Grid congestion, or the mismatch between when energy is available and when buildings need it, is where our next guest has focused his attention.

Alex Blumberg, best known for founding Gimlet Media and co-creating Planet Money, is now the Co-founder and CEO of DaisyChain Energy. His second company is tackling grid congestion, a problem hiding in plain sight.

“So the big problem with the electric grid is that it’s built sort of on a parking lot model. The parking lot is like most of the year half empty. And then there are two or three days a year where it’s beyond full. But people who build parking lots build for those two or three days. And the grid is the same. It builds for peak load, even though it’s very rare that you get anywhere close to peak load.”

In this episode, Blumberg explains why building decarbonization has stalled and how DaisyChain is unlocking progress by making the economics work first. By combining submetering with smart rate arbitrage (tracking energy use at the circuit level to buy power at cheaper off-peak rates), DaisyChain is helping commercial buildings generate immediate savings while laying the groundwork for batteries, heat pumps, and other distributed energy resources.

Blumberg envisions a different grid: one where buildings don’t just consume energy, but actively stabilize the system by flexing demand and reducing peak load.

“Ultimately, what we’re building is the integration and control layer of electrification for the built environment. It’s a world where you don’t have to build as much generation because you can control your peaks.”

MCJ is an investor in DaisyChain. Learn about Blumberg’s story and DaisyChain’s technology in this recent episode of our podcast Inevitable.

Listen on Spotify

The Lean Back

Learn how Paces is helping to accelerate renewable energy siting in this episode of Inevitable.

MCJ Portfolio Jobs

Check out the Job Openings space in the MCJ Collective Member Hub or the MCJ Job Board for more

• Senior Data Engineer at Arcadia (USA)

• Manufacturing Engineer at Base Power (Austin, TX)

• Staff Enterprise AI Automation Engineer at Crusoe (San Francisco, CA)

• Global Supply Manager at Exowatt (Austin, TX)

• Data Engineering Manager at Overstory (Remote)

• Head of Marketing at Paces (Brooklyn, NY)

• Controller at Quilt (Redwood City, CA)

• Head of Supply Chain at Remora (Wixom, MI)

• Production Planner at Standard Nuclear (Oak Ridge, TN)

• Senior Manager, People and Talent at Weave Grid (San Francisco, CA)

• Project Manager, Partnerships & Projects at Zanskar (Salt Lake City, UT)

👩‍💻 Events

🌁 San Francisco Climate Week: We’re taking the show on the road to SF Climate Week! The MCJ team is hosting an event featuring the people behind New Mexico’s exciting transformation as a hub for entrepreneurs and investments. Join us to discover how the state is deploying public capital, attracting industry, and positioning itself as a magnet for the next generation of climate and innovation-driven businesses. Hear from: Rob Black, New Mexico’s Cabinet Secretary of Economic Development, Bruce Brown, Head of Strategic Climate Initiatives at the New Mexico State Investment Council, Carrie Von Muench, Founding COO at Pacific Fusion and Carl Hoiland, Co-Founder at Zanskar Geothermal. RSVP here. Space is limited!

But momentum is building to change that. Initiatives like the Global Energy Alliance, a multi-billion-dollar effort supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the IKEA Foundation, and the Bezos Earth Fund, are accelerating progress toward universal energy access.

Our latest podcast episode welcomes Ashvin Dayal, Senior Vice President for Power and Climate at the Rockefeller Foundation, who shares insights on bringing electricity to underserved communities and achieving economic and energy resilience.

“The trend is definitely towards what we call interconnected mini-grids. Distributed energy resources are the way of the future, even in modern electric grids in the US and in Europe.”

By combining technology and partnerships across governments, businesses, and communities, these efforts are helping unlock economic opportunities and expand access to electricity in emerging countries like India and Nigeria.

“Within five years, if you can have hundreds of utilities with this capability, we’ll be at the next level of trying to get to that ultimate goal of universal energy abundance.”

In this conversation with Cody, we discuss the benefits of philanthropic capital as a way to de-risk investment, scale innovative energy solutions, and support countries as they navigate the transition toward a cleaner and more inclusive electrical system

Tune in on your favorite podcast player to get a better picture of the global energy transition and what it’ll take to power the next billion people.

Listen here

The Lean Back

Is renewable energy alone enough? Check out this episode of Inevitable with Dr. Mark Jacobson, Stanford’s Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

MCJ Portfolio Jobs

Check out the Job Openings space in the MCJ Collective Member Hub or the MCJ Job Board for more

• Senior Cloud Support Engineer at Crusoe (San Francisco, CA)

• Quality Engineer at Standard Nuclear (Oak Ridge, TN)

• Manager, Revenue Operations at Weave Grid (San Francisco, CA)

• Staff Talent Sourcer at The Nuclear Company (Washington, DC)

• Manager - Defense Business Operations & Partnerships at Solugen (Houston, TX or Washington D.C)

• Video Editor and Producer at Aalo Atomics (Austin, TX)

• Field Technician at David Energy (New York, NY)

• Product Manager at Leap (Remote - EST required)

• Staff Electrochemical Engineer at Twelve (Berkeley, CA)

• Customer Support at Base Power Company (Austin, TX)

👩‍💻 Events

MCJ Climate + Marketing Meetup: Join us for our monthly climate and marketing meetup. (March 26)

Women in Climate + Energy Meetup: How is AI impacting the development of climate technologies? From heavy industries to Earth data, this month we have an exciting discussion led by Paul Manwell of Archimetis and Dan Hammer of LGND. We’ll talk about how AI can help decarbonize heavy industries, and how AI-enabled Earth data helps build planetary resilience. (April 1)

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Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse viciously fought over one essential question: should we power our electric grid with alternating current (AC) or direct current (DC)?

It got gruesome. At one point, Edison began electrocuting animals to show the danger of alternating current.

Ultimately, the war settled for one simple reason: Transformers.

Here’s the logic:

1. We needed to transfer electricity across long distances.

2. Stepping up and down voltage was the only efficient way to do so (e.g. changing how much electricity wants to move).

3. Transformers are the technology to do so.

4. Transformers could only use alternating current.

That’s it. Transformers decided how our electric grid was shaped.

Now, the constraint that shaped the grid is the bottleneck holding it back.

MCJ is proud to back DG Matrix in its $60M Series A, led by Engine Ventures with participation from Clean Energy Ventures, Cerberus Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, Fine Structure Ventures, and others. DG Matrix is reinventing the architecture that underpins our electric grid, rethinking how power is converted, routed, and delivered for an increasingly electrified world.

What is DG Matrix?

DG Matrix is building the first multiport solid-state transformer (SST) solution: a programmable power router that can convert AC to DC, DC to AC, step voltage up or down, and dynamically route energy across multiple inputs and outputs.

In other words, a universal adapter for power.

DG Matrix is designed for maximum grid flexibility. Its multiport architecture allows customers to accept disparate power sources at varying voltages and deliver exactly the power configuration they require. Solar, batteries, generators, and the grid can all integrate seamlessly through a single system.

By consolidating all necessary power electronics into one skid, DG Matrix saves customers space and cost. For context, a data center today typically requires transformers, switchgear, rectifiers, inverters, and power protection equipment deployed across multiple skids. In many installations, this power conversion stack spans two 4×30-foot skids. A single DG Matrix Interport replaces this equipment with a 4×4-foot device, combining 10 critical components into one unit with a 15× smaller footprint and up to 90% lower system cost.

