Zanskar’s ambitious plans to “spearhead one of the largest ever expansions of American geothermal power” are advancing.
Less than two years after its $30 million Series B, the AI-enabled geothermal company announced it has raised $115 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Spring Lane Capital, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Lowercarbon Capital, among others.
Zanskar will use the financing to expand its discovery platform, which leverages artificial intelligence to streamline the exploration and development process for geothermal. The company will also use the capital to develop its first greenfield power plants.
Diego D’Sola, Zanskar’s head of finance, told Latitude Media that the company has six power plants of 20 megawatts each in the pipeline, which are expected to reach commercial operations within the next three to four years.
“We’ve been 100% venture capital-backed since inception, and we are now entering this pivotal moment where we start raising non-dilutive sources of capital,” D’Sola said, in response to questions about how the projects will be financed. “In conjunction with this Series C, the expectation is that Zanskar will also be closing a development capital facility and project-level facilities this quarter.”
The news comes at the end of a momentous year for Zanskar. In May 2025, the company successfully tripled the production of the Lightning Dock geothermal power plant in New Mexico, a facility that had previously been put up for sale due to underperformance.
Throughout the rest of the year, Zanskar announced three new geothermal discoveries using its AI technology, including the discovery of “Big Blind” in Nevada, a 250-degree-Fahrenheit permeable reservoir found at a depth of roughly 2,700 feet. These are only a few of a “string of discoveries” that have Zanskar in full or partial control of sites with a geothermal potential of over 700 megawatts, according to D’Sola.
The ‘Wild West’ of speed to power
Zanskar’s successful Series C — which D’Sola noted was oversubscribed and capped at $115 million to avoid diluting current investors’ ownership — exemplifies the potential of AI to advance clean energy technologies. And the company’s rush to build is a testament to the market’s premium for speed; surging energy demand from data centers has hyperscalers willing to pay a high price for power, and especially clean power, as long as it’s coming fast.
Joel Edwards, who co-founded Zanskar with CEO Carl Hoiland back in 2019 and serves as its chief technology officer, told Latitude Media that speed to power is a big driver of Zanskar’s push towards building its first greenfield sites as soon as possible.
“It’s the Wild West,” Edwards said. “Everybody’s hunting for the same carbon-free firm megawatts, and it’s really who can build the fastest and at a reasonable cost that’s going to win this game.”
For more on how geothermal power plants get built, listen to Carl Hoiland’s interview on Catalyst with host Shayle Kann:
As a company whose innovation lies mostly in discovering geothermal sites, rather than in revolutionizing the technology itself, Edwards says Zanskar is in a good position to find financial backing.
“We’ve built all this tech around finding geothermal sites that unlock conventional ways of development that the market is comfortable with financing with a lower cost of capital,” he said. “We’re avoiding the first-of-a-kind risk label, so that we can access cheaper capital sooner.”
Like much of the new generation capacity, the real challenge lies further down the line: “Interconnection is our bottleneck,” Edwards said. That’s part of the reason why Zanskar is planning its power plants in 20 MW increments. This strategy allows the company to leverage the small generator interconnection agreement in the Western market, which significantly speeds up permitting and processing times for projects of that size.
‘The cool kids’
Zanskar’s journey towards infrastructure funding — “the hundreds of billions of dollars market that you need to tap into,” according to D’Sola — reflects the growing popularity that the geothermal sector has experienced over the past year. As a potential provider of clean, firm power and one of the Trump administration’s favorite energy sources, geothermal is having a breakout moment. And institutional investors are increasingly viewing it as a viable asset class.
Peers like Fervo Energy, which is pioneering enhanced geothermal systems, are also seeing momentum; the company closed an oversubscribed $462 million Series E round last month. This is a trend Zanskar, which will have enhanced geothermal potential at many of its sites, views as a contribution to the rise of the entire sector.
“This is a growing pie, and it’s a positive-sum game that we are playing,” D’Sola said. “We see ourselves benefiting from the successes of some of the other players… because geothermal has been so small as an industry historically.”
The shift in geothermal has experienced over the past few months, according to D’Sola, has been transformational. Institutional lenders and infrastructure capital have moved from sitting on the sidelines to “leaning in very strongly,” willing to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars.
“I’d say we went from being this niche, nerdy outfit that nobody really cared about, to [being] the cool kids now,” Edwards said.
