Quaise

Quaise Energy was founded in 2018 in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a spinout from MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. The company was co-founded by Carlos Araque, who serves as CEO, and Matt Houde, who serves as Chief of Staff. Araque, a former Schlumberger drilling engineer and MIT alumnus, and Houde, who had worked at AltaRock Energy, met through The Engine — MIT's hard-tech venture incubator — where Araque was Technical Director. The scientific foundation was built on a decade of research by MIT research engineer Paul Woskov, who pioneered the use of millimeter-wave electromagnetic energy to vaporize rock. Quaise operates from Houston and Cambridge, combining oil and gas drilling expertise with plasma physics and geothermal resource development.

Quaise's published mission is to make superhot geothermal a backbone of the modern energy system, offering affordable, zero-carbon power and true energy independence for communities and nations everywhere. The company was founded on the insight that the most transformative geothermal resources — superhot rock at 10 to 20 kilometers depth — are inaccessible with conventional drill bits, which cannot withstand those extreme temperatures and pressures without exponentially increasing cost and failure rates. By replacing mechanical drilling with millimeter-wave energy generated by a gyrotron, Quaise aims to access geothermal resources that are effectively limitless and globally distributed, with CEO Araque describing the ultimate goal as replacing every oil and gas well with a supercritical geothermal equivalent.

Quaise is an independent private company that has raised over $75 million from investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures, Vinod Khosla, and the Collaborative Fund. The company received early non-dilutive support from the DOE, NSF, and ARPA-E, as well as seed funding from The Engine at MIT. Development has proceeded through rigorous staged milestones: from laboratory demonstrations to a record 118-meter millimeter-wave drilled hole in granite at Marble Falls, Texas in 2025 — the deepest field demonstration of millimeter-wave drilling in history.

Quaise's September 2025 Marble Falls public demonstration was a landmark event: the first time millimeter-wave drilling had been validated at meaningful scale in the field, with granite drilled at speeds ten times faster than prior demonstrations and results matching engineering predictions closely. The company is now advancing plans for its first superhot geothermal power plant in the western United States and signed agreements with an unnamed major tech company and a utility as early customers. Quaise is both a technology developer and a project developer — its product is not a drill bit, but clean, firm geothermal power.