“We are here to help communities adapt to climate change and to be more resilient, and we see utilities as being right at the heart of that.”
— Fiona Spruill of Overstory
That thesis is what Overstory’s entire product is built around. Utilities take risks every day from trimming trees and managing asset health, to watching for wildfires and storms. But each of these jobs lives in a separate department, siloing off its own data. Overstory connects all of the information so utilities can be smarter about when to send people, where to send them, and what equipment to bring.
To get started, a utility needs to provide the location of their poles and lines. From there, Overstory uses satellite and aerial data across the network and works with each utility to define its own risk matrix of high versus low priority.
As Fiona describes it:
“We run a series of models that determine where the risks are. The height, location, the health, and in some cases, the species of every tree on their network. And from that, we recommend actions within the product that they could do to go out and reduce those risks.”
But Overstory doesn’t measure its impact by the data delivered, it measures impact by whether utilities’ habits have actually changed.
“One of our key results is how many programs have been permanently changed at the utility because of Overstory. That’s how we measure success. Are they actually changing their workflows?”
— Fiona Spruill of Overstory
Fiona’s path to Overstory runs straight through Cody Simms and MCJ. She and Cody first worked together on New York Times user research in 2004, then reconnected 16 years later on an MCJ webinar. From this, Fiona was introduced to Overstory co-founders Indra den Bakker and Anniek Schouten, joining as employee number 10 and relocating her family to Amsterdam.
In late 2023, Indra was diagnosed with a rare cancer that tragically claimed his life the following October, at just 35 years old. Fiona stepped in as CEO practically overnight and led Overstory through the hardest transition a company can face. In the time since, she and the team have carried Indra’s vision forward: Overstory has raised $68 million to date and now has about 50 utilities on board, including six of the 10 largest electric power companies by line miles in North America, closing in on the “one-stop shop resilience platform” Indra and Anniek set out to build.
Listen to the conversation wherever you get your podcast.
🎥 The Lean Back
Hear Fiona Spruill, CEO of Overstory, break down how satellite imagery and AI are helping utilities tackle vegetation risk, cut wildfire risk, and prevent outages.
🎙️ New Inevitable Episode
Yasir Arafat is the co-founder and CTO of Aalo Atomics, a company developing factory-manufactured modular nuclear power plants designed for AI data centers. In this episode of Inevitable, Yasir explains how Aalo became one of four U.S. nuclear startups to achieve criticality by the July 4, 2026 deadline. Listen to the episode here.
👩💻 Climate Jobs
MCJ portfolio companies that are hiring this week:
VP of Business Development at Fourier (Mountain View, CA)
Sustaining Program Manager — Consumer at Mill (San Bruno, CA)
Lead Brand Designer at Patch (San Francisco, CA)
QA Engineer at SPAN (Bengaluru, India)
Summer 2027 AI Applied Research Internship at The Nuclear Company (Washington, DC)
Staff Data Scientist - Wildfire at Overstory (Remote)
Lead, Field Quality & Training at Base Power (Austin, TX)
Sr. Development Engineer at AIRCO (New Britain, PA)
Senior Robotics Integration Engineer at Charge Robotics (San Leandro, CA)
Director/VP of Marketing at Lightship (Broomfield, CO)
Join our talent network to view details and apply. Once your profile is set up, we’ll match you with relevant opportunities across our portfolio.