This former PG&E engineer is building a ‘Google Maps for the underground; plus, Viral AI startup Instinct has raised $350M at a $2.5B valuation

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0:30place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. Josh Mechanic 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. He told TechCrunch, I had a job that got shut down because a pipe was in the excavation that we didn't know about. Fortunately, we saw it before we impacted it. But then there was this three-day ordeal of running around asking things like, whose pipe is this? Can we tap it? Can we not? What's in it? Mechanic eventually got the answer, but it took three days, a delay that cost$60 ,000.

1:14Despite being one of the largest utility companies in the U.S., PG &E and companies like it only has visibility into the many miles of electric and gas lines it owns and operates. Pipes carrying sewage or water belong to other companies, and so does the information about where exactly they are. This leads to around 200 ,000 so-called utility strikes every year. So back in 2020, Mechanic founded a startup called Civil Grid designed to solve this problem. The company gathers disparate data regarding utility assets, property ownership, and environmental regulations, and bundles it into what Mechanic cheekily refers to as Google Maps for what's underground.

2:02It then sells access to governments, civil engineering firms, and utilities, including his former employer. Now, Mechanic has raised a$26 million Series A to grow Civil Grid into something bigger. The round was led by Spark Capital, with additional investment coming from early-stage funds, Ford Street Ventures, S &R, and others. Civil Grid also received investment from Energy Impact Partners, a fund with a number of utility companies serving as LPs, which Mechanic pointed to as another vote of confidence from the industry. Christine Kalsert, Senior Vice President of Enterprise Business and Technology Modernization at PG &E, said, California's energy needs are growing rapidly, and our customers expect us to deliver the infrastructure they need safely, reliably, and affordably.

2:51That means planning smarter from the start with tools like CivilGrid, which help our teams identify risks earlier, build more efficiently, and avoid unnecessary costs while keeping safety front and center. A case study performed by PG &E has already identified$60 million in avoidable paving costs across 1 ,600 planned gas distribution projects by using CivilGrid. Mechanic said he wants to bring on more customers and eventually start tackling other red tape problems that make it so hard to build things here in the U.S. He said, right now we're providing engineers the data to be able to make a decision about where to place infrastructure.

3:35But once I've given them the constraints, it's not too hard for me to say, well, I would recommend that you put the pipe down right here. And oh, by the way, here are the permits you need in order to move to construction on this pipe. Would you like me to file those permits? Okay, let me file those permits. Mechanics said there's a lot more that Civil Grid could start to automate now that the company has built this data set and kind of captured the core user who's at the very early stages of making decisions about what's going to be built. Creating better visibility into the country's subterranean infrastructure is not a novel idea, but mechanics said that nobody had found a way to solve the problem of collecting, sorting, and securing the data, and striking up relationships with the partners most likely to pay for that information.

4:25He added, one of the reasons I left PG &E to start Civil Grid was because I felt like this was a problem that was going to be better solved from the outside in than the inside out, and not because there's a lack of awareness of the problem or even interest in solving it. Utilities, well, they run relatively lean, right? Nobody wants to pay more for their gas bill than they have to. Like many kids, Mechanic said he spent much of his childhood dreaming of sending rockets into space. But even though he studied mechanical engineering in college and graduate school, he said he never expected to work for or with utility companies digging into his own planet.

5:04He remembered thinking, I was like, aren't these places boring? But working at PG &E made him realize just how high-stakes utility work can be, all so people can turn on their lights or start a pot of coffee every day without worrying that those things will work. He finished by saying, the reality is, Unfortunately, we do ourselves a disservice in not championing the extent to which they work wonders every day.

5:35Instinct is a startup founded just last year, and it's helmed by a 23-year-old. And that company has managed to ride the wave of AI enthusiasm toward a gargantuan valuation over the course of the summer. The company, which offers an AI assistant that has inspired enthusiasm among its early users, told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that it had raised$250 million in a recent Series B funding round. That new round brings the company's total funding to$350 million and gives the startup a valuation of$2.5 billion. That new funding round was co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. Instinct, which is offered by the company Spear Street Technology and is led by founder Noah Shen, is an agent that the company says can efficiently organize your life.

6:28Users connect it to their apps and devices and can communicate with it via texts and calls. In a tweet that Shen wrote on Wednesday, he said, I'm thrilled with everything our early users are doing with Instinct. They've told us they've planned cross-country road trips, bought weekly groceries and concert tickets. and canceled hundreds of dollars of subscriptions. Someone's even planning their wedding with Instinct. Instinct, which rocks a decidedly lo-fi website, is currently in private beta, but it has already inspired a certain amount of controversy due to privacy concerns. Online, users have worried about the overly generous permissions that the app requires, as well as its terms of use that disturbed some users because of their invasive potential.

7:17That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to TechCrunch.com.

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