It only takes a quick look at Eclipse’s recent investments to see where this venture firm’s interests lie — and where it’s headed.
The Palo Alto-based VC, which has seen its average deal size jump in recent years, has poured an increasing amount of money into the “physical world.” Its deals include electric boat developer Arc, buzzy battery and materials recycling company Redwood Materials, self-driving construction vehicle startup Bedrock Robotics, autonomous vehicle technology company Wayve and industrial robotics lab Mind Robotics.
With $1.3 billion in new capital — which is split between a $591 million early-stage incubation fund and another geared toward startups — Eclipse zeroes in on what partner Jiten Behl describes as the next big tech era.
“Over the last two decades, we’ve seen multiple waves of innovation,” Behl said, citing the eras of the internet, mobile cloud and social media. “It’s the first time things will move from our screens into the physical world; we’ll see advanced levels of intelligence, along with real actions, in terms of solving problems in the real, physical world.”
Artificial intelligence and the natural world collided. The ubiquity of the term “natural AI” is just one signal. Behl said this era is driven by a confluence of talent, technological advances, demand and politics. And of course capital.
“We’ve got a nice war chest to make and make a serious dent in the market and support companies the right way through the lifecycle,” he said.
Eclipse doesn’t break new ground by investing in natural AI. It is, after all, the next shiny new thing to invest in. How Eclipse selects startups is worth noting. The VC seeks to invest in all physical sectors, including transportation, energy, infrastructure, computing and defense. The interesting part, as Behl described it, is a strategy to create a web or ecosystem of startups in overlapping fields that will likely become partners as they scale.
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“Scale is so important, and if you can combine that in a way that companies work together early to build scale, to create proof points, then it enables them to go after the next set of demand,” Behl said, explaining that the portfolio companies will work directly with each other, but hopefully with each other’s partners as well.
In some cases, these startups will be incubated within the confines of Eclipse. Behl said Eclipse plans to spin off companies from this new fund. And while he wouldn’t give many hints, he did confirm that the process has already begun.
“We’re definitely working on some very interesting ideas,” he said, noting that Eclipse is particularly interested in startups that work across businesses.
“The next idea is how do you connect these domains? How do you scale across domains? And how do you use the data between domains to create that moat?” he posed, adding that data will be used to train smarter AI models for the benefit of a wider group. “That’s the general position we’re working on.”
