HOUSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar 16, 2026--
GA Drilling, a technology company making deep geothermal drilling commercially viable has secured a $44.1 million investment to enter full-scale commercial deployment of its NexTitan downhole anchoring and drive system.
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The funding consists of $24.7 million in fresh capital and $19.4 million converted from a SAFE investment raised last year. The round is led by TomEnterprise, the investment platform founded by Thomas von Koch, former CEO of EQT, with participation from Underground Ventures. In addition, one of the world's largest drilling contractors with a global rig fleet, participates as both investor and strategic industrial partner, providing immediate commercial reach across oil & gas operations worldwide.
At the Threshold of Commercial Deployment
In late February 2026, GA Drilling completed a successful field deployment of NexTitan at the NORCE Research facility in Norway, delivering a validated output of 32,000 lbf under real downhole conditions, confirming that NexTitan can drive a drill bit deeper and through formations that have historically made deep drilling uneconomical. This translates directly into wells that geothermal developers could not previously justify on cost, and meaningful reductions in non-productive time for oil and gas operators on complex wells. With that validation now behind them, GA Drilling is advancing on two fronts: active development work with a key deepwater offshore operator, and first commercial drilling engagements with prospective customers.
“This investment gives us the capital and momentum to accelerate commercial deployment at scale,” said Tony Branch, CEO of GA Drilling. “NexTitan is designed to significantly reduce drilling costs, and these funds allow us to prove that with real-world customer data across multiple geographies. Our priority is execution - demonstrating field performance is what earns trust in this industry, and that is exactly what 2026 is about.”
Energy Security in a Volatile World: Why Domestic Geothermal Cannot Wait
Recent escalation in the Middle East, including disruptions to tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, is once again exposing the fragility of global oil and gas supply chains. Geothermal energy is structurally immune to these dynamics, produced locally from heat beneath the earth’s surface, with no exposure to shipping lanes, export restrictions, or foreign policy risk.
The barrier to unlocking that capacity has been drilling cost. NexTitan directly addresses that constraint, making the wells that enable geothermal energy faster, cheaper, and safer to drill.
Key Deepwater Offshore Operator Partnership: First Commercial Engagement with a Global Operator
According to the IEA, more than three-quarters of the investment required for next-generation geothermal overlaps directly with oil and gas - the same equipment, the same engineering disciplines, the same supply chain. GA Drilling is built on that foundation. In 2024, the company established a formal development and validation partnership with a key deepwater offshore operator - one of the world’s largest and most technically demanding energy companies. This is an active collaboration to validate NexTitan in the most demanding operational environments in the industry - positioning GA Drilling as a credible supplier to Tier-1 global operators and confirming that the technology performs where it matters most.
A Rare Large-Scale Investment in European Industrial Hard-Tech
At $44.1 million, this round ranks among the largest European funding rounds of 2025 in hardware and industrial technology. This is an exceptional result in an environment where most large rounds have focused on software or AI. The IEA projects geothermal could supply up to 15% of global electricity demand by 2050, up from less than 1% today; NexTitan is purpose-built to remove the drilling cost barrier standing between that resource and the grid.
"Reaching this point required relentless testing, multiple pivots, and the conviction that deep geothermal would become a priority market before the world was ready for it," said Igor Kocis, Founder of GA Drilling. "This investment validates both the technology and the timing. The energy security conversation happening right now is exactly the context in which NexTitan becomes strategically essential."
2026: The Year of Field Performance
2026 is the year NexTitan moves from validated technology to operating asset. Drilling campaigns are already being planned with geothermal developers and oil & gas operators across key markets, and early movers will shape how this technology gets deployed at scale. NexTitan is platform-agnostic and designed to integrate with any developer’s rig and workflow. If you are looking to drill deeper, faster, and at lower cost, GA Drilling is open for business: www.gadrilling.com
About GA Drilling
GA Drilling is a global technology company making deep geothermal energy economically viable at scale through NexTitan, the world's first downhole anchoring and drive system designed for deep, ultra-deep, and ultra-long-reach drilling. With offices in the United States, United Kingdom, Brazil, and Slovakia, GA Drilling deploys proven oil & gas experience to unlock the next generation of clean, locally sourced energy.
NexTitan is GA Drilling’s modular downhole system designed to address the core mechanical limitations of hard-rock drilling. It stabilizes the drill string, applies weight directly at the bit, and operates with closed-loop autonomous control, adjusting thrust and torque based on real-time downhole conditions rather than surface estimates with delayed feedback. It can increase Rate of Penetration up to 3x, and BHA lifetime up to 2x.
NEW YORK (AP) — Teresa Younger's term leading the Ms. Foundation, the first national philanthropy run by women and for women, has spanned the #MeToo movement and the rollback of national abortion rights and is now ending during Donald Trump's second presidency.