DG Matrix was founded in 2022 by CEO Haroon Inam and CTO Dr. Subhashish Bhattacharya in Raleigh, North Carolina. Inam previously served as the CTO of Smart Wires and led the power electronics company to an IPO. Bhattacharya is the leading publisher of low and medium-voltage solid-state transformers in the space.

DG Matrix’s commercial SST will be the first to market, building both a low-voltage solution for microgrids and fleet electrification and a medium voltage for data centers.

Why did we invest?

First, Why Solid-State Transformers?

All infrastructure is built around a single limiting technology. Early factories were organized around a central steam engine, forcing building layouts around their power source. Telecom networks were designed around the limits of copper wiring before fiber optics. Cities historically formed around natural water sources before large-scale water conveyance systems.

The electric grid is no different. It was designed around the capabilities of magnetic-core transformers developed in the late 1800s.

At MCJ, we look for the technologies that lift these constraints. Solid-state transformers allow the grid to modernize beyond its original architecture, unlocking a more flexible, intelligent, and bidirectional power system.

Why DG Matrix?

Building a next-gen power electronics component requires deep transformer R&D experience and past power electronics scaling experience. This means deep manufacturing intuition, utility relationships, and the patience to iterate through certification cycles. Inam has done it before, with 200 patent applications, a team of 24 PhDs, and $40M ramp within the first three months of production at Smart Wires.

Meanwhile, CTO Dr. Subhashish Bhattacharya brings deep technical leadership in power electronics, with more than 800 publications and over 25,000 citations. His work includes the highly cited Voltage and Power Balance Control for a Cascaded H-Bridge Converter-Based Solid-State Transformer (800+ citations), providing the technical foundation needed as DG Matrix expands from low-voltage deployments to medium-voltage systems.

DG Matrix is the only company developing a mature multiport solid-state transformer architecture. They have built both a low-voltage and medium-voltage offering, allowing them to serve applications such as fleet electrification and microgrids while also supporting data center deployments. Over time, we believe the broader electrification of fleets, buildings, and distributed energy systems is likely to be a more durable driver of demand than any single infrastructure cycle.

The company has also begun building relationships with early adopters of solid-state transformer technology, including collaborations with companies such as Exowatt, an MCJ portfolio company.

Where do we go from here?

Working with DG Matrix sharpened our view of the “picks and shovels” bottlenecks across the power stack. We are actively exploring opportunities in core grid components (inverters, substations, and next-generation circuit breakers), particularly where wide-bandgap semiconductors like silicon carbide can unlock major improvements in efficiency, size, and system flexibility. New architectures are already emerging, including NVIDIA’s 800V DC data center design, which challenges long-standing assumptions about how electricity should be delivered.

As a result, we believe power systems are shifting toward DC-native architectures. As solid-state transformers release us from AC infrastructure, we can enable more flexible routing, tighter system control, and better monitoring of energy flows. Projects like Sun Cable’s HVDC link between Australia and Asia illustrate how direct current is already being used to move power more efficiently at scale.

Together, these shifts suggest we are still in the early innings of re-architecting the electric grid. As these constraints fall away, the most valuable opportunities will come from the technologies that make a more flexible, software-defined power system possible.

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One critical and often overlooked bottleneck to advanced nuclear deployment is fuel. Dozens of reactor developers are racing to commercialize next-gen designs, but the specialized fuel manufacturing infrastructure required to power those nuclear reactors presents an opportunity.

Standard Nuclear is the reactor-agnostic fuel supplier positioned to unlock the nuclear bottleneck with TRISO (TRi-structural ISOtropic particle) fuel for advanced reactors. After a conversation with CEO Kurt Terrani on a recent episode of Inevitable, MCJ is thrilled to announce our participation in Standard Nuclear’s $140M Series A, led by Decisive Point.

What is Standard Nuclear?

Standard Nuclear manufactures TRISO for advanced reactors and provides fuel-line services, including chemical conversion and qualification. Based in Oak Ridge, Tennessee–where uranium was first enriched at scale during the Manhattan Project–the company is already manufacturing fuel today.

TRISO fuel consists of microscopic uranium kernels–each about the size of a poppy seed–encapsulated in multiple carbon and ceramic layers, including a silicon carbide barrier that contains radioactive fission products at extreme temperatures. Unlike conventional fuel that requires massive containment structures, TRISO particles can withstand temperatures up to 2,000°C, while retaining their integrity. This enables passive safety characteristics and compact core designs that are central to next-gen reactor architectures.

Standard Nuclear positions itself as an independent merchant supplier rather than a captive OEM fuel provider. This allows the company to serve a broader market. For example, while several reactor developers plan to vertically integrate fuel production for their own fleets, aggregate TRISO demand is expected to exceed capacity for an extended period. More importantly, utilities and operators have decades of experience avoiding single-source fuel dependency in light water reactors. They prefer multiple suppliers for negotiating leverage and supply security. That same dynamic will drive demand for independent TRISO suppliers as advanced reactors scale.

Why Did We Invest?

CEO Kurt Terrani brings deep technical expertise and rare commercialization experience to Standard Nuclear. He holds a Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from UC Berkeley (2010) and spent over a decade in the DOE national laboratory system, including roles as a Senior Staff Scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and National Technical Director for the U.S. DOE Office of Nuclear Energy. His research focused on nuclear fuel and materials manufacturing, radiation effects, and fuel behavior, the exact technical foundation required for TRISO production.

At UltraSafe Nuclear, Kurt led the core division responsible for fuel and core structural materials development, where he built the pilot-scale fuel manufacturing line that would become the foundation for Standard Nuclear. When UltraSafe entered financial distress in 2024, Kurt joined the board and helped navigate a Chapter 11 restructuring that preserved the fuel assets and team.

Standard Nuclear emerged from that process with Kurt as CEO, bringing the entire DOE Advanced Gas Reactor program team with him. The company is the only group in the U.S. with hands-on TRISO production experience at scale.

Kurt describes his passion: “I’m an ultimate nuclear nerd, so I care a lot about where we’re doing something to the nucleus of the atom.” That technical depth, combined with the experience of taking a fuel line from R&D to commercial production, makes Kurt and his team uniquely positioned to solve the TRISO bottleneck.

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Additional Resources

• The Missing Piece Holding Back Advanced Nuclear with Standard Nuclear

• The Audacious Reboot of America’s Nuclear Energy Program

Steel, refining, and chemical plants lose billions annually to operational inefficiency, and the problem is accelerating. U.S. industrial sites waste nearly two-thirds of their primary energy in generation and conversion, totaling hundreds of billions in losses each year. Meanwhile, experienced operators are retiring faster than they can be replaced, taking decades of institutional knowledge with them.

This convergence of workforce erosion and systemic inefficiency creates an urgent need for technology that can both preserve operational expertise and unlock massive efficiency gains. The stakes are enormous: addressing operational waste in heavy industry represents a pathway to reducing over a gigaton of CO2 emissions globally.

Archimetis is addressing this by deploying AI agents that work alongside operators to optimize complex industrial processes in real-time. Their systems learn from operational patterns, predict equipment failures before they occur, and continuously adjust parameters to reduce energy waste and emissions. Rather than replacing human expertise, Archimetis’ agents augment it, capturing institutional knowledge while enabling the precision and speed that modern industrial operations demand.

As Archimetis officially comes out of stealth, MCJ is thrilled to share that we are a two-time investor in the company, including a Pre-seed investment alongside Homebrew and a Seed investment alongside Inspired Capital. Keep reading to learn more about our conviction in the Archimetis team.

What is Archimetis?

Unlike traditional industrial software that requires manual configuration and constant human oversight, Archimetis’ operational reasoning system autonomously diagnoses inefficiencies, models process adjustments, and iterates toward optimal solutions, learning continuously from live sensor data and operational outcomes.

