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Earthgrid won a $1 million grand prize during the Startup World Cup in San Francisco. The Bay Area startup is using plasma lasers to bore tunnels. Here's how they won.
A Bay Area startup using super hot lasers to drill through rock took home the top prize at the Startup World Cup, an annual pitch competition that awards one company a $1 million prize.
Based in Richmond, Earthgrid is developing plasma lasers, or torches, that can bore through hard rock more efficiently than traditional methods to create tunnels for infrastructure projects like burying cables.
The Startup World Cup is an annual pitch competition organized by Pegasus Tech Ventures, a venture capital firm based in San Jose, and the firm runs regional pitch competitions around the world leading up to the grand finale in San Francisco.
Earthgrid CEO Troy Helming won the Silicon Valley regional event in August.
Overall, the Startup World Cup’s grand finale was one of the most challenging pitch events Helming has done.
“It was a little more challenging in two ways,” Helming told me. “It was a big crowd, I think there was over 1,000 people there. And the second element that was tricky is, it was only a four-minute pitch and we have kind of a big story to tell. We’re infrastructure, we’re robotics, we’re climate tech. It’s a lot to pack in.”
But he got some advice after the semifinals held in the days leading up to the final pitch that helped him refine his message.
“It seemed like the judges didn’t know how real our big joint venture announcement was,” Helming said, and “they encouraged me to spend a little more time on that.”
In September, Earthgrid announced it had entered into a joint venture with EnerTech — a subsidiary of Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund — to build out infrastructure projects for power, telecommunications and more across the U.S., Europe and Middle East.
Earthgrid and EnerTech estimate that there are $18 billion worth of projects to deploy in the U.S. alone.
That sizable business opportunity impressed the panel of judges who ultimately awarded Earthgrid the grand prize at the World Cup on Friday.
“It was a combination of factors that we found very compelling,” Vaibhav Agrawal told me.
Agrawal was one of the investors judging the Startup World Cup. He’s also a founding partner at a new venture fund called Odd Bird and a venture partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
“It’s not like space travel — nothing wrong with it but the utility is not immediately clear,” Agrawal said. By contrast, Earthgrid’s plasma boring technology has the potential to solve real problems in a sector that could translate to billions of dollars in revenue. “The company also had a strong balance of technical and commercial talent in the founding team. When both of those things come together is when the real magic of applying technology to the real world happens.”
Helming worked in telecommunications in the 1990s and then switched his focus to renewable energy, first as the founder of a wind power developer in Kansas called Tradewind Energy that was acquired by Italian energy company Enel Green Power and then as the founder of Pristine Sun Corporation, a solar energy company in the Bay Area.
Helming also previously worked for a couple of years at another tunnel boring company in San Francisco called Petra which also uses thermal energy to drill through hard materials for undergrounding cables.
Earthgrid has now raised around $51 million and has 19 employees. Helming intends to hire one or two more engineers, in addition to equipment operators and machine fabricators as the company grows.
“As more of our customer contracts start to generate revenue, we’ll continue to grow slowly,” Helming said.
Earthgrid does assembly and light manufacturing at its facility in Richmond.
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