A former engineer from Pacific Gas and Electric is building something like “Google Maps for what’s underground” to help utilities, civil engineers, and governments avoid costly surprises. The startup is called CivilGrid, founded by Josh Mackanic in 2020, after a particularly painful three-day scramble to identify an unknown buried pipe caused a $60,000 delay. That experience—combined with mounting risk in underground infrastructure—sparked the idea.
The Problem Underground
Large utilities like PG&E often lack visibility into subsurface infrastructure outside their own systems. Water, sewage, telecom or private gas pipelines are frequently owned and documented by other entities, if documented at all. Because of this, every year the U.S. sees roughly 200,000 so-called “utility strikes”—excavation projects that accidentally hit infrastructure nobody knew was there. CivilGrid aims to prevent those incidents by stitching together utility asset maps, environmental permits, property records, geotechnical data and other relevant datasets into one unified platform. Users get a map-based interface to explore all the known underground constraints before breaking ground.
From Startup to Growing Platform
Mackanic, who spent ten years at PG&E, launched CivilGrid in California but is now expanding the company’s reach. The core offering is a cloud-based platform that loads utility GIS datasets, environmental and regulatory zones, geotechnical reports, and parcel boundaries, then overlays them visually for preconstruction planning. Beyond viewing constraints, CivilGrid is building toward guided recommendations—suggesting where to lay infrastructure, what permits to secure, and even filing permits—a logical next step once its dataset grows and usage scales.
To support this growth, CivilGrid has closed a $26 million Series A round. Leading the pricing was Spark Capital, joined by early-stage investors including Afore, A* (A-Star), Ford Street Ventures and SNR. Importantly, Energy Impact Partners—a fund backed by utilities—also participated, sending a strong signal from the industry that this tool is needed and viable.
Already, PG&E has used CivilGrid’s mapping tools in a pilot covering nearly 1,600 planned gas distribution projects and identified approximately $60 million in avoidable paving costs. By knowing in advance where lines are buried and where environmental/regulatory restrictions lie, planners saved money and minimized risk. CivilGrid’s customers now include governments, utilities, and engineering firms—often its former employer among them—and Mackanic says that as the platform’s data grows, so too will the level of automation it can support.
While others have approached underground infrastructure mapping, Mackanic says nobody has yet cracked the messy work of collecting, curating, securing, and licensing all the disparate data and then building a business around it. CivilGrid aims to be the product engineers reach for first when planning new work, reducing surprise digs, delays, and cost overruns.
What this means: With more federal infrastructure funding, faster energy transitions, and growing demand for broadband and EV charging, the need for smarter, data-driven planning has never been greater. CivilGrid sits at the intersection of construction tech, GIS, infrastructure digitization, and regulatory compliance—sectors primed for disruption. The question now is whether it can scale across states, standardize relationships with thousands of agencies, and maintain the data quality required. The potential payoff is huge: smoother permitting, more efficient builds, and safer, more reliable cities.
