Telura has come out of stealth with €4 million and a bold claim: it can make deep geothermal economically viable almost anywhere on Earth.

The problem with geothermal energy has never been the heat. The Earth’s core sits at roughly 5,000 degrees Celsius, and the thermal gradient beneath the surface is consistent enough that, in principle, clean baseload power is available almost everywhere on the planet.

The problem has always been the drilling. The deeper you go, the harder and hotter the rock, and the faster conventional drill bits wear out. Economics turn unfavourable long before you reach the temperatures that would make a project worthwhile.

Telura, a Munich-based deep-tech startup founded in 2025, is betting it has a way around that constraint. The company has emerged from stealth with a €4 million pre-seed round and a technology it calls electro-impulse drilling: instead of grinding through rock with rotating mechanical bits, the system fires high-voltage electrical pulses directly into the rock, fracturing it from within.

The physics, as the company notes, is well understood. Success is less certain, depending on how the technology performs in real subsurface conditions at depth.

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How it works

Conventional rotary drilling becomes exponentially slower and more expensive as depth increases, because the heat and pressure degrade both the drill bit and the equipment around it.

In hard granites several kilometres underground, exactly the formations that contain the superhot rock most valuable for geothermal energy, but wear can render projects economically unviable before sufficient depth is reached.

Telura’s electro-impulse approach avoids mechanical contact with the rock altogether. Ultra-high-voltage pulses create a plasma channel through the material, causing electrical breakdown and fracturing the rock from the inside out.

Because no rotating bit is grinding against the formation, there is theoretically no wear on the cutting mechanism, and the system’s performance should not degrade with depth in the same way.

The approach is not new as a concept: academic research into electric impulse drilling has been ongoing for more than two decades, with institutions including TU Dresden and ETH Zurich among those working on it.

What Telura argues is that the time has come to translate that research into deployable hardware. The company says its system is designed to integrate with conventional drilling infrastructure — rather than requiring an entirely new supply chain, which is intended to reduce deployment risk and shorten the path to commercial operation.

The target application is closed-loop geothermal systems (CLGS), in which a sealed network of pipes circulates a working fluid through deep hot rock without requiring a natural hydrothermal reservoir.

Because the fluid stays contained within the loop, the system reduces environmental risk, simplifies permitting, and makes geothermal viable in geological settings where open-loop or traditional hydrothermal systems could not work.

Telura was co-founded by Philipp Engelkamp, who serves as CEO, and Andrew Welling, CTO. Engelkamp’s previous company, INERATEC, was a spin-out of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology that became one of Europe’s better-known sustainable e-fuels businesses, raising over $129 million in Series B funding and earning recognition from the World Economic Forum and the Deutscher Gründerpreis. He has spent more than a decade scaling deep-tech companies in the energy transition space.

Welling brings a hardware background with engineering credentials across two of Europe’s most demanding development programmes. He spent the majority of his career at Rolls-Royce before moving to Lilium, the electric aircraft startup, where he led the engineering team that brought the company’s first aircraft prototype to flight.

The combination of e-fuels commercialisation and extreme hardware development is an unusual pairing for an early-stage geothermal company, and both investors and SPRIND, Germany’s federal agency for breakthrough innovations, have cited it as central to their confidence in the project.

Backing and validation

The €4 million pre-seed round was raised in Autumn 2025 and brings together a group of European deep-tech investors. Nucleus Capital, First Momentum Ventures, and Possible Ventures participated alongside angel investors Better Angle and Felix Jahn, the founder of McMakler and Home24, and a well-known figure in the German startup ecosystem.

Separately, Telura has agreed with SPRIND to validate the electro-impulse drilling technology under conditions designed to resemble real-world deployment. SPRIND, whose full title is Bundesagentur für Sprunginnovationen, is Germany’s federal agency for breakthrough innovation and has a mandate to support technologies that are too early-stage or too speculative for conventional funding mechanisms.

The SPRIND agreement, announced in December 2025, is distinct from the equity pre-seed round; a recent job posting from First Momentum describes Telura as having raised approximately $5 million to date, which suggests the two combined.

Martin Chaumet, Innovation Manager at SPRIND, said of the collaboration: Telura’s electro-impulse approach has the potential to become a cross-industry key enabling technology, and SPRIND supports Telura in validating this breakthrough beyond research toward real-world application.

The market context

Geothermal has rarely attracted the investment frenzy that has surrounded solar, wind, and batteries over the past decade. That is beginning to change. Rising demand for 24/7 clean baseload power from AI data centres has focused attention on the sector in a way that intermittent renewable energy cannot satisfy.

Fervo Energy, the California-based enhanced geothermal startup backed by Google, raised $462 million at the end of 2025. In Europe, a clutch of deep-tech drilling companies has emerged seeking to crack open the continent’s geothermal potential, including Munich-based Hades Mining, which raised €5.5 million in pre-seed funding in mid-2025 using a laser-based approach and has since closed a further €15 million seed round.

Germany has also recently passed the Geothermal Energy Acceleration Act, legislation that simplifies permitting procedures for geothermal projects and is seen by the industry as a meaningful reduction in regulatory friction.

Telura’s thesis is that the deepest and hottest rock, superhot rock geothermal, typically defined as resources at depths where temperatures exceed 374°C, remains almost entirely untapped precisely because no drilling technology can reach it economically.

The company cites research suggesting that tapping just 1% of the superhot rock resource could generate eight times the current worldwide electricity demand. Whether electro-impulse drilling is the technology that unlocks it, and whether Telura’s team can make it work outside a laboratory, is what the SPRIND validation programme is designed to answer.