After you’ve worked on rockets that find their way to outer space, it can be hard to come up with a second act. For SpaceX alumni Andrew Redd, it meant looking deep in the ocean.
Redd, who grew up in the Pacific Northwest, a region affected by uncharacteristic heat waves and catastrophic fires in recent years, knew he wanted to tackle something in renewable energy.
“But the experience at a very hardcore company like SpaceX made me realize that I can’t just come up with an incremental solution. It actually has to be brand new and it has to be approached from first principles,” according to Redd, who was an engineer on Dragon and Starship at SpaceX.
Redd left SpaceX and founded Endurance Energy, a startup that has raised a $54 million Series A to eventually harness terawatts of geothermal energy deep in the ocean, TechCrunch has learned. Founders Fund led the round with participation from 72 Ventures, Construct Captial, Felisis Ventures, First Round Capital, Riot Ventures, and Voyager Ventures. The new funding will allow the company to develop its plans for power plants at a time of surging energy demand from AI data centers, electric vehicles, and heavy industry.
Since founding the company last year, Redd has grown the team to 21 employees, 11 of whom used to work at SpaceX. The company’s vice president of engineering previously worked at Helion Energy, the fusion startup.
Geothermal energy isn’t a new idea — humans have been using the Earth’s heat for millennia, whether it be from spa-like hot springs or geothermal power plants. But Redd, drawing on his experience at SpaceX, figured there was another opportunity people were overlooking.
Here’s how he distilled the problem: Any future energy source should be renewable, or at least …