$26M · CivilGrid + 2 more

What they're building

CivilGrid is a pre-construction data platform that answers one deceptively hard question: what is already in the ground where you want to dig, and who owns it? The product assembles utility shapefiles, land ownership records, geotechnical borings, and environmental constraints into a single map layer engineering teams can scope a project against before anyone breaks ground. The internal shorthand is 'utility composite generation' — stitching the partial, incompatible records that each utility holds about only its own assets into one coherent picture of the subsurface. The insight is structural rather than technical. Every gas, water, sewage, electric, and telecom operator maintains its own map, in its own format, of its own pipes. Nobody owns the union. So roughly 200,000 utility strikes happen in the US every year — not because the data doesn't exist, but because it exists in twelve places that don't talk. Mackanic hit this personally at PG&E: an unknown pipe stalled an excavation for three days at $60,000. CivilGrid is the aggregation layer that should have existed. The customer set is unusual for a software startup this size: government agencies, civil engineering firms, utilities, and developers, all buying platform access. PG&E, Mackanic's former employer, ran a case study that identified roughly $60 million in avoidable paving costs across 1,600 planned gas distribution projects. That is the sales motion — a single number the buyer computed themselves. The stated next move is upward into workflow: automating permit filing and the red tape that sits between a designed project and a shovel. Data first, then the process the data unblocks.

Why this matters

American infrastructure spending is running through a decade-long buildout — grid interconnects, gas distribution replacement, fiber, data center hookups — and every one of those projects starts with the same undifferentiated pain of figuring out what's already underground. The 200,000-strikes-a-year figure is the cost of that fragmentation, paid in delays, re-paving, and occasionally in explosions. CivilGrid's PG&E case study putting $60M of avoidable paving cost against 1,600 projects is the kind of number that makes a procurement conversation short. The timing argument is that this is a data-moat business in a category that software mostly skipped. Civil engineering and utility planning ran on PDFs and phone calls while every other vertical got a SaaS layer. The first company to assemble the composite dataset and get it in front of the agencies who issue permits is very hard to dislodge — the aggregation itself is the product, and it compounds with every jurisdiction added.