The Closest I’ve Ever Been to Changing the World (9) — How Deep Is Your Moat?

Continuing from the last post, I asked, “So are you really the only company in the world that can do this?”

He said, “Actually, there used to be two companies in the world that could. One is in Slovakia, mainly doing underground vertical drilling, and I’ve known their founder for years — we often share information and might even acquire them one day, they’re an ideal target. The other one was founded by someone who stole our trade secrets and tried to copy us — that was the first time I sued someone. We won, of course. They went bankrupt, and we ended up buying their patents, assets, and hired some of their people. So now, only the Slovakian company is still doing deep underground drilling — but they can only do vertical geothermal drilling, while we do horizontal and diagonal tunneling.

Basically, any company that tries to dig underground horizontally or diagonally using plasma would be infringing on our IP. And if we dig vertically, we don’t infringe on theirs. That’s how deep our moat is.”

I said, “What about Elon Musk’s Boring Company? Isn’t that literally a ‘tunneling company’ already?”

He laughed and said, “Good question — but they’re mainly system integrators, and what they dig through is soil, not rock 😂. In fact, they’ve reached out to us before and invited us to propose a solution, because they couldn’t handle hard rock very well, and rocks are our specialty. It’s very likely they’ll need our technology.

Their main bottleneck depends on how many projects they can win — they’ve bid on 30–40 projects but have only built one in Las Vegas so far. And they’ve been fined over $500,000 across hundreds of safety and environmental violations. That’s because they are required to use toxic chemicals in their process, like all other rotary and mechanical tunneling and drilling technologies. We don’t need any of those things, so our process is environmentally benign. In fact, our first project was approved by the state of California, a very difficult state to get environmental reviews approved. If we can get our tech approved in California, we can get it approved anywhere else. So they’re still far from the scale where they’d need us to mass-dig tunnels for them. Their strength is digging through dirt; once they hit rock, they’re stuck. But globally, about 60% of underground tunneling involves hard rock — and that’s exactly what we’re best at. So yes, our moat is very deep — we’re truly the only one.”

I asked, “So does that mean the Boring Company could actually become your client? What kind of clients do you usually work with?”

He said, “Yes, The Boring Company could be a great customer of ours if they’re able to win any more projects after all the trouble they’re getting into in Las Vegas. We’re not an AI company, but we’re AI-adjacent, because we’re solving the biggest bottleneck AI is currently facing — power. Our main clients are large data center developers and AI hyperscalers, since their demand for electricity is exploding. After them come the large power utilities, construction firms, and mining companies.”

I asked, “Any feedback from current clients so far?”

To be continued next time!