The platform functions as a reasoning agent: it doesn’t just flag problems, it understands context, evaluates tradeoffs, and recommends actions that balance efficiency, safety, and emissions targets. Archimetis achieves this by combining large language models (LLMs) with proprietary scenario modeling and multi-modal sensor integration, interpreting complex operational data the way an experienced engineer would, but at machine speed and scale.

Archimetis is already piloting with several facilities, including a steel pipe plant in Houston operated by MCJ LP Borusan. Early pilots are targeting 15-30% reductions in unplanned downtime and 12% improvements in energy efficiency, gains that translate to millions in avoided losses at facilities where downtime can cost over $1 million per hour.

Why Did We Invest?

Our investment in Archimetis stems from several key factors, one of which is the exemplary founding team with unique insight into the low-level details of how large industrial plants operate, as well as the acumen to develop elegant software solutions.

Founder-Market Fit

Paul Manwell (CEO & Co-Founder) is a mechanical engineer by training with a degree from Rice University. Paul spent the early part of his career working with energy companies, building analytic tools for clients as a consultant for Accenture. He spent over a decade at Google in a number of high-visibility executive roles, including Chief of Staff to the CEO, and later Senior Director of Product. In the latter role, he oversaw internal data and analytics, having founded a data warehouse and dashboards that unified updates for C-level executives. Paul grew his team to 140 people and led a cross-functional team of product managers, UX designers, and data scientists.

Aaron Brown (CTO & Co-Founder) has a background in Computer Science from Harvard (AB) and Berkeley (MS & PhD). Aaron spent several years at IBM where his focus was AI and analytics. He then went on to spend over 12 years at Google in executive product management roles. Notably, he worked on the development of the Knowledge Graph in Google Search and led the engineering team responsible for that product’s data infrastructure. In his last role as a Senior Director of Product Management, Aaron led an over-sixty person product team that was responsible for Google’s internal developer infrastructure.

Positive Signal From Heavy Industry Players

Borusan, an LP in the MCJ fund, is an industrial conglomerate with businesses spanning steel production, automotive manufacturing, energy development, and others. We introduced Borusan to Archimetis, and the ventures team expressed great excitement (and an interest in investing) in what Archimetis is building. They not only believe in the value proposition but also aim to play an active role in helping spur adoption among other heavy industry players. Archimetis is already piloting with several facilities, including a steel pipe plant in Houston operated by Borusan. We view Borusan’s informed interest as another strong signal of the opportunity Archimetis is pursuing.

Additional Resources

• Efficiency in Oil Refining: The Low-Hanging Fruit of Climate Action by Paul Manwell

• Ex-Google exec launches AI firm for oil refineries

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🎙️ Work on Climate pod

Recently, Work on Climate announced that it’s pivoting from helping people find climate jobs to helping them become climate leaders. Rather than waiting for the right job posting, climate leaders are professionals who transform their industries from within. Co-founder and Executive Director Eugene Kirpichov joined Cody on the show to talk about this shift and introduce the concept of regenerative economics. Eugene argues that climate, democratic erosion, AI risks, and institutional breakdown are all symptoms of:

“…an economic system that lacks the ability to manage the health of systems it depends on.”

Work on Climate is now organizing place-based, sector-specific chapters (starting with food systems in the Bay Area) where professionals across entire value chains can collaborate to rewire how industries operate. As Eugene puts it:

“We need to stop seeing ourselves and seeing other professionals as a talent pool. We need to start seeing each other as power.”

This episode with Eugene was a long time coming, but the timing feels right as both of our communities continue to evolve. Listen to the full conversation to hear how this vision is taking shape and what it could mean for professionals looking to drive systemic change.

Listen on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Lean Back

Tom Steyer on why business as usual can’t last in the energy industry.

MCJ Portfolio Jobs

Check out the Job Openings space in the MCJ Collective Member Hub or the MCJ Job Board for more.

• Lead Data Scientist at Arcadia (Remote)

• Growth Optimization at Base Power (Austin, TX)

• Director, Energy Innovation and Commercialization at Crusoe (Denver, CO)

• Partner Marketing Lead at Bright Harbor (Austin, TX)

• Senior Software Engineer at Heirloom (Brisbane, CA)

• Process Engineer at Fourier (Mountain View, CA)

• Senior Mechanical Design Engineer at Lightship (San Francisco, CA)

• Growth Product Manager, Consumer at Mill (San Bruno, CA)

• Data Engineer at Paces (Brooklyn, NY)

Upcoming Events

♻️ Sustainability and Impact with Pinterest and Autodesk (2/09 at 9 a.m. PST): We’re relaunching MCJ’s Career Advancement Monthly Meetup with a free, virtual session focused on practical career advice and real-world insight. This month, sustainability leaders from Pinterest and Autodesk share how they’re advancing climate strategy across operations, products, and decision-making. It’s an interactive, welcoming conversation designed to help you learn, connect, and take your next career step. RSVP here

🔥 Autonomous firefighting robots

Seneca is building an autonomous arsenal or ‘strike team,’ as CEO Stuart Landesberg calls it, to suppress wildfires within the first five minutes, after which containment is the only option. The company’s approach is fundamentally different from today’s centralized model. Instead of relying on terrain-constrained ground teams and multimillion-dollar helicopters stationed at central bases, Seneca’s strike team costs orders of magnitude less, can launch within minutes, and can operate in conditions like high winds and heavy smoke that are too dangerous for human pilots or hotshots.

Fires grow exponentially. If you miss the first 5-15 minutes of a fire, the outcome is locked in, and suppression becomes containment. As Stu puts it:

“The difference between five minutes and two hours could be half an acre or 200 to 300 acres… a major incident, a real wildfire.”

For decades, resilience has been framed as a question of scale: more crews, more capital, more capacity. That logic worked when risk accumulated slowly, but we don’t live in that world anymore. The good news: speed changes the math. A fire suppressed in the first five minutes never demands a fleet of aircraft. This early intervention brings exponential loss back within manageable bounds.

Listen to the latest episode of Inevitable to hear Stu walk through Seneca’s technology, the economics, and what changes when you can deploy autonomous aircraft everywhere fires start.

The Lean Back

Learn more about Seneca in this episode of Inevitable.

MCJ Portfolio Jobs

Check out the Job Openings space in the MCJ Collective Member Hub or the MCJ Job Board for more.

• Project Engineer at Base Power (Austin, TX)

• Partner Success Lead at Bright Harbor (Austin, TX)

• Land Acquisition Manager at Charm Industrial (Fort Lupton, CO)

• Senior Product Manager at Enode (Remote, Europe)

• Senior Project Manager, Delivery at Euclid (Remote)

• Frontend Engineer and Software Engineer at Light (Austin, TX)

• Senior UX Designer, Web & E-Commerce at Mill (San Bruno, CA)

• Lead Electrical Engineer at Moment Energy (Bc, Canada)

• Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Zanskar (Salt Lake City, UT)

More from MCJ Newsletter

Our portfolio founders are solving some of the toughest industrial and energy challenges—rewiring generation and storage, driving efficiency in heavy industry, and building infrastructure for climate volatility. Once capitalized, their biggest priority is assembling teams that can move fast, adapt, and execute through uncertainty. Early-stage climate & energy founders often face limited runway, capital-intensive roadmaps, evolving regulations, and legacy customers. The first hires must thrive in ambiguity, span functions, and either bring sector depth or ramp quickly.

