After five years in stealth, Dig Energy has emerged with a revolutionary water-jet drilling rig that could finally make geothermal heating affordable for mainstream adoption. The startup's compact technology promises to slash drilling costs by up to 80%, potentially transforming a market where geothermal represents just 1% of building installations despite superior efficiency.
Dig Energy just pulled back the curtain on technology that could finally crack the geothermal code. The New Hampshire startup emerged from five years of stealth development Tuesday with $5 million in seed funding and a water-jet drilling rig that promises to cut geothermal installation costs by up to 80%.
The round, led by Azolla Ventures and Avila VC with participation from Baukunst, Conifer Infrastructure Partners, Koa Labs, Mercator Partners, Drew Scott, and Suffolk Technologies, comes as the US faces a massive infrastructure challenge. According to Oak Ridge National Laboratory research, America needs to drill 6 million feet of geothermal borehole daily through 2050 to stabilize its electrical grid.
"In the United States, geothermal has been 1% of building installations for decades," CEO Dulcie Madden told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. "It's really just because upfront cost is so, so, so expensive."
That cost barrier has kept geothermal heating locked out of mainstream adoption, despite the technology's ability to slash HVAC energy use - which represents a third of all US energy consumption and up to 40% in data centers. Grid operators could save up to $4 billion annually if geothermal reached scale.
Madden and co-founder Thomas Lipoma, her husband and the company's CTO, started exploring the space five years ago after winding down their previous startup, Rest Devices. They discovered decades-old research describing water-jet drilling but found the technology wasn't ready for commercial deployment.
"A lot of the drilling technology has trickled down from oil and gas," Madden explained. "It tends to be large, expensive, and overpowered for something like geothermal." Traditional geothermal drill rigs cost around $2 million and require massive double-axle trucks that can't squeeze through residential side lots or navigate crowded commercial sites.
