Enter: FRVO

Fervo Energy’s IPO represents a new era for clean energy and an unprecedented milestone for the Activate community

Fervo Energy (Tim Latimer & Jack Norbeck, Cohort 2018) has become the first Activate Fellow-led company to go public, announcing a $1.89B raise after selling 70 million shares at $27 each (upsized from $21-24 per share). The Houston-based company delivering 24/7, carbon-free power is now valued at over $10B.

Source: 2026 Nasdaq, Inc. / Vanja Savic

Ringing the Nasdaq bell last week, Fervo CEO and co-founder Tim Latimer declared, “This is the decade it will become obvious that geothermal is the next great American energy technology, and we are leading the charge.”

When Latimer and Norbeck began their journeys as Activate Fellows in Cohort 2018, this was far from obvious. Many said their idea was impossible. People had given up on geothermal as a growth industry—even the industry’s own incumbents.

But this milestone shows why we need to keep betting on early-stage founders with daring innovations and world-changing potential.

Latimer knew for a long time that he wanted to make an impact through energy. “At the start of my career I got what I call the ‘energy bug,’” he told Activate in a 2023 interview. “Once you start working on energy, you see how important it is to people's lives.”

Tim Latimer and Jack Norbeck as Activate Fellows in Cohort 2018.

Fervo’s current momentum could not come at a more critical time—when global competitiveness, national security, economic development, and affordability all hinge on energy.

“This is our Theory of Change in action,” says Activate CEO Cyrus Wadia. “And today is a very visible example of what it looks like when the hard tech for good community bets together on science entrepreneurs who deserve a real shot.”

“Have you thought about making an app?”

As an early-career engineer in the oil and gas industry, Latimer had a realization that would become the foundation of Fervo: applying horizontal drilling innovations from the natural gas sector to geothermal could transform it into a viable, widespread carbon-free energy source.

Latimer’s vision was remarkably clear. He recently shared an excerpt from his Stanford M.B.A. application essay from 12 years ago, in which he said, "I believe we are on the cusp of a new energy revolution.” To get there, he wrote, next-generation geothermal professionals would need to be able to “create a business case, secure funding, and lead new ventures”—and that’s exactly what he went on to do.

But at the time, his idea was early, it was bold, and it threatened the status quo. Getting others to see it—not to mention fund it—proved difficult.

First, Latimer’s concept was truly first-of-its-kind. No one else was doing next-generation geothermal at the time, and experts even told Latimer it couldn't be done. Without field tests, the potential for enhanced geothermal systems using horizontal drilling was merely theoretical.

Second, it would require a lot of capital to get off the ground.

“The thing that makes geothermal innovation so difficult is that you can't just bootstrap it. You can't just say, oh, a new way of drilling wells—let me try that out in my garage,” Latimer previously told Activate.

Many quietly discouraged him from thinking so big, asking him, “Have you thought about making an app?”

Ultimately, Latimer found a small group of advisors who saw his vision and pushed him to bring it to life. “You have a wildly ambitious idea that requires a lot of capital and science and engineering work,” Latimer remembers them telling him. “There are not many places that can support you, but you need to look at Activate.”

“You have a wildly ambitious idea… There are not many places that can support you, but you need to look at Activate.”

Finding the Right Path

Latimer became an Activate Fellow in Cohort 2018 alongside his co-founder, and later CTO, Jack Norbeck, a geothermal scientist who he met at Stanford.

At first, Activate struggled to figure out how to fund the category-defying Fervo team. Initially unsuccessful at securing government grants, Activate was able to secure more risk-tolerant philanthropic capital to kickstart Fervo’s entrepreneurial journey.

This philanthropic support represented a turning point, giving Latimer and Norbeck the runway to develop their groundbreaking technology—and attract substantial subsequent investments. They were able to raise a small seed round at the beginning of the fellowship and close an $11M Series A one year into their fellowship.

According to Latimer, Activate’s impact went far beyond funding. The fellowship helped shape Fervo at a foundational level—translating a scientific hypothesis into a legitimate business model that resonated with leading climate investors.

Activate also instilled a critical lesson about team-building: that a technology or business model breakthrough isn't sufficient on its own without the right people driving the mission. That mindset around intentional team-building became core to Fervo's DNA.

Fast forward to today: Fervo’s commercial pilot, Project Red, is the world’s longest-running enhanced geothermal system. Its Cape Station project, located in Utah, will begin delivering power to the grid this year, with plans to scale to 500 megawatt operating capacity over the coming years (and permits to scale up to two gigawatts). Customers include Southern California Edison, Clean Power Alliance, Shell Energy North America, and others. An upcoming project, Corsac Station, will power Google's Nevada data center operations.