After more than 1,000 introductions and over 100 hires into the MCJ portfolio, we’re sharing talent trends we’ve seen, the hiring patterns that show up most consistently among repeat founders, and some principles founders should consider as they embark on hiring their early teams.

(1) Talent Market Shifts

People with experience in heavy industrial and regulated industries are in high demand across functions. Most new companies we see are building software and hardware in power generation and storage, grid strengthening, industrial materials, fuels, and chemicals. Hiring has gravitated toward individuals who can navigate regulation-heavy environments and long sales cycles. Founders are looking for talent that can inform regulation-aligned product roadmaps, de-risk technical and financial execution, and build credibility with C&I customers.

At the mid-level—beyond ML engineers—the most in-demand profiles are process engineers and program managers with experience across at least one of three sectors: manufacturing (e.g., Tesla, GE, Apple), utilities (e.g., PG&E, NextEra, Duke Energy), and/or oil and gas (e.g., Chevron, Shell, Oxy). These operators are valued for their ability to design and deploy industrial systems at speed and scale, while adapting to AI-driven efficiency gains layered onto physical infrastructure.

On org structure, instead of hiring a recruiter as their first HR role, more founders are opting for a generalist Head of People who can own recruiting alongside HR fundamentals. This gives early teams flexibility and reduces handoffs at a stage where priorities shift quickly and headcount decisions are tightly coupled to runway.

(2) Patterns in How Repeat-Founders Hire

The most experienced founders recognize that leverage drives progress. Multi-time founders actively recruit a trusted right-hand early on, often in the form of a Chief of Staff, to offset founder blind spots and increase execution velocity. These roles skew toward operators with strong program management and cross-functional fluency; common backgrounds include policy, venture, or consulting, paired with prior operating experience in heavy industries. In practice, Chiefs of Staff become the connective tissue between technical teams, external stakeholders, and long-horizon execution.

Don’t rush into hiring commercial folks. Repeat founders consistently run the sales process themselves and fight the urge to “press the easy button” to hire an industry vet. This steep learning curve enables them to internalize how customers—especially in established and traditional industries—actually buy: where deals stall, who the real decision-makers are, and which constraints are structural versus negotiable. The gained clarity directly informs what “good” looks like in a first Head of Sales or CRO and avoids mis-hires driven by resume prestige vs. fit with the product DNA and nuanced sales motion.

Early hiring decisions should be evaluated through one lens: does this person reduce execution risk across technology, product, regulation, and/or customers within the next 6–9 months? The strongest hires have operated inside complexity before and can translate between software, hardware, policy, and real-world deployment. Founders who prioritize this judgment early avoid blown timelines, preserve runway, and reduce downstream rework in markets with steep learning curves.

(3) Best Practices for Founders around Early Hiring

Hiring is one of the few levers early-stage founders fully control once capital is raised. Across the most successful teams, a few repeatable practices show up again and again:

Breadth Breeds Serendipity

One of the biggest misconceptions in recruiting is that precision beats breadth. In practice, breadth creates optionality. Founders should treat recruiting as an ongoing pipeline rather than a role-by-role process. Optimize for consistently meeting high-quality people instead of waiting for perfectly defined openings. Early-stage priorities often shift faster than job descriptions, and over-indexing on exact role fit can cause you to miss candidates who would materially raise the bar.

Make time to meet strong operators (people who have a high say/do ratio) across functions and seniority levels, even when you’re not actively hiring. Keep lightweight notes and maintain warm follow-ups (leverage your ATS of choice or simply leverage a tool like Tasklet to remind you to follow up). Many of the most effective early hires are people founders met months earlier, before a clear role existed, who became obvious adds once timing aligned.

Just last year, we heard the following sentiment from at least 5 founders: “We didn’t have a role, then we met X and made one.” This mindset is a feature, not a bug!

Content Reach as a Talent Discovery Engine

Rather than chasing the same highly sought-after candidates, founders who invest early in sharing how they think about their problem space tend to attract more aligned talent over time.

We’ve seen people engage with the MCJ newsletter or podcast because they found a founder-written piece interesting, then later connect with portfolio companies, host events, or become early hires.

Creating a mechanism to share your perspective becomes a dual-use lever when it educates your market and surfaces talent you’d never find through outbound sourcing alone. Start writing or speaking early—well before you’re hiring—about the real challenges you’re tackling. Focus on where mission-driven operators already gather and engage authentically. By the time you need someone, you’ll often have warm relationships to draw from. Justin Lopas, COO of Base Power, does this particularly well.

AI Helps—But Human Intuition Matters More

AI tools promise efficiency in recruiting, but they’re not yet a substitute for founder judgment. The strongest hiring signals still come from referrals, warm outreach, and context-rich conversations within dense networks.

Founders should use AI to expand discovery—tools like Harmonic or Happenstance can very effectively help surface patterns and profiles—but not to outsource decision-making. Technology provides reach; relationships provide precision.

At MCJ, our talent approach reflects these principles. We connect people around real shared interests, stay close to founders as hiring needs evolve, and measure quality through feedback on both sides. If you’re navigating early hiring in complex industries, pressure-test your approach after every hire. Ask whether execution got meaningfully easier within 90 days. If it didn’t, recalibrate quickly and adjust how you hire next.

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Inevitable Podcast

🌧️ As drought tightens across the West, Rainmaker is using drones and radar to make cloud seeding measurable and scalable. CEO Augustus Doricko explains how in this week’s episode.

MCJ Portfolio Jobs

Check out the Job Openings space in the MCJ Collective Member Hub or the MCJ Job Board for more.

• Manufacturing Engineer (Production) at Base Power (Austin, TX)

• Product Manager, Security and Compliance at Crusoe (San Francisco, CA)

• Communications Manager (Contract) at Mill (San Bruno, CA)

• People Operations Partner at Pacific Fusion (Albuquerque, NM)

• Mechatronics Hardware Engineer at Quilt (Redwood City, CA)

• Director of Utility Solutions at Rhizome (San Francisco, CA)

• Staff Product Designer at Verse (Remote)

More from MCJ Newsletter

Reports of China’s rapid progress in developing and deploying green and carbon-free technologies, such as solar, wind, batteries, EVs, and nuclear, have dominated news headlines recently. While the flood of cheap Chinese exports has sparked fears as well as protectionist policies in various countries, many have credited China’s cost-competitive renewables as being a boon for developing nations and the effort to curb global greenhouse emissions. At the COP30 climate conference in Brazil in November, the culmination of China’s emergence as a “renewable-energy superpower” was on full display, leading many to proclaim China had supplanted the U.S. as the world’s leader in clean energy. To help those of us outside of China make sense of what’s being reported, I’m sharing observations from my brief time on the ground. For a more in-depth summary of insights, I highly recommend reading “A tour of China’s electrostate,” written by Kim Zou, CEO and Co-Founder of Sightline Climate, who was one of my companions on the trip.

Speed, Scale, & Specialization

Few would be surprised to hear of China’s penchant for building at breathtaking speed. Whether it’s deploying solar farms larger than Manhattan, laying high-voltage transmission lines across the country, erecting massive hydroelectric power stations, or building the biggest nuclear fleet, China has shown a steadfast commitment to its domestic industrial advancement that is envied the world over. In his book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, author Dan Wang asserts that this stems in part due to an ingrained engineering mentality that pervades China’s technocratic leadership and bureaucracy. Having read Wang’s book and hearing him speak in person before traveling to China, I had some expectations of what a visit might reveal. However, it was only by speaking with local insiders and glimpsing the internal workings of these companies did I truly appreciate the sheer magnitude of the country’s manufacturing output and technical sophistication.

