Zanskar is a Salt Lake City geothermal company using artificial intelligence to crack one of clean energy's oldest bottlenecks: finding the heat. Launched in 2021 by CEO Carl Hoiland and CTO Joel Edwards, both of whom had experienced the limitations of traditional geothermal exploration firsthand, Zanskar set out to apply modern machine learning and data science to a discipline that has historically relied on slow, expensive, and often unsuccessful drilling. The company is named after the Zanskar range in the Himalayas.
Geothermal power is clean, firm, and available around the clock, making it an ideal complement to intermittent solar and wind, but its growth has been throttled by exploration risk. Locating a viable reservoir conventionally means relying on surface clues like hot springs and geysers, and then drilling costly exploratory wells with high failure rates. Zanskar inverts this with custom AI tools and geoscience models that ingest enormous volumes of geological, geophysical, and historical drilling data to predict where subsurface heat resources lie, including reservoirs with no surface expression at all.
This 'blind' discovery capability is Zanskar's signature achievement. The company announced it had used AI to locate a 250-degree-Fahrenheit reservoir, dubbed 'Big Blind,' with no hot springs, geysers, or prior exploration history, reportedly the first industry-discovered blind geothermal site in more than three decades. By reducing exploration risk and raising drilling success rates, Zanskar aims to make conventional geothermal economically viable across far more of the country than previously thought possible, including the western United States.
Zanskar raised a $115 million Series C led by Spring Lane Capital, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Lowercarbon Capital, bringing its total funding to roughly $180 million. The capital moves the company beyond pure discovery into building and operating geothermal power plants on the resources it finds. As surging electricity demand from AI data centers intensifies the hunt for clean, firm power, Zanskar is positioned as the AI-driven exploration engine that could unlock geothermal at far greater scale.