Why we invested in Bedrock Energy

The humble heat pump has become a fashionable conversation topic for climate founders and investors because of its potential to dramatically reduce C02 emissions. Due to its ability to heat and cool spaces cheaply, this appliance has become an essential step in most pathways to building electrification. In fact, residential heat pumps comprised 53% of heating system sales during 2022, outpacing gas furnaces for the first time. But their adoption has been slower in commercial buildings, where heat pumps serve just 11% of the US market.

It turns out that heat pumps paired with an underground loop to draw on the constant temperature of the earth have the highest efficiency of any heating and cooling solution for commercial buildings. However, these geothermal heat pumps (GHPs) have had limited deployment due to upfront cost and space requirements. The scale of conditioning commercial spaces requires very large fields of ground loop heat exchangers, which would mean a lot of boreholes using conventional drilling techniques. This also requires a large physical surface footprint plus a lot of time, capital and custom project work to deploy. This prohibitive upfront cost and complexity kills the economics of GHPs for most commercial buildings if they are even considered at all.

This untapped market opportunity is what drew us to Bedrock Energy and their approach to drilling very deep holes, very quickly and very accurately in a small physical footprint. What sold us was their extraordinary founding team that blends deep domain experience from the Oil & Gas sector with operational leadership from high-growth tech startups. The CTO, Silviu Livescu, is a prolific and renowned innovator who was previously Chief Scientist of pressure pumping at Baker Hughes. And the CEO, Joselyn Lai,  brings leadership experience from scaling startups. Together they paint a compelling vision for how to simplify and accelerate the deployment of ground-source heat-pumps in commercial real estate.

We met the team very early in their journey before they had built anything. So it’s been amazing to witness their pace of learning and execution. In a relatively short period of time, they’ve already delivered a full-stack solution including software for precise subsurface modeling and operational control paired with a novel drilling rig inspired by some of the highest performance systems from Oil & Gas.

Wireframe is thrilled to have led Bedrock’s $8.5 million seed round alongside a terrific group of co-investors. The company has recruited a tremendous early team and is actively hiring for their mission to decarbonize buildings everywhere with sustainable geothermal heating and cooling.