He spent ten years inside a utility before he ever pitched a VC. Now he is selling the map he wished he'd had.
At nine, Josh Mackanic typed his first QBasic program into MS-DOS. By twenty-three he was permitting some of the largest utility-owned solar farms in the country. By thirty-four he was watching engineers redesign a city block because nobody knew a gas main ran where the surveyors said dirt was.
CivilGrid is the answer he built. It is a construction intelligence platform that stitches together utility, environmental, and geotechnical site data into one searchable layer cake. Engineers click. The unknown becomes the known. Backhoes stop discovering surprises the hard way.
The pitch is unromantic and the market is enormous. Every road repair, every new tower, every fiber pull, every solar interconnection begins with the same question: what is down there? For decades, the answer involved PDFs from a dozen agencies, paper drawings in filing cabinets, and a phone tree of utility liaisons. Mackanic's bet is that a single interface, fed by curated public and private datasets, is worth real money to anyone who has ever filed a permit.
He is not guessing. He spent a decade inside Pacific Gas and Electric watching the workflow he is now replacing. He has the war stories and the PE license to prove it.
Making the unseen seen.- The working creed of CivilGrid
Mackanic grew up, by his own account, knee-deep in Legos and computer parts. He studied physics and math at Georgia Tech, then switched to mechanical engineering when the equations started to feel detached from the world they described. He wanted to touch what he calculated.
UC Berkeley came next. He enrolled in a PhD program focused on autonomous vehicle perception - teaching cars to interpret their surroundings before that phrase had a Wikipedia page. He lasted a year. The energy sector was hiring engineers willing to get muddy, and he wanted to build things that would still be in the ground in fifty years.
So he joined PG&E. The year was 2008. The job was solar developer.
His first portfolio at PG&E was prospective solar sites across California. Three of them became 20-megawatt facilities, among the largest utility-owned solar plants in the country at that moment. The math he had wanted to leave behind at Georgia Tech reappeared as land leases, interconnection studies, and capacity factors.
Then San Bruno happened. On September 9, 2010, a 30-inch natural gas transmission pipeline ruptured under a residential neighborhood near San Francisco airport. Eight people died. A neighborhood burned. PG&E's gas business was rewired overnight, and Mackanic was rewired with it. He transferred into gas transmission. He spent three years walking pipeline rights-of-way in the Bay Area, learning what a community looks like from underneath.
Later came a $150 million-plus valve automation and replacement program, the kind of capital project where a missing as-built drawing can cost a quarter and a quarter again. He earned his Professional Engineer license in 2011. He became, depending on the org chart, a chief of staff, a mapping leader, a lean implementation manager. Different titles, same complaint: the data was scattered and the consequences were not.
"Every project I touched started the same way. Pull the file. Hope the file matches the ground. Find out, often expensively, that it doesn't. The map was never the territory. Somebody had to make it closer."
In 2016 he started an MBA at Wharton, which is a strange thing for a licensed PE to do unless you intend to do something with it. He used the consulting practicum to design an APAC go-to-market for a US network security company. He graduated in 2018 and worked briefly with Allele Advisors. The window he was actually looking through was the one he had been staring at for ten years.
CivilGrid incorporated in January 2020. The seed round, $2.2 million, closed in April 2021. The team is now sixty-two people. The product is the unglamorous, indispensable kind: a map of the buried world.
Two macro tides are lifting the work. The Inflation Reduction Act funneled an enormous wave of capital into American infrastructure - transmission lines, EV charging, solar interconnection, port electrification. Every dollar of that capital has to find its way through a permitting and design process that still runs on PDFs. At the same time, climate adaptation is making site conditions less predictable. Floodplains shift. Soils saturate. Old assumptions stop holding.
If you are an engineer designing a fiber pull in Dallas or a substation in Sacramento, the question Mackanic is answering - what is down there, and what is around it - has gone from annoying to existential. Site intelligence is the new permit.
A decade inside PG&E is not a resume bullet, it is a moat. He has filed the permits, walked the rights-of-way, and lost weeks to missing as-builts. The product is built from grievance.
A licensed engineer who can also build a pitch deck. He can talk soil reports with a geotechnical engineer in the morning and term sheets with a Sand Hill partner in the afternoon.
IRA money, climate adaptation, and aging utility networks have made site intelligence non-optional. He built the picks-and-shovels company at the front of an infrastructure decade.
Build more for less.- His standing operating order