He Built the Zillow for Land - Then Wood Mackenzie Bought the Whole Map

Every acre of the United States is worth something. The trouble is that nobody could tell you what - not in one place, not in one number. Is the dirt better for a solar farm or a corn crop? Is there gas underneath, or a transmission line close enough to matter? For most of American history the answer lived in a filing cabinet, a county courthouse, or the head of a broker who wanted a commission before sharing it. LandGate spent a decade turning that answer into a search box.

Founded in Denver in 2016, LandGate scored the energy and resource value of roughly 150 million U.S. parcels and made a marketplace out of it. Landowners could look up what their property might earn from solar, wind, carbon, minerals, water, or oil and gas. Brokers could research listings. Developers could screen sites. The company got called "the Zillow for land resources" so often that its own founder started using the line first.

In June 2026, that decade of data-cleaning ended with an acquisition. Wood Mackenzie, the energy-and-resource analytics firm, bought LandGate to fold its parcel-and-grid intelligence into Wood Mac's power-market forecasts. The timing was not an accident. The thing everyone in energy suddenly needed to know - where can a new data center actually plug into the grid? - was exactly the thing LandGate had been mapping for years.

01 / The IdeaPut a price on the ground

Yoann Hispa spent seventeen years in energy and carbon investing before he started LandGate with co-founder Craig Kaiser. He came at the problem like an investor: land is an asset, assets have cash flows, and cash flows can be modeled. The catch was that the inputs - geology, solar irradiance, wind speed, mineral records, transmission maps - were scattered across hundreds of public databases that never spoke to each other.

So LandGate did the unglamorous work. It pulled from more than 200 public data sources and stitched them into parcel-level scores: a Mineral Value Index, a Carbon Value Index, a Property Value Index, and dollar estimates for solar and wind lease income. The company ran each parcel the way an operator would - automatically, at national scale.

"We have over 200 sources of data, all of them public. We've completely digitized that for 172 million parcels in the U.S."

Yoann Hispa, Co-Founder & CEO

02 / The ModelFree for the owner, paid for the pro

Here is the part worth copying. LandGate never charged the landowner. The person who owns the asset gets the data on their own property for nothing - the value estimate, the resource maps, the listing tools. That generosity is the flywheel: free access pulls in supply (parcels, listings, owners), and supply is what makes the platform worth paying for on the other side.

The money came from the professionals. Real estate agents and land brokers subscribe to LandApp to research parcels and print unlimited custom property reports. Energy developers use the PowerTools suite and PowerCRM to source and track developable land. Lenders, insurers, and asset managers use PowerCapital to underwrite projects. Enterprises license the raw data feeds. Landowners are the audience; the industry is the customer.

"Everything they get from us is free. The landowners need to access the data - we're not making money off landowners."

Yoann Hispa

03 / The Pivot That Wasn'tFrom 95% oil to 95% renewables

LandGate started life valuing oil and gas. Within a few years, its revenue mix had turned inside out. The remarkable thing is that the product barely changed - the company kept scoring land, and simply let the market decide which resource mattered. When capital rushed from fossil fuels to solar and wind, LandGate's business followed automatically, because it had never bet on a single commodity.

That neutrality is the strategic point. LandGate did not sell opinions about energy's future; it sold the data layer everyone needs before forming an opinion. When you are the map, you win regardless of which road the traffic takes.

04 / Why NowThe data-center land rush

For most of the last century, the U.S. power system was planned around supply - where to build the plant. The AI and cloud build-out inverted that. Now the hard question is demand: where does a gigawatt-hungry data center go, and can the grid there actually feed it? Answering that means overlaying land availability, land cost, and transmission capacity - the nearest line, who owns it, how far it is, and how much it can carry.

That overlay is precisely what LandGate had built. Its property reports flag the nearest transmission line, its owner, its distance, its rated capacity, and even queued projects at the substation level. As electricity demand climbed, a niche land-data tool quietly became infrastructure for the biggest siting decisions in energy.

05 / The ExitWood Mackenzie buys the map

On June 24, 2026, Wood Mackenzie announced it had acquired LandGate. The logic is a clean fit: Wood Mac forecasts power markets and supply chains; LandGate had the parcel-level land and grid data those forecasts sit on top of. Together they promise a single framework connecting demand, supply, networks, and the ground itself.

"By combining our proprietary data and insights with Wood Mackenzie, we are creating a unified ecosystem."

Yoann Hispa, on the acquisition

06 / Under The HoodWhat you can actually do with it

Strip away the strategy and LandGate is a set of practical tools. A rancher checks whether a solar developer might lease the back forty. A land broker prints a report that shows a buyer the mineral, wind, and carbon upside in one page. A storage developer screens a hundred sites for interconnection before spending a dollar on feasibility. The data layers behind those tasks read like an atlas of what land can be:

"I compare LandGate to Zillow for land resources."

Yoann Hispa

07 / The FounderFour years without a paycheck

Hispa holds multiple science and math degrees, speaks four languages, and has worked in nine countries. By his own telling, he did not pay himself for the first four years of LandGate - the time it took to turn hundreds of messy public datasets into something a landowner could read in a minute. It is a reminder that the moat here was not a clever algorithm. It was patience with boring data that nobody else wanted to clean.

The 2022 Series B - $10 million led by NextEra Energy Resources, the world's largest generator of wind and solar power, with private-equity firm Kimmeridge participating - was a vote of confidence from the industry LandGate served. By the time of the acquisition, the company ran with roughly 55 people and about $2.5 million in annual revenue: small, focused, and sitting on a dataset far larger than its headcount suggested.

08 / The Fine PrintWhere the model strains

Scoring 150 million parcels from public data is a bet on the data being right. Valuations are estimates, not appraisals; geology, permitting, and local politics can override any index. The free-for-owners model leans on a paying professional class staying subscribed, and much of the source data is public - which means the moat is the cleanup and the coverage, not exclusivity. LandGate's answer to all of it was the same one it started with: keep widening the map until being anywhere else stops making sense. Wood Mackenzie evidently agreed.