Once I landed in China and met with my group, we embarked on a visit to BYD, a leading battery producer as well as the world’s largest EV maker. Deriving its name from the acronym “Build Your Dreams,” BYD started in 1995 as a battery manufacturer, an industry in which it continues to command a leading share of the market along with its Chinese competitor CATL. At BYD’s headquarters in Shenzhen, our hosts walked us through the company’s history and evolution. I was awestruck not just by the company’s high-velocity EV sales volume, but also by its innovation. Reaching heights of 4.27 million in EV sales in 2024, BYD sold 4.6 million in 2025, securing nearly 21% of the world’s EV market.

BYD has accelerated its sales growth over the last several years and, in 2025, dethroned Tesla as the largest EV brand by sales volume. There are several confluent factors worth noting that have propelled BYD and its Chinese peers to market dominance.

Owning the upstream supply chain

Controlling the upstream supply chain endows a durable advantage to many Chinese companies, enabling them to expand downstream and compete both on cost as well as quality. As an example, BYD has leveraged its specialization as a battery manufacturer to produce EVs, energy storage systems, and electrified rail that, in many cases, are more advanced and cheaper than those of its domestic and foreign competitors. Unveiled this year, BYD’s 5-minute fast charging battery is one such manifestation of the company’s competitive edge. With the BYD Super e-Platform, EV owners can enjoy megawatt charging, getting 400 kilometers (250 miles) of range in nearly the time it takes to fill up the tank at a gas station. Ostensibly, BYD and other Chinese EV OEMs have not just narrowed the gap between their Western competitors but, in many ways, have leapfrogged them in terms of innovation and quality—a new reality that Ford’s CEO, Jim Farley, has echoed. In Breakneck, Wang credits the foresight of the Chinese government in paving the way for Tesla’s entry into the Chinese automotive market. He notes that Tesla had the effect of catalyzing consumer interest in EVs as well as forcing Chinese OEMs, like BYD, to compete at a higher bar. This phenomenon, dubbed the “catfish effect,” was akin to introducing a larger fish into a pond, forcing the others to swim faster.

Beyond Industrial Policy

The role of China’s central government and its years of commitment to its green energy industrial policy cannot be overstated. For decades, the central government has prioritized key sectors and areas of innovation it deems as strategic and representing industries of the future. Since 2009, it has reportedly invested nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars into the EV space alone, which has taken the form of subsidies enabling Chinese EV companies to achieve scale. I learned that China’s industrial policy is defined at the top by the central government, but implemented locally by provincial officials. In contrast to the elected politicians in the West, Chinese provincial leaders are appointed by the central government and primarily judged on their ability to drive GDP growth and economic development. This political structure incentivizes local leaders to attract businesses, provide support, and eliminate red tape, an issue many founders in the U.S. have decried as hobbling the speed of development. One American climate tech founder I met on the trip, who was visiting China to explore setting up a factory, shared his story of meeting with a local official:

“Meeting with Chinese local governments was so eye opening. They literally have KPIs - one govt needs to bring 10 new cos with 100M RMB investment per year. Our first meeting they brought a rep from every department we would interact with. Financial incentives (free money) actually have mainly turned off due to recent belt-tightening (or at least that’s what we were told), but philosophically 100% alignment. Dinner with one mayor and he literally called one of our potential customers during our dinner and was trying to sell [...] for us! We told him we are planning to break ground mid next year, his response was ‘if I get you a customer now can you break ground by December? You need to go faster’ 🤯”

When I asked the founder how this compared to engaging with officials in America, he replied, “We haven’t had anywhere near such an enthusiastic reception anywhere in the US that we’ve looked so far.”

Manufacturing Speed and Specialization

Our visit to the headquarters of CATL in Ningde, Fujian province was similarly eye-opening. The largest battery maker globally with a 38% share of the EV battery market, CATL is a supplier of batteries to EV OEMs as well as energy storage and battery management systems. Like BYD, CATL owns the battery-making supply chain from the production of the fuel cells to the assembly of the battery packs. Its sprawling headquarters includes a large manufacturing facility in which we were given a rare tour of the factory line.

As we traveled through a long labyrinth of corridors, we peered through glass windows and observed the lengthy process of how battery cells, namely the electrodes (anode and cathode), are made starting from raw minerals. On the production line, a slurry of lithium and other chemicals are processed into long strips of foil, rolled and stacked with delicate precision, and ultimately assembled into a battery cell. What was most impressive about witnessing the electrode manufacturing process—which accounts for 40% of lithium-ion cell capital expenditure—was not just how intricate and precise it was, but also the level of automation involved. While there were people to monitor and provide quality assurance, the production line was heavily automated, leveraging complex machinery and robotics. I had heard of China’s so-called “dark factories,” which are supposedly so fully autonomous that the absence of humans negates the need for indoor lighting, and CATL’s advanced manufacturing seems to come close to that. The speed with which new production lines—be they for batteries or solar panels—could be purportedly stood up was impressive. We often heard the time to assemble meaningful manufacturing capacity in China is measured in months, whereas in the West it may require years.

The Crucible of Chinese Competition

It’s worth commenting on the immense size of the Chinese market, as well as the Hunger Games-style competition that produces its industry victors. As an example, the Chinese EV market is so large that it eclipses all vehicle sales in the U.S.; and the immense competition across a vast landscape of OEM brands means that companies that are able to survive in China are the ones best positioned to expand abroad.

Involution and other headwinds

While China has made headlines for its ability to dominate industries, many sectors, like EVs and solar panels to name a few, are gripped in fierce domestic competition as a result of an economic phenomenon that has come to be known as “involution (nèijuǎn 內卷).” Partly a consequence of China’s industrial policy, involution is where companies, beset with an excess of supply and a dearth of domestic demand, compete on price in a “race to the bottom.” In some ways, many Chinese industries are victims of their own success, achieving such vast scale that there’s a glut of capacity. The result has been scores of unprofitable companies that are making little to no margin on the products they sell. An intensifying challenge across sectors, involution was top of mind among many of the business leaders and founders we spoke with, seemingly much more so than U.S. trade tariffs which seldom was expressed as a major concern. The severity of involution has led some to predict an implosion of the Chinese EV market. For their part, company leaders we heard from felt confident they can always modify output and that, given China’s forecasted long-term growth, they will be able to fill today’s surplus capacity with tomorrow’s demand.

China’s economy is contending with two seeming contradictions. Overall domestic investments are stagnating in areas such as manufacturing; however, in spite of steep U.S.-imposed tariffs, China’s trade surplus has reached an all-time high. This is due in part to the country’s ability to increase its exports to markets in the EU and the Global South. Addressing anemic domestic demand while continuing to build a “fortress” of economic self-sufficiency is a priority for the Chinese leadership.

Nuances to the Great Decoupling

As U.S. trade tariffs have risen on Chinese manufactured goods, we have seen a number of MCJ portfolio companies attempt to shift away from Chinese suppliers. Representative of a greater decoupling from the Chinese supply chain that’s occurring across American industry, companies have moved to “friendshore” their supplier network to places like Vietnam or in some cases “re-shore” to the U.S. Witnessing the extent to which Chinese companies have become entrenched in key areas of the green energy supply chain, I realize there are nuances to that trend. First, there are some industries for which China is the only reliable supplier for the foreseeable future. Even accounting for heightened tariffs, China will remain, in the near term, the optimal source of manufacturing for certain sectors. Second, many of the alternative factories being established in countries like Vietnam are, in fact, run by Chinese companies.

