Advanced Spade Company's Daniel Kimminau on burying power lines with tech from SpaceX, Boring Co., and Anduril

Advanced Spade Company

Daniel Kimminau spent years watching two realities exist side by side: SpaceX tracking satellites to millimeter precision, and underground construction teams repeatedly hitting pipes they didn't know were there. Advanced Spade Company is his attempt to close that gap.

Kimminau's path to founding the company runs through SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Anduril. At SpaceX he joined via the Hyperloop competition and helped build the Hyperloop track before pivoting to help start The Boring Company. Later, doing site development in Austin for Elon Musk's companies, he kept running into the same problem: no one reliably knew what was buried underground until they hit it. Two years at Anduril, he says, pointed him toward the specific technical problems worth solving first.

“LA started burning down around us, and then all of a sudden, everyone was calling. We had big wigs coming to just my garage, seeing like, what can we possibly do to get power lines underground... We started in private utility locating. We were really good at making maps, and so these general contractors would say, hey, we keep hitting stuff, can you come drill for us? We're like, yes. That was the secret plan the whole time.”

The wedge strategy

Advanced Spade started in private utility locating, deliberately targeting the cheapest, least-wanted work in the market. The logic was simple: build superior mapping and data capabilities, use those to win drilling work from general contractors who were struggling with accurate site data, then use the better datasets to outperform incumbents on-site. As reputation builds, the company moves up in technical difficulty and contract scope.

The longer play is to eventually exit lower-margin work entirely and sell the tools Advanced Spade developed to the smaller operators it displaced. Kimminau is explicit about why that works where traditional "golden shovel" hardware sales fail: if you've already beaten competitors with a tool, selling them that same tool afterward is an easy pitch. Credibility is the product.

The market problem

Grid investment has tripled over the last decade, Kimminau says, yet reliability has gotten worse by every metric. The bottleneck is cost and safety, not demand. Directional drilling proved its value during aggressive fiber rollouts in rural areas, but the tooling hasn't translated cleanly to dense urban environments. New York's JFK airport recently lost power after a fiber line was struck during construction — exactly the kind of failure Kimminau argues reflects a data and tooling gap rather than operator error.

The January 2025 LA fires accelerated things for Advanced Spade directly. The company was operating out of Kimminau's garage when LA started burning, and major stakeholders came looking for solutions. The business has since grown to roughly 50 people, based in Long Beach.

What they're selling now

The company's current field setup includes directional drills and fluid trucks — standard equipment configured to their own specs. The differentiation sits in the data layer: integrated mapping that reduces the guesswork on what's underground before a drill bit goes in. Kimminau frames the current product as integration more than invention, pulling together tools that exist but that no one in the industry has assembled coherently. The harder, more novel technical work, he suggests, is coming later.

The near-term commercial path runs from subcontractor work up to general contractor scope, with a parallel software and tooling business targeting the smaller operators Advanced Spade is moving away from serving directly.