Quaise Energy

Geothermal Energy · Clean Energy Technology

Funding

Quaise Energy raises $180M to build world's first superhot geothermal plant

An oil-field drilling giant took equity in the project it will also help build, blurring the line between fossil-fuel services and clean power.

• Quaise Energy closed its $180M Series B, led by Prelude Ventures, with Nabors Industries adding $35M in the final tranche, taking total funding to $280M since inception.
• Quaise, a Houston-based startup built on MIT research, uses gyrotron millimeter-wave beams to vaporize rock and drill wells over 5km deep without a mechanical bit.
• The round closed in two tranches: a $134M first close in July led by Prelude Ventures with Japan's JERA and Idemitsu Kosan, then a $46M final close in August anchored by Nabors; no valuation was disclosed.
• Nabors, a major land-drilling contractor, now holds roughly 14% of Quaise on a fully diluted basis and gains a strategic framework granting it a dedicated rig and access to Quaise's reservoir-modeling and well-design platform.
• Project Obsidian in Oregon's Deschutes National Forest is planned in three phases: 50MW first, then 250MW, then over 1GW, targeting rock as hot as 500°C.
• The drilling technology adapts a gyrotron, a beam source originally built to heat plasma in fusion reactors, a concept MIT engineer Paul Woskov spent 14 years developing for underground use.
• The deal signals that oil-field drilling expertise and equipment, long tied to fossil fuels, are being redirected toward proving out superhot geothermal as a scalable, location-independent clean baseload power source.