There’s another dimension worth noting as well. While Western businesses have long had to bear the risks to their intellectual property as a part of doing business in China, I met some founders keen on identifying ways to sell into the Chinese market. It remains to be seen whether, over time, we’ll see more than just NVIDIA GPUs and soybeans as the Western goods that are imported to China in large quantities. That might be wishful thinking given China’s policy direction toward economic self-reliance.

The Return of the Sea Turtles

Apart from the impressive automated factories and fancy EVs, one of the more subtle observations I noticed is the role of expat talent, Chinese professionals returning to their homeland after being educated and trained in the West. Among the companies we visited, we met individuals who had studied or built their early careers at prestigious research institutions and corporations in America. These returning Chinese expats, sometimes referred to as “sea turtles” (hǎiguī 海歸), often had very impressive resumes, English fluency, and clearly contribute both technical as well as a unique insight to their Chinese employers. When I asked one of our organizers whether opportunities in China lured them home, I was told that, more often than not, it reflects the challenging process of obtaining an H-1B visa to remain in the U.S. Living in an American city in which Chinese foreign students abound, I feel our inability to retain such talent that we have cultivated on our soil is an unforced error that stymies our unique advantage in attracting the very best from around the world.

Navigating Risk and Opportunity

After my illuminating tour, I understand the reasons for some Western investors’ aversion to investing in companies that would be in direct competition with those in China. The advantages that many Chinese industries have developed are structural and have been honed over decades. For Western investors and entrepreneurs, China’s capacity to refine, scale, and dramatically lower the cost of a technology represents both a significant opportunity and a potential risk. This factor must be carefully considered for any technology under evaluation. In fact, some investors who have traveled to China are posing a critical question during investment committee decisions: Is the company positioned to survive Chinese competition? Nevertheless, I hold a perhaps naive hope that, in the long run, collaboration between Western and Chinese climate tech companies will ultimately prevail. The potent combination of leading Western innovation and technology with China’s unparalleled speed and capacity for deployment creates a powerful global opportunity for critical decarbonization. This synergy, already evident in sectors such as solar and batteries, allows for rapid, large-scale implementation worldwide. For those curious about the vibrant Chinese climate tech sector, I highly recommend visiting to experience its dynamism firsthand. A trip is sure to offer a revealing glimpse into the future of climate technology for decades to come.

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If you’re interested in opportunities to join future tours of China’s climate tech ecosystem, you can contact Sharon Chen (sharon@persimmonsystems.com).

Cody, on autonomy and automation:

In 2026, we’ll start to see autonomy and automation tip from “pilot tech” into default operating infrastructure across the physical economy, because the pressures are converging all at once: tighter labor and safety constraints, greater volatility on the grid, and higher uptime expectations for critical assets. As these systems move from dashboards to closed-loop control—optimizing energy, routing, maintenance, and operations in real time—automation becomes the fastest path to clean energy abundance, infrastructure resilience, and a new wave of industrial productivity.

David, on the maturation of AI infrastructure:

2026 will see consolidation in the AI and data center space, as major players—both going public and preparing for IPOs—go on acquisition sprees to bulk up, buying smaller players that have land but no power generation, power generation but no land, and further integrating vertically by acquiring small software companies.

Yin, on the migration to the American Southwest:

In 2026, founders building in firm power, heat, and grid-flexibility startups increasingly migrate toward Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas as the Southwest becomes the most important place to commercialize hard-energy ideas. Falling drilling costs, rising AI-driven electricity demand, and a surge of state-backed investment shift gravity away from coastal hubs. The Southwest becomes the test bed where new baseload power technologies move toward commercial scale.

And Yin again, on grid policy innovation:

Starting in 2026, we’ll begin to see real-time co-optimization take hold across U.S. grids as more ISOs adopt ERCOT-inspired storage frameworks (e.g., RTC+B) that give energy storage systems unified participation in both energy and ancillary markets. This shift opens a new class of startups in the “sub-utility layer,” optimizing batteries, HVAC/cold storage, industrial clusters, and campus microgrids for real-time market participation and reliability value. As this takes hold, “load as a resource” becomes a monetizable asset class.

Thai, on the continued buildout of fission:

Since 2024, we have seen strong signs of a nuclear (fission) renaissance emerge in America. Waves of commercial offtake, namely from energy-hungry hyperscalers, have created market signal for an industry that has languished for decades due to project risk and exorbitant cost-overruns. Moreover, bipartisan support and legislation has given many hope that the regulatory environment will be streamlined and it will be easier to approve new nuclear development and technologies. For its part, the DOE has begun to underwrite and provide financing for nuclear re-starts. 2026 will likely see these developments continue to accelerate with actual shovels in the ground building new plants, and novel reactors demonstrating criticality.

Casey, on the rise of geoengineering:

2026 will be the first time the general investor community accepts geoengineering as an investible category. While cloudseeding has been in practice for 70 years, recent events have increased attention and calls for governance. Meanwhile, solar radiation modification (SRM) has quietly received record levels of philanthropic donations over the past few years, along with its first meaningful equity investments. Simultaneously, improvements with physics-informed ML and causal AI for weather modelling enable far higher precision in deployment and verification. While many governments may be slow to adopt, nations experiencing increased extreme drought or heat will likely show a greater appetite for conducting pilot programs over the next year.

What predictions do you have for 2026?

Happy New Year from all of us at MCJ! 🎆

Inevitable Podcast

⛽️ Kurt Terrani, CEO of Standard Nuclear, discusses why fuel (not reactor design) could be the bottleneck for advanced nuclear. He also covers the nuclear fuel cycle and why reactor-agnostic, commodity fuel is critical for advanced nuclear to scale. Listen to the episode here.

The Lean Back

Learn about Aalo’s modular reactors in this episode from the archives.

Climate Jobs

Check out the Job Openings space in the MCJ Collective Member Hub or the MCJ Job Board for more.

• Project Coordinator (Deployments) at Base Power (Austin, TX)

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MCJ’s 2025 Highlights:

• 💼 MCJ made a total of 21 investments, 13 of which are new portfolio companies.

• 💸 We deployed over $15M into companies working in clean energy, abundance, infrastructure resilience, and new industrialism.

• 🤠 MCJ organized an “Energy + AI” event in Austin, TX with some of our local portfolio companies, plus we recorded a live episode of the Inevitable podcast with Cully Cavness, COO of Crusoe (listen below!).

• 👨‍🏫 Cody started as a lecturer at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, where he teaches impact investing and coaches MBA students on investment sourcing and diligence.

• 🤵‍♂️ David danced with his daughter at her wedding, where both of his parents were in attendance.

• 🛶 Yin went on a multi-day backcountry kayak trip with her 8 year old and can’t forget watching our portfolio founders shine during MCJ summit.

• 🇨🇳 Thai toured leading cleantech companies in China. Stay tuned for more insights from his trip!

• ☢️ Casey connected with MCJ founders Cully (Crusoe), Matt (Aalo) and Gabe (Moment Energy) about the ethics of nuclear power and how hard it is to start a company at our dinner in Austin, TX.

• 📚 Courtney read 39 books this year, just one book short of her goal.

• 💍 Jenn got married in Mexico, which turned out to be excellent preparation for organizing MCJ Summit.

• 🧶 Lauren learned to knit and took French courses, in addition to coordinating MCJ’s Austin event.

Top Episodes from the Inevitable podcast:

53 episodes. One new podcast brand. Here are a few listener favorites.

• 🔥 Tom Steyer (Galvanize): Investor, climate advocate, and CA gubernatorial candidate on managing a $20B hedge fund to raising one of the largest climate venture funds ever, and why he believes we will win the climate war. Listen to the episode here.

