former employer.

The round and who's behind it

CivilGrid announced a $26 million Series A to scale its operation. The round's composition, according to TechCrunch:

| Investor | Role | |---|---| | Spark Capital | Round leader | | Afore | Early-stage fund | | A* | Early-stage fund | | Ford Street Ventures | Early-stage fund | | SNR | Early-stage fund | | Energy Impact Partners | Fund with utilities as LPs |

Mackanic highlighted the presence of Energy Impact Partners, a fund that counts several utilities among its limited partners (LPs), as a vote of confidence from within the very industry he's trying to serve.

The number that backs the thesis

The source's most concrete argument isn't the founder's pitch, it's a case study conducted by PG&E itself. According to TechCrunch, the utility identified $60 million in avoidable paving costs by applying CivilGrid to 1,600 planned gas distribution projects. In other words: knowing in advance what's underground avoids unnecessarily reopening and repaving public roads.

PG&E's institutional statement reinforces the angle of advance planning:

This means planning smarter from the start, with tools like CivilGrid that help our teams identify risks earlier, build more efficiently, and avoid unnecessary costs while keeping safety first.

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-- Christine Cowsert, SVP of Technology and Corporate Business at PG&E

From data to automation

Today, according to Mackanic, the product delivers data for the engineer to decide where to place infrastructure. The next step he describes is moving beyond lookup: once the constraints are mapped, the system could recommend where to position a pipe and then identify, and even file, the permits needed to start construction.

"There's a lot more that CivilGrid could start automating now that we've built this database," he told TechCrunch, pointing to the ambition of tackling the "red tape" that holds up infrastructure projects in the US. It's worth noting that, in the source, this is described as a plan, not as a feature already delivered.

What this means for software builders in Brazil

CivilGrid operates in the US, and the case study data comes from PG&E, but the problem it tackles is familiar to anyone working with geospatial data, IoT, and utility operations in Brazil. The underlying pain, underground data fragmented across multiple owners, formats, and agencies, is essentially the same in Brazil, where power, sanitation, gas, and telecom utilities rarely share a unified registry.

A few practical points worth the attention of Brazilian devs:

• Aggregation layer, not a new sensor: CivilGrid's value, as described in the source, isn't in capturing new data, but in collecting, organizing, and securing data that already exists in silos. That's a product pattern replicable in any sector with data scattered across players that don't talk to each other.
• Integration with smart cities and IoT: for those building smart city platforms, a reliable layer of what's underground is direct input for network planning, construction work, and field sensors.
• The data-as-product model: Mackanic says in the interview that the obstacle was never a lack of awareness of the problem, but solving the collection, curation, and business relationships with whoever pays for the information. It's a reminder that, in B2B data products, distribution and industry trust weigh as much as engineering.

What remains open

The source doesn't detail the platform's technical architecture, which data formats and sources are ingested, or how the company ensures the information's freshness and accuracy, which is precisely the Achilles' heel of any underground registry. There's also no indication of plans to expand outside the US. For those following the utilities and geospatial sector in Brazil, the case serves more as a reference for the model and investment thesis than as a tool available locally.