Zanskar

Zanskar was founded in 2019 in Salt Lake City, Utah by Carl Hoiland (CEO) and Joel Edwards (CTO), both of whom have backgrounds in geology and geophysics. The founders met while working independently in the geothermal sector and recognized a shared conviction: conventional geothermal resources in the western United States were vastly larger than the industry believed, but the exploration tools available were far too slow, expensive, and imprecise to find them. The company's name is drawn from the Zanskar mountain range in the Himalayas — where expedition and geology converge — as a nod to the founders' spirit of exploration and scientific rigor. Note: while Zanskar's legal entity was established in 2019, public-facing operations began around 2021 when the company raised its first external funding.

Zanskar's published mission is to make geothermal power the most affordable form of widely-deployable, 24/7, carbon-free generation on the planet. The company was founded on the belief that most of America's conventional geothermal resources have been dramatically underestimated — not because they don't exist, but because the exploration tools available have been too crude to find them reliably. Zanskar has built proprietary AI models trained on vast libraries of geological, geophysical, satellite, and historical drilling data — including digitized analog records from explorers who surveyed the subsurface decades ago — to identify hidden geothermal systems with unprecedented precision. The result is a repeatable, data-driven discovery process that has allowed the company to identify more new geothermal resources in three years than the industry found in thirty.

Zanskar is an independent private company headquartered in Salt Lake City. In January 2026, it raised a $115 million Series C led by Spring Lane Capital, with participation from Obvious Ventures, Union Square Ventures, and Lowercarbon Capital, bringing total funding to over $157 million. The Series C will fund expansion of the company's gigawatt-scale project pipeline and support construction of multiple geothermal power plants across the western United States, targeting power delivery before 2030.

In late 2025, Zanskar announced what the industry recognized as the first confirmed discovery of a commercial-grade blind geothermal system — a resource with no surface signs whatsoever — at its "Big Blind" site in western Nevada, which it is now developing as a 20 MW power plant. Earlier in 2025, it acquired the underperforming Lightning Dock geothermal plant in New Mexico and used its AI platform to identify a previously unknown resource zone, drilling what became the most productive pumped geothermal well in the United States. Zanskar holds the industry's largest portfolio of conventional geothermal development projects in the western US and has described a terawatt-scale opportunity that AI-enabled exploration is only beginning to unlock.