Carl Hoiland is the co-founder and CEO of Zanskar, the Salt Lake City company using AI foundation models to find hidden geothermal reservoirs across the American West. A Stanford-trained exploration geologist whose grandfather prospected for uranium and gold, Hoiland built Zanskar on a contrarian bet: that the United States has overlooked geothermal potential by an order of magnitude, possibly a full terawatt of clean baseload power waiting underground with no hot springs or geysers to mark it. In 2025 his team confirmed 'Big Blind,' the first commercially viable blind geothermal system discovered by industry in over 30 years, and in January 2026 Zanskar raised a $115 million Series C to start building power plants.
Zanskar is a Salt Lake City geothermal company that uses artificial intelligence and computational geoscience to find, de-risk, and develop naturally occurring geothermal energy. By applying machine learning to vast troves of geological data, Zanskar pinpoints 'blind' hydrothermal reservoirs that leave no clue at the surface, cutting the exploration risk that has long kept geothermal expensive. The company is now moving from discovery to building its own power plants, with a multi-gigawatt pipeline aimed at making 24/7 carbon-free power cost-competitive.
Terra AI is a Palo Alto geoscience company building generative AI that turns the messy, expensive guesswork of subsurface exploration into fast, probabilistic 3D models of what lies underground. By fusing geophysics, geochemistry, and drilling data, its platform generates millions of geological scenarios in minutes, helping mining and energy teams decide where to drill, how many wells they need, and whether a project is worth the capital - shrinking exploration timelines and pointing capital at the critical minerals the clean-energy transition depends on.
KoBold Metals is a Berkeley-based mineral exploration company that uses artificial intelligence, data science, and geophysics to find the copper, lithium, cobalt, and nickel deposits the energy transition will require. Founded in 2018, it has raised roughly $1 billion from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, T. Rowe Price, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, and is developing the Mingomba copper project in Zambia, called the country's largest copper discovery in a century.
Kurt Zenz House is the Co-Founder and CEO of KoBold Metals, an AI-driven mineral exploration company backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Andreessen Horowitz. A Harvard-trained earth scientist and serial energy entrepreneur, he built KoBold from the ground up to solve one of the most consequential problems of the energy transition: finding enough copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel to power a decarbonized world. Under his leadership, the company discovered the Mingomba deposit in Zambia - potentially the most significant copper find in a century - and raised over $1 billion to develop it. Before KoBold, he founded C12 Energy (CO2-based enhanced oil recovery) and Phase Change Resources (natural gas asset acquisition), and held research and teaching roles at MIT and Stanford.
John Mern is the Co-Founder and CEO of Terra AI, a Khosla Ventures-backed startup using generative AI and probabilistic modeling to transform how humans find and develop critical minerals and energy resources underground. A Stanford PhD in aerospace engineering and alumnus of Boeing Phantom Works and KoBold Metals, Mern built Terra AI's platform to cut mine development timelines in half - running geophysical simulations 125,000x faster than traditional methods, achieving 40% reductions in drilling costs, and helping partners unlock over $100 million in investments. His work sits at the intersection of deep reinforcement learning, geoscience, and the urgent global race to secure the copper, lithium, and cobalt the energy transition demands.