“We are currently not in the best shape,” Younger said, of the pursuit for political equality for everyone, part of the Ms. Foundation's mission. But even as she prepares to step down from her role as CEO in June, Younger said she is not walking away from the fight.
“I believe feminism is still alive and well," Younger said in an interview with The Associated Press. "In fact, it has been the one thing that has been the preservation of democracy and our constitutional rights in some way over the past 12 years.”
As CEO, Younger took on domestic abuse by professional football players, expanded the foundation's investments in grassroots groups in the South and Midwest and raised more than $100 million for its endowment. In 2018, the foundation embraced a strategy to advocate for resources to go to girls and women of color. Younger said that change was a long time coming, but it resonated differently under her leadership as a Black and Indigenous woman.
“The institution was explicit in our strategic plan to say that we want to center women and girls of color as a point of inclusion, not exclusion," Younger said. "And now we are sitting in a spot where quote-unquote DEI is looked at as bad. And we refuse to accept that.”
As part of that strategic shift, the foundation produced a 2020 report called, “Pocket Change: How Women and Girls of Color Do More with Less,” which is a call to other philanthropic funders to change not just what they fund but how.
The research identified that charitable foundations granted about $356 million to women and girls of color in 2017, which represents less than 0.05% of funds granted out in 2018 by foundations.
But beyond highlighting this tiny investment in some of the country's most marginalized people, the report revealed major misalignments between funders and groups led by women of color. For example, many of these nonprofits use multiple strategies, providing child care and diapers alongside their advocacy for reproductive justice. Meanwhile, funders may separate grantmaking by population, strategy or issue, and may only want to fund part of their activities.
The report calls for foundations to provide flexible, long-term funding, to align their strategies with the groups they fund, to solicit feedback from grantees and to support intermediaries who are well connected with these groups.
This has long been the role that women's funds and Ms. Foundation have played within philanthropy. They both support grassroots groups that serve marginalized populations, and pioneer new ways of funding and working with those groups, which some other funders then adopt as best practices.
The earliest women's funds in the U.S. started in the 1970s, with Ms. Foundation being the first national funder to support women's groups and feminist movements. It was founded in 1973 by Gloria Steinem, Patricia Carbine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Marlo Thomas.
Sunny Fischer, one of the founders of the Chicago Foundation for Women, said the women who started it around 1983 wanted to serve women differently than how many large social service organizations were at the time.
Rather than telling women experiencing domestic violence to go back and save their marriages, she said, “There were new groups that were trying to help women where they were, to really understand what was going on in the home," and to give them safer choices about what they could do if they were in an abusive situation.
Lucia Woods Lindley, a photographer and an heir of a wealthy Nebraska family whose fortune came from telecommunications and coal, was another founder of CFW, who Fischer remembered as "a great planner."
In 2023, Ms. Foundation announced that Woods Lindley had left them $50 million in her estate, the largest gift it had ever received. It made up almost half the $106 million the foundation ultimately raised for its endowment.
In an interview at the time, Younger said Ms. Foundation had not expected the gift from Woods Lindley to be so large.
“She trusted and believed that Ms. (Foundation)’s role as the national public women’s foundation was critical to the thought leadership that needed to happen in philanthropy around feminism and around challenging the field and around growing and asking the right kinds of questions,” Younger said.
Overall, the amount of money controlled by women’s funds remains tiny compared to the assets of major foundations and the largest individual philanthropists. One exception is Melinda French Gates, who has committed billions to benefit women and girls.
The Women’s Philanthropy Institute at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy has tracked giving to women and girls and found that over 10 years, the proportion of overall philanthropic support they've received has risen from 1.59% in 2012 to 2.04% in 2023, with an increase to 2.18% in 2022.
“The vast majority of philanthropic dollars are going to the general population and based on need rather than identity,” said Jacqueline Ackerman, the institute's director, but she said they track giving to historically underfunded groups in order to reveal whether those trends are changing.
Ms. Foundation plans to announce Younger's replacement later this spring and Younger has not yet said what is next for her. Speaking with emotion, Younger said she has loved the work she's done with the foundation but is confident it will benefit from new leadership.
“I want to look back and see somebody who’s built on what I’ve been able to do and take it to the next level,” she said. “And I will sit back with pride in what they are able to accomplish.”
Associated Press coverage of philanthropy and nonprofits receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content. For all of AP’s philanthropy coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/philanthropy.
FILE - Ms. Foundation President and CEO Teresa Younger, right, and Gloria Steinem pose at the Ms. Foundation's Women of Vision Awards at the Ziegfeld Ballroom, May 16, 2023, in New York. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