• 💰 Brandon Middaugh (Microsoft): Inside Microsoft’s $1B Climate Innovation Fund and its “invest-to-procure” model driving demand for clean power, carbon removal, and low-carbon materials to hit its 2030 carbon-negative goal. Listen to the episode here.

• ☀️ Hannan Happi (Exowatt): How Exowatt’s thermal energy storage system aims to supply round-the-clock power for AI data centers, going beyond what solar and batteries alone can deliver. Listen to the episode here.

• 🏗️ Cully Cavness (Crusoe): How Crusoe evolved from flare gas Bitcoin mining to building hyperscale AI data centers, including its role in the $500B Project Stargate, and why energy abundance is the future of compute. Recorded live in Austin. Listen to the episode here.

• ⚡ Dr. Mark Jacobson (Stanford University): The architect of 100% renewable energy roadmaps for all 50 states and 149 countries on where we really are in the clean energy transition and his case against nuclear and carbon capture. Listen to the episode here.

Your Favorite MCJ Newsletter Reads:

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Today, millions of GPUs need power to keep up with insatiable demand. The scale is unprecedented, but the shape of this buildout is familiar: networks that cluster in unlikely places, expensive hardware that seeks full utilization, and a collision with our power system. The question isn’t if the buildout will continue, but how we use this opportunity to usher in a new step change in our infrastructure.

We traced history to see what we can learn from the past and where the next unlock may be hiding. What follows are three stories from Data Centers: The Hidden Backbone of Our Modern World.

Why is the global epicenter of data centers in rural Virginia?

Hubs and fiber.

In the early 1990s, a group of network providers in the Virginia area got together over a beer and decided to connect their networks. They selected the corner of a parking garage to stack servers and swap traffic. This building, known as MAE-East, soon became the most important building for the commercial internet. If you sent an email from London to Paris, it likely crossed the Atlantic through that D.C. garage. The same pattern repeated in downtown LA when One Wilshire, a bland office building from the mid-1960s, became the internet’s West Coast hub—and the most valuable commercial real estate in LA, selling for a record $437.5 million in 2013.

As demand for dense connectivity outgrew the garage or a single office building, the industry coalesced around data center regions. None more famous than the “data center alley” that grew out of farm land in Ashburn, Virginia. AOL located its core connectivity there in the early 1990s, MAE-East was relocated, and Loudoun County created an economic flywheel—making it as easy to build data centers as a normal office park. Today, Loudoun County data center zoned land trades at an astonishing $6M per acre.

Every hub needs its spokes. For data centers, it’s all about fiber—hair-thin strands of glass that carry every text, image, and video around the world. During the dot-com bubble of the ‘90s, we laid way too much fiber. By 2000, there was enough fiber to wrap around the Earth thousands of times, yet less than 10% of it was lit up. The rest sat dark, waiting to be connected.

That overbuild became a subsidy for Web 2.0, smartphones, and the hyperscale cloud. Today, nearly 600 active submarine cables carry 99% of international internet traffic.

How did we manage through scale in the past?

We stopped wasting capacity.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, computers lived in a “glass house”—expensive mainframes run by trained operators via punch cards. IBM was king—the NVIDIA of the 1970s. The invention of time-sharing was the first unlock: many users, one machine, swapping in slices of the CPU. A student on a teletype had direct access to a computer for the first time.

The rise of the PC led to “client-server” architectures where companies had server rooms built on commodity hardware. Servers sat idle most of the time. Along came virtualization: suddenly, dozens of workloads could run on the same hardware, each believing it had its own machine.

Amazon took it further. In 2006, EC2 let developers rent a virtual server by the hour. You could launch an internet startup with a credit card, paying only for what you used. Containers and serverless designs have pushed the abstraction even further from the physical machines underneath.

Each step pushed utilization up. The more usage, the lower the per unit costs, and the more economies of scale rewarded centralization.

Today’s AI chips turn the knob again. A single H100-class GPU now costs on the order of a small car. They are bought in 2 or 8-GPU nodes wired together with ultra-fast interconnects. A single 8-GPU training box can be a half-million-dollar asset. At that price point, utilization is existential.

How did power become the bottleneck?

While the current scale of the power problem is unprecedented, power and data centers are not a new tension.

In the early 2000s, Christian Belady walked into NTT Docomo, the Japanese cellular operator, with “10 best practices” for their data center efficiency: separate hot and cold aisles, seal the gaps, tighten airflow. Three months later, back in Tokyo, their verdict: We implemented everything. It didn’t work. We are going back to the way it was.

They complained—the hot aisle was even hotter! But from a physics perspective, that’s ideal: the hotter the hot aisle, the more effectively heat is being removed from the data center. The problem was goal-setting; no one was looking at a common metric.

On the 12 hour flight home, Belady invented PUE—Power Usage Effectiveness. Total facility power divided by the power reaching IT equipment. In the mid-2000s, that number was typically 2.5 or greater. For every watt powering servers, another 1.5 watts vanished into overhead.

Over the next decade, hyperscalers attacked that ratio. Shifting to more efficient cooling architectures, rethinking power distribution inside the building, and building in better climates. The result? PUE fell toward 1.1, meaning almost all of the electricity goes to chips, not chillers.

From 2010 to 2020, cloud, streaming, and mobile sent internet traffic surging 17x, yet energy use barely moved. Those inefficient, underutilized server closets were deprecated and migrated to efficient hyperscale services.

But today’s AI data centers are 10-100x more power hungry than in the past. 50-100MW data centers are rounding errors in the face of 5GW builds. Yesterday’s solutions will not solve today’s problems. And yet, it is wise to look for rhymes: Are today’s chips fully utilized? Are we using the full power capacity of DCs? Can we get more power out of our existing grid?

False panic about the energy needs of IT equipment is as old as the internet. What is new this time is speed and scale. After 15 years of flat national load growth, we’re seeing a confluence of factors—largely industrial growth, transportation electrification, and AI data centers—kick off a new scale of electricity demand.

A step-change moment

It’s easy to read history and marvel at the leap between the world before and after the car or the light bulb. But we’re living through a shift like that right now. When we were kids, we could barely load a text page over dial-up. Now our kids stream HD video mid-flight or chat with the latest reasoning model.

Living through this moment means holding two truths in tension. We enjoy a world where compute keeps getting cheaper—unlocking products and discoveries that would have sounded like science fiction a decade ago. And we inherit the hard problems this technology creates: strained grids, environmental degradation, and real impacts on communities where these buildings land.

Every era’s constraint became the next era’s unlock. The next decade is an invitation to reengineer everything from chips to the power grid so that the era ahead is fundamentally more abundant and sustainable.

If you want the full dive into how we got here and what comes next, join over 100K others and listen to The Stepchange Show in any podcast player.

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Authored by Anay Shah & Ben Shwab Eidelson, co-founders and managing partners of Stepchange Ventures. Stepchange invests in ambitious companies building software to accelerate energy abundance and upgrade critical infrastructure. They’ve partnered with 20 companies to date, including multiple co-investments with MCJ.

🎙️ Inevitable Podcast

🏡 Aleks Gampel, COO and Co-founder of Cuby, explains how his company’s mobile microfactories can address the housing crisis by cutting costs, waste, and carbon while using mostly unskilled labor to build climate-resilient homes. Listen to the episode here.

🎥 The Lean Back

👩‍💻 Climate Jobs

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But Crusoe has done just that. We reconnected with CEO Chase Lochmiller, whose last appearance on the MCJ podcast in 2021 centered on Crusoe’s mission to capture flared natural gas for bitcoin mining. Since then, the company has evolved into a global leader in sustainable AI infrastructure. It has grown arguably faster in the past year than most companies do in a decade.

