geoscience
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Carl Hoiland
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.
Kurt House
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
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.