Four businesses on South Congress are heated and cooled by a hole in the ground
In a corner of Austin's South Congress Business District, four commercial tenants run their heating and air conditioning off something they will never see: a field of boreholes reaching deep into the rock below their feet. No smokestack. No roof unit roaring through a Texas July. Just 35 tons of quiet, carbon-free climate control pulled out of the earth.
That borefield is Bedrock Energy's first commercial installation, and it is doing the unglamorous work geothermal has always promised and rarely delivered at a price anyone would pay. The building owners did not buy a science project. They bought heating and cooling. The fact that it happens to be clean is, for Bedrock, the entire point - and the part it would prefer you stop treating as exotic.
"Limitless geo-energy right under your property."
Heating and cooling is the biggest energy bill in the building - and the dirtiest
Geothermal has a reputation problem. The physics has been settled for decades: pump heat into the ground in summer, pull it back out in winter, and you can roughly halve a building's HVAC energy use while cutting related air pollution by as much as 90%. Everyone in the industry knows this. Almost nobody builds it.
The reason is boring and decisive: drilling. Sinking the boreholes that make geothermal work has been slow, unpredictable, and expensive. Crews drill more or less blind, hit surprises in the rock, stop, fix, and start again. Every surprise is money. For a commercial developer running the numbers, the upfront cost of all that drilling has quietly killed thousands of geothermal projects before they began.
So the question Bedrock asked was not "is geothermal good?" Everyone agreed it was. The question was "why is the part that goes into the ground so painful - and who has actually solved hard drilling before?"
"Heating and cooling remain the largest energy expense for buildings - but geothermal can cut those costs in half while reducing air pollution by 90%."
Take the people who drill for oil, and point them straight down for heat instead
The oil and gas industry has spent a century and untold billions learning to drill precisely, deeply, and at scale. Silviu Livescu spent nine years as a chief scientist at Baker Hughes and time before that at Exxon, accumulating close to 40 patents in the process. He knew, better than almost anyone, that the hardest problems in drilling already had answers - they were just being used to pull carbon out of the ground rather than to avoid burning it.
His bet, made with co-founder and CEO Joselyn Lai, a decade-long startup operator with a long-standing pull toward sustainability, was deceptively simple: take oil-and-gas drilling technology, reengineer it for shallow geothermal, and the economics flip. Drill faster and smarter, and the upfront cost that strangles geothermal stops being a dealbreaker.
Joselyn Lai
A decade in startups with an early, durable interest in sustainability. She runs the commercial engine - turning a drilling breakthrough into projects building owners will actually sign.
Silviu Livescu
Former chief scientist at Baker Hughes, ex-Exxon, and onetime UT Austin academic with nearly 40 patents. He brings the subsurface engineering that makes the drilling fast.
"Oil-and-gas technology can be reengineered and redesigned for geothermal direct-use heating and cooling for buildings."
A drill that reads the ground the way a self-driving car reads the road
Bedrock's core trick is to stop drilling blind. Its rigs sense the subsurface in real time as they drill, adjusting on the fly instead of stopping to recover from surprises. The company compares it to the way an autonomous vehicle reads the road ahead - and says it lets them build boreholes up to five times faster than conventional methods, with reports of three-to-eight-times gains in the right conditions.
Around that hardware sits the software. Bedrock's Geo Loop Field Design uses data algorithms to model how a borehole field will perform over its lifetime, skipping the expensive thermal testing that usually precedes a project. Its Intelligent Drilling stack runs the rig. And the company has announced the industry's first real-time 3D visualization platform, so the team can watch the drilling happen underground rather than infer it after the fact.
Then there is the part nobody romanticizes: End-to-End Project Delivery. Bedrock handles MEP design, coordinates energy financing, and lines up construction partners, so a building owner gets a working system rather than a pile of promising components. Geothermal's problem was never the idea. It was everything around the idea.
"Bedrock's drilling reads the ground as it goes - similar to how autonomous vehicles read the road ahead."
A short company, a steep climb
The numbers that have to be true for any of this to matter
Climate stories are easy to tell and hard to prove. Bedrock's case rests on two numbers a building owner cares about more than any carbon figure: how much faster the drilling goes, and how much the energy bill drops. Here is how the company's claims stack up against the conventional baseline.
Drilling speed: Bedrock vs. conventional
Building HVAC energy cost
The proof is also in the cap table. A $12M Series A led by Titanium Ventures, with Energy Impact Partners - a serious energy investor - joining alongside Sustainable Future Ventures and the seed-stage backers who doubled down. Roughly $25.8M raised in total for a company that is, in startup years, barely out of the gate.
"We backed Bedrock because the hardest, most expensive part of geothermal is the drilling - and that is exactly the part they have made faster."
Make the cleanest heating and cooling also the obvious choice
Bedrock's stated mission is to transform the heating and cooling of buildings using geothermal energy, radically reducing costs for both people and the environment. Notice the order. Cost first. The environmental win is real, but the company's whole strategy is built on a quiet conviction that clean energy wins when it is cheaper, not when it is virtuous.
That is why the expansion plan points at the Mountain West - Colorado, Utah, and neighboring states - where the climate makes the math even friendlier. And it is why the Series A money is going into faster drilling and better software rather than louder marketing. The thesis is that geothermal does not need to be sold as a sacrifice. It needs to be made boring, reliable, and affordable.
"Transform the heating and cooling of buildings, using geothermal energy to radically reduce costs for people and the environment."
If the drilling gets cheap enough, the argument is over
Buildings are not going to stop needing heat in winter and cool in summer. The only question is what they burn to get it, and what it costs. Bedrock is betting that once you remove the drilling penalty, geothermal stops being the responsible-but-expensive option and becomes the default - first in friendly climates, then everywhere the numbers work.
There are reasons for the skeptic to keep a hand on their wallet. One commercial borefield is a proof, not a portfolio. Scaling hardware in the field is brutal, the regulatory and construction landscape is fragmented, and "up to 5x faster" still has to hold across thousands of very different sites. None of that is solved yet.
But back on South Congress, four businesses are already living in the future Bedrock is selling - and they are not thinking about it at all. That is the whole idea. The best clean-energy system is the one nobody notices, working away in the rock, sending the bill down instead of the carbon up.