Chase’s years of alpine climbing, including summiting Mount Everest, offered him a mental model for preparation and disciplined risk-taking, one he now applies to Crusoe’s rapid buildout.

The ‘mountaineer mindset’ is simple: it’s the idea that reaching the summit is only half the journey. The same can be said for startups, where raising capital isn’t the end goal; it’s what you do next that determines survival and long-term impact. Below are a few proven principles to build by using Crusoe’s ‘mountaineer mindset.’

#1: Preparation is everything

In mountaineering and in billion-dollar infrastructure, success is determined long before the climb begins. You don’t just show up at base camp and start climbing. You plan every route and contingency. That’s how Crusoe approaches infrastructure.

Chase talks about front-loading design, modeling, and scenario testing so that when it’s time to execute, the team can move fast because the groundwork is already complete. There’s a clear line between moving fast recklessly and moving fast because you’ve prepared meticulously. Crusoe’s ability to build data centers at a record pace stems from doing the hard, often invisible work up front. They spent time challenging every traditional data-center assumption, preparing for every contingency, and approaching each project with the same discipline mountaineers bring to an expedition.

#2: Move light and fast, but safely

In mountaineering, traveling “light and fast” isn’t reckless but strategic. The less you’re waiting around on a mountain, the less exposure you have to shifting weather, avalanches, or fatigue. As Chase puts it, “Oftentimes, speed is actually a mechanism to be safe in mountains.” Crusoe builds infrastructure the same way.

By vertically integrating everything—from land and power development to data center design, construction, and GPU clusters—Crusoe removes the dependency bottlenecks that traditionally slow projects down. When one company controls the full stack, there are fewer handoffs, fewer miscommunications, and far more accountability.

This is the mindset that enabled Crusoe to break ground on its 1.2 GW Abilene campus and deliver its first 200 MW building in just 11 months.

#3: Let curiosity be your compass

On a mountain, curiosity pushes climbers to explore new routes instead of relying on the ones everyone else has taken. At Crusoe, that same instinct keeps the company from settling into industry convention.

Chase describes curiosity as one of Crusoe’s most important cultural traits. It’s what led the team from capturing flared gas to reimagining how AI infrastructure should be built. Instead of copying hyperscaler playbooks, Crusoe questioned every assumption, including siting data centers where energy is abundant rather than where real estate is cheap and designing modular systems that scale with power availability instead of forcing the grid to adapt to them.

This willingness to ask “why not?” is Crusoe’s competitive edge. It’s why they’re able to build faster, cleaner, and closer to the energy resources that will define the next era of compute.

#4: Safety culture scales trust

In the mountains, ambition means nothing without discipline. Chase summed it up simply:

“Getting up is optional, getting down is mandatory.”

Speed only works when the team shares a common understanding of risk and the responsibility that comes with moving fast around heavy equipment, high-voltage systems, and complex logistics.

Crusoe’s safety culture is fundamental to how the company operates. Thousands of employees and contractors follow the same playbook, speak the same language, and hold each other to the same standard. That consistency builds trust inside the organization and with external partners who need to know that Crusoe can execute big projects.

It’s the rope-team mentality applied to industrial infrastructure; move together, move deliberately, and move only as fast as the whole system can move safely. That’s a big part of why institutional partners like Brookfield and Blue Owl are willing to back Crusoe’s expansion into new regions and new energy markets.

Putting it all together

Chase’s mountaineering mindset isn’t really about Everest. It’s about how to build under pressure. At Crusoe, that means doing the unglamorous prep that enables speed, staying curious enough to question every assumption, and building a safety culture strong enough to support GW-scale ambition. These principles apply far beyond data centers or AI. Whether you’re constructing climate infrastructure or building an early prototype, the same themes hold: prepare deeply, move with intention, and create the trust your team needs to push higher.

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For more, watch the conversation below or listen to the full episode wherever you get podcasts.

🎥 The Lean Back

🎙️ Inevitable Podcast

⚛️ Carrie von Muench, COO and Co-Founder of Pacific Fusion, shares how the company is translating recent fusion breakthroughs into a modular, pulser-driven system designed for net gain. Pacific Fusion’s approach can be mass-manufactured and built on domestic supply chains. Listen to the episode here.

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🎉 We reached a new milestone of 100 successful hires in the MCJ portfolio! If you’re exploring roles in climate and energy startups, don’t overlook VC firms. They’re deeply plugged into founders, see hiring needs early, and often help match talent to open roles. If you’d like introductions across MCJ’s portfolio, fill out our talent form here.

• Senior Product Manager, Platform at Arcadia (Remote)

• Growth Operations Engineer at Base Power (Austin, TX)

• Senior Systems Software Engineer at Crusoe (San Francisco, CA)

• Chief of Staff or Finance & Admin Manager at Clean Crop Tech (Holyoke, MA)

• Product Designer at Euclide (Remote)

• Global Supply Manager at Heirloom (Brisbane, CA)

• Frontend Engineer at Light (Austin, TX)

• Content Specialist at MCJ (Remote, Part-Time)

• Head of Business Systems at The Nuclear Company (Columbia, SC)

• Enterprise Account Executive at Overstory (Remote)

• Senior Inventory Specialist at Pacific Fusion (Albuquerque, NM)

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Yet most data centers operate far below their potential—typically around 40% utilization despite 100% capacity. This isn’t operator error; it’s structural over-provisioning for reliability. To meet “five nines” uptime requirements (operational 99.999% of the time), facilities reserve massive power buffers for rare peak events that might occur just hours per year. Studies like the 2024 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report confirm average utilization sits at 30–50%, meaning nearly half of all provisioned power goes unused.

The inefficiency compounds with AI workloads. Training runs and batch inference are latency-tolerant (they don’t need instantaneous response), yet data centers treat them like mission-critical transactions. Without intelligent orchestration to reshape and shift flexible workloads around peaks, enormous compute capacity sits stranded. Data centers are simultaneously power-constrained and sitting on vast unused capacity they can’t unlock.

This gap between provisioned capacity and actual usage represents one of the most interesting economic opportunities in the entire compute value chain.

Hammerhead AI is turning this hidden capacity into usable compute. Their technology applies the founders’ experience orchestrating gigawatt-scale virtual power plants to AI infrastructure, dynamically coordinating rack-level power, GPU load, cooling, UPS systems, and on-site storage. MCJ is excited to back Hammerhead AI in its $10M Seed led by Buoyant Ventures. Keep reading to see how Hammerhead fits squarely into our new investment theses.

What is Hammerhead AI?

Hammerhead’s software, known as ORCA (Orchestrated RL Control Agents), transforms the data center from a static, over-provisioned asset into a responsive, power-aware system. By reshaping workloads and orchestrating power in real time, Hammerhead enables facilities to generate 20–30% more compute output from the same grid allocation.

Why Did We Invest?

Unlocking the AI Value Chain

We invested in Hammerhead because it sits at one of the most valuable bottlenecks in the AI value chain. Electricity demand is rising faster than supply, and data centers must make every electron more productive. While the market chases new generation or long-duration storage, Hammerhead tackles the problem from the inside out—unlocking more performance from infrastructure operators already have. Instead of delaying deployments or turning away customers, data centers can use their existing power far more intelligently.

The market dynamic strengthens Hammerhead’s position over time. As the industry races to deploy power-hungry GPUs and build new capacity, today’s capital surge may eventually overshoot demand. When that happens, operators will face