The United States Underground Infrastructure Data Platform CivilGrid completed $26 million in Round A financing. The company tried to consolidate information on underground pipelines, land tenure and environmental restrictions scattered across different agencies, helping the engineering team to judge more quickly whether the project could move forward before work began.
This round of financing was led by Spark Capital
CivilGrid was founded in 2020, and the current round of A financing was led by Spark Capital and Afore, A*, Ford Street Ventures and SNR. The Fund ' s limited partners include utility companies.
The company currently sells platform access to government departments, civil engineering companies and utilities, and PG&E is one of its clients.
Platform integrates asset information below ground
The founder Josh Mackanic worked for the Pacific Coal Power Company PG& E for 10 years. He stated that the direct cause of his own entrepreneurship was the discovery of unknown pipes in the course of a construction preparation, and that it took the team three days to confirm their attribution and access, resulting in a single delay of $60,000.
CivilGrid ' s core product is to consolidate previously dispersed data into a single interface, covering underground utility assets, property ownership and environmental regulatory requirements. Mackanic describes it as an “underground Google Maps” with the objective of enabling the engineering team to identify construction restrictions, reduce back-to-back and stop work at an early stage of the project.
PG&E case shows space saving
According to Mackanic, there are approximately 200,000 cases per year in the United States of America in which construction has accidentally hit underground facilities. The problem lies not only in the complexity of the pipelines, but also in the fact that different types of facilities are held by different agencies and the data are dispersed over a long period of time.
A case study cited by PG& E shows that, with the help of CivilGrid, some $6 million in avoidable pavement costs were identified in 1600 planned gas distribution projects. PG&E Senior Management Christine Cowsert states that such tools help teams to identify risks earlier, improve building efficiency and reduce unnecessary expenditure.
According to Mackanic, the next step for the company is not only to reach out to its clients, but also to automate more forward processes. In addition to providing data to support site selection, further recommendations for line laying and assistance in the preparation and submission of construction permits may be provided in the future.