CivilGrid, a startup building a unified data platform for underground utility infrastructure, announced a $26 million Series A in August 2026 to expand its customer base and automate permitting processes for utility and construction work.
The round was led by Spark Capital, with participation from Afore, A*, Ford Street Ventures, SNR, and Energy Impact Partners — a fund whose limited partners include a number of utility companies.
CivilGrid was founded in 2020 by Josh Mackanic, a former Pacific Gas and Electric engineer who spent a decade at the company. Mackanic said a single on-the-job incident crystallized the problem he wanted to solve: a job was shut down after workers discovered an unidentified pipe in an excavation site, triggering a three-day effort to determine ownership and contents. The delay cost $60,000.
That kind of disruption is common. Mackanic cited roughly 200,000 “utility strikes” occurring annually in the U.S., a consequence of utility companies having visibility only into the assets they own — not those belonging to other operators. CivilGrid aggregates data on utility assets, property ownership, and environmental regulations into a single platform, which it sells to governments, civil engineering firms, and utilities, including PG&E.
A PG&E case study found that using CivilGrid identified $60 million in avoidable paving costs across 1,600 planned gas distribution projects. Christine Cowsert, PG&E’s senior vice president of enterprise business and technology modernization, said the tool helps teams “identify risks earlier, build more efficiently, and avoid unnecessary costs.”
Mackanic said the new funding will support customer growth and a planned expansion into automated permitting. Once CivilGrid identifies where infrastructure should be placed and what permits are required, he said the platform could file those permits directly on behalf of users — reducing a broader layer of administrative friction that slows U.S. construction projects.
“There’s a lot more we could start to automate now that we have built this dataset,” Mackanic told TechCrunch.
Source: TechCrunch