Telura comes out of stealth with 4 million euros

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

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

The problem has always been drilling. The deeper you go, the harder and hotter the rock, and the faster conventional drill bits wear out. The economy becomes unfavorable long before temperatures are reached that would make a project worthwhile.

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

The physics, as the company points out, is well understood. Success is less certain, depending on how the technology performs in real deep subsurface conditions.

how it works

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

In hard granites, several kilometers underground, are found exactly the formations that contain the most valuable superhot rock for geothermal energy, but weathering can make projects economically unviable before reaching sufficient depth.

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

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

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

What Telura maintains 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 aims to reduce implementation 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 remains contained within the loop, the system reduces environmental risk, simplifies permitting, and makes geothermal viable in geologic environments where traditional or open-loop hydrothermal systems would not be able to operate.

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

Welling brings hardware experience with engineering credentials to two of the most demanding development programs in Europe. He spent most of his career at Rolls-Royce before moving to electric aircraft startup Lilium, where he led the engineering team that put the company’s first airplane prototype into flight.

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

Support 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, founder of McMakler and Home24, and a well-known figure in the German startup ecosystem.

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

The SPRIND deal, announced in December 2025, is distinct from the pre-seed equity round; A recent First Momentum job posting describes Telura as having raised approximately $5 million to date, suggesting the two are combining.

Martin Chaumet, innovation manager at SPRIND, said of the collaboration: Telura’s electropulsing approach has the potential to become a key enabling technology for the entire industry, and SPRIND supports Telura in validating this advancement beyond research into 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’s starting to change. The growing demand for clean 24/7 baseload power from AI data centers has focused attention on the sector in a way that intermittent renewable energy cannot meet.

Google-backed California-based enhanced geothermal startup Fervo Energy has raised $462 million by the end of 2025. In Europe, a clutch of deep-tech drilling companies have emerged seeking to tap 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 an additional seed round. of 15 million euros.

Germany also recently passed the Geothermal Energy Acceleration Act, legislation that simplifies permitting procedures for geothermal projects and is seen by the industry as significantly reducing regulatory friction.

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

The company cites research suggesting that harnessing just 1% of the superhot rock resource could generate eight times the current global demand for electricity. The SPRIND validation program is designed to answer whether electropulse drilling is the technology that unlocks it and whether Telura’s team can make it work outside of a lab.