The Story of Bedrock: Building the Future of Distributed Geothermal Energy

Sometimes the most promising innovations come from reimagining existing technologies rather than inventing entirely new ones. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Joselyn Lai, CEO and co-founder of Bedrock, shared how her lifelong passion for sustainability led to transforming geothermal energy from a niche solution into a scalable clean energy category.

From Sustainability Advocate to Energy Innovator

“Since I was a teenager have loved recycling and sustainability and all things environmental,” Joselyn shares. This passion drove her decade-long journey through various sustainability ventures, from sustainable agriculture to transportation, before finding her way to building heating and cooling solutions.

The genesis of Bedrock came when Joselyn met her co-founder Silvia Levescu, a former oil and gas executive. Their partnership would prove transformative, as they realized that oil and gas extraction technology could be repurposed for a more sustainable future. “He had this idea that a lot of the technology that he had developed for oil and gas extraction could be reengineered and repurposed for specifically the use case of low temperature, direct use distributed geothermal,” Joselyn explains.

The Market Opportunity

What caught Joselyn’s attention wasn’t just the technology, but its market potential. “The category of geothermal heating and cooling is really small. It’s really nascent, but it’s actually very long established, we know it works, it’s feasible,” she notes. This combination of proven technology and untapped market potential presented a unique opportunity.

More importantly, they identified a crucial advantage: the ability to align environmental benefits with financial incentives. As Joselyn explains, “This is a form of decarbonization, where we can actually put money into the pockets of real estate decision makers… Nothing good or positive for society can scale unless it also has a financial value proposition. And geothermal delivers that.”

Breaking Down Barriers

The main challenge wasn’t proving that geothermal works – it was making it financially viable. “Drilling today is pretty expensive,” Joselyn notes. “Drilling is a very solved problem if you’re doing really large, centralized drilling projects for oil and gas. But if you’re talking about drilling in urban areas, if you’re talking about drilling hundreds and hundreds or maybe even thousands of feet for a property in the real estate sector, it’s just not financially viable for the vast majority of properties.”

Bedrock’s innovation focuses on making geothermal more cost-effective and accessible. They’re working to reduce costs to “under five times the cost of what it would be today in some of these, like, urban drilling projects.” This involves not just technological innovation, but also making the solution more bankable and reducing risk for property owners.

First Steps to Market

The company recently achieved a significant milestone with their first installation in Austin, Texas, partnering with CIM Group, a major real estate firm. This project demonstrated their ability to “shrink the footprint of the geothermal system” to fit urban properties while proving they could “drill faster” and “drill more quietly” – crucial considerations for urban installations.

The Vision for the Future

Looking ahead, Bedrock’s ambitions extend far beyond individual installations. Joselyn envisions a future where “we actually just like get free thermal energy from the ground under our buildings pretty much in every city in the world.” This isn’t just about energy – it’s about transforming how buildings operate and how cities manage their energy needs.

The end goal is to see “many tens of thousands of rigs operating around the world that we’re licensing our hardware and our software to other construction players to go do geothermal as kind of the obvious default solution for buildings because every building should be super energy efficient and every building should be carbon free.”

This vision represents more than just business growth – it’s about creating a new category in the energy sector that can help address climate change while delivering real economic benefits to property owners. By making geothermal energy more accessible and cost-effective, Bedrock is working to transform an established technology into a mainstream solution for sustainable building infrastructure.