The ground under our feet has always been a massive energy vault, but the cost of unlocking it has kept geothermal stuck on the sidelines. Heating and cooling accounts for 35 percent of U.S. energy use, yet fossil fuels still dominate because drilling deep enough to make geothermal work has been brutally expensive. That’s the bottleneck Dig Energy decided to blow open. After five years in stealth, the Manchester, New Hampshire startup is stepping into the light with a compact waterjet drilling rig that slices through rock instead of grinding it. The math is simple but game-changing: up to an 80 percent reduction in drilling costs, making geothermal suddenly look like a true rival to gas and oil.
This play is led by co-founders Dulcie Madden and Thomas Lipoma, a pair with startup battle scars and technical chops. They spent nearly a decade building Rest Devices before turning their attention to the grid. Madden, armed with an MPH from Boston University and experience at Deshpande Foundation and The Engine, brings public health perspective and ecosystem savvy. Lipoma, an MIT mechanical engineer, lives deep in the mechanics of R&D and product design. Together they’ve validated their tech across every nasty material New England could throw at them, soil, clay, gravel, limestone, granite, even shale. The rigs didn’t just drill; they performed.
Investors didn’t need a hard sell. Azolla Ventures and Avila VC co-led Dig Energy’s $5 million seed round, joined by Baukunst, Conifer Infrastructure Partners, Koa Labs, Mercator Partners, Suffolk Technologies, and Drew Scott. Suffolk also tapped them into its BOOST accelerator, while the U.S. Department of Energy put real points on the board with a third-place finish in the EPIC Prize earlier this year. The funding is fuel for the shift from prototype to pilots, where rigs will land in the hands of drilling contractors. That go-to-market choice is as sharp as the tech itself, equip the players who already know the game instead of trying to reinvent the entire field.
Look wider, and the scale is jaw-dropping. Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimates the U.S. needs six million feet of geothermal boreholes drilled daily through 2050 to keep the grid stable. That’s not a market, that’s a mandate. Compact rigs designed for backyards and commercial lots, using water jets to carve straighter and denser boreholes, give Dig Energy a shot at shifting geothermal from niche to mainstream.
The takeaway? Real disruption often comes from the quiet grind before the spotlight. Madden and Lipoma didn’t just build cheaper equipment, they changed the math holding geothermal back. And if decarbonizing heating and cooling is going to happen at scale, the future may literally get dug by the rigs rolling out of New Hampshire.