Source: Fervo Energy

The company’s success is a testament to the impact of a supportive ecosystem. Activate wasn’t the only one on Fervo’s side. Programs like Elemental Impact and Breakthrough Energy also contributed the vital, early support that allowed Fervo to transform from an “impossible” idea into a rapidly growing company with massive potential for impact.

Once a Fellow, Always a Fellow

While relentlessly scaling Fervo, Latimer and Norbeck haven’t stopped championing Activate and serving as a resource for current fellows.

Activate’s tight-knit community is often cited as one of the fellowship’s top benefits that goes well beyond the two-year program—and engaged alumni like Latimer and Norbeck are one of the reasons why.

“With everybody posting on LinkedIn about Fervo's IPO and all the pictures of them ringing the bell, I’m reminded that Tim takes my call and answers my Slack message every single time,” says Claire Nelson (Cella Mineral Storage, Cohort 2023). “It’s incredible that someone so busy building the most successful climate-tech company ever would take the time to mentor me because we're both in the subsurface world.”

Tim Latimer speaking at the 2023 Activate Reunion in Tiburon, CA.

Latimer has also been especially supportive of the Activate Houston Community. He was the community’s very first external speaker after it launched in 2023, sharing candid stories from his time as a fellow and even Fervo’s finalist presentation from the Activate recruitment process.

Activate co-founder Matt Price says he’s excited to see how Fervo inspires other science entrepreneurs. “[This milestone] is a major validation that there are pathways for entrepreneurial scientists to create a vision for the future they believe in and take the steps needed to bring that vision to fruition,” he says.

Houston as an Energy Transition Driver

It is meaningful that Activate’s first fellow-led company to go public is based in Houston—a global energy capital that is creating a new legacy as a leader in clean energy.

“Fervo’s IPO is a great story of traditional energy workers driving energy transition,” says Jeremy Pitts, Managing Director of the Activate Houston Community.

“Fervo’s IPO is a great story of traditional energy workers driving energy transition.” - Jeremy Pitts, Managing Director of the Activate Houston Community

“It also shows how Houston can support these types of growing companies by offering the resources and talent base to build a great company,” he says. “I don't know that Fervo could have been built anywhere other than Houston.”

Harnessing the talent in his home state of Texas have always been at the heart of Latimer’s vision for Fervo.

“One of the things that I've been most excited about since starting is seeing how many people we can hire and get these brilliant people working on a new kind of problem,” he told us in 2023. “It makes me feel very glad to know that that's been an inspiration for a lot of people to make a career transition.”

Fervo currently has around 250 employees and dozens of job openings, with more to come.

“IPOs are an engine of job growth,” stated an article in the Houston Chronicle about how Fervo’s IPO will impact Houston. “On average, IPO’d companies add roughly 822 jobs in the years following an IPO, with 92% of their headcount growth occurring after the IPO.”

A New Era for Hard Tech

For many investors, Fervo’s path to the public markets reflects a broader shift in how the market understands hard tech, energy, and infrastructure.

“The Fervo IPO is a watershed moment that proves the next generation of trillion-dollar companies won't be built in the cloud—they will be built in the physical world,” says Robert Ethier, co-founder and Managing Partner at Impact Science Ventures, which first invested in Fervo in 2022 in the biggest raise a geothermal company had ever achieved at that point in time.

“For decades, venture capital chased software, but Fervo's success signals a massive market rotation,” he says. “We are entering a new industrial age where the greatest returns, and the strongest structural moats, belong to the hard-tech founders securing our global energy grid and overhauling heavy industry.”

“We are entering a new industrial age where the greatest returns, and the strongest structural moats, belong to the hard-tech founders securing our global energy grid and overhauling heavy industry.” - Robert Ethier, co-founder and Managing Partner at Impact Science Ventures

At Activate, we’re seeing our Theory of Change come to fruition, including our vision for impact at ten years: “The acceleration of high-risk, early-stage hard-tech innovations reinvents our industries to be more economically and environmentally sustainable.”

Indeed, in the eight years since starting the Activate Fellowship, Fervo has reinvented geothermal, if not the entire clean energy sector. And Fervo is one of more than 230 companies launched by Activate Fellows—ventures that have collectively attracted over $5.5B in follow-on funding. Fervo has shown us what's possible when the ecosystem gets the earliest stage right.

Source: Fervo Energy

Fervo’s trajectory also validates the strength of Activate’s model, from our rigorous selection process that identifies the highest-impact founders and innovations to our method of developing entrepreneurial leaders who have what it takes, in Latimer’s case at least, to grow a multi-billion-dollar company.

Fervo’s IPO may be above and beyond what our co-founders imagined when they first started Activate—but it’s also exactly the kind of scalable real-world impact that the fellowship was designed to unlock.

Praising the Fervo team for its vision, grace, and impact, Activate co-founder Ilan Gur wrote on LinkedIn, “The goal of Activate was always to help more leaders like this win and be in a position to shape the future.”