Betting on Heat
Jun 27, 2025
3 min read
Author
By Maxime Pasquier, Investor & Rasmus Holt @ Blackwood
Joachim “Joe” Ante, the softly spoken technologist behind Unity, the game engine that powered Pokémon Go and Among Us, is not, by nature, a bombastic figure. But after helping take Unity public in 2020, and joining the ranks of Europe’s lesser-known tech billionaires, Ante is now placing a strikingly different wager: geothermal energy.
Through a personal $40 million commitment, Ante is the sole LP behind Underground Ventures, a Copenhagen-based venture capital firm focused exclusively on geothermal innovation.
It’s a thematic bet, unfashionable by ‘b2b SaaS standards’, but potentially transformational if the physics and economics align.
The fund is helmed by Torsten Kolind, Ex-YouNoodle.
The thesis? Deep drilling automation, high-temperature tooling, and ultra-hardened robotics, we’re talking stuff like thermally stable PDC bits, diamond-impregnated bits, and advanced cooling techniques.
Only a handful of countries, El Salvador, Kenya, the Philippines, Iceland, New Zealand, and Costa Rica, generate more than 15% of their electricity from geothermal sources.
The untapped potential is vast. Yet it remains largely out of reach due to unviable costs with the current tech; a major part of it comes down to the mechanical and thermal fatigue of the drill bits.
Underground’s portfolio includes GA Drilling (Slovakia), Canopus Drilling (Netherlands), and Borobotics (Switzerland), each focused on driving down the cost curve of geothermal access.
And for once, the politics are aligned.
In the U.S., geothermal enjoys rare bipartisan favor. President Trump, somewhat surprisingly, has endorsed it, largely due to its compatibility with existing oil and gas infrastructure. Recent permitting reforms have bundled geothermal in with fossil fuels, allowing faster project approvals. The result is a rare alignment of political will, capital commitment, and technical momentum. Geothermal is indeed going to be big and beautiful, if they can crack it. It’s a refreshing thesis.
But as the world grapples with the hard constraints of the energy transition, Underground’s approach may prove to be smart. More funds will need to get comfortable operating in frontiers, where the challenge isn’t user acquisition, but thermodynamics. At the end of the day, most energy innovation is just finding fancier ways to boil water, and make steam for the turbines…
We think this kind of thematic concentration is becoming more relevant than ever. Focusing on what needs to be built, not just what’s easy to fund. (Although these larger infrastructure plays are easier than ever to fund with Tangible. See more at the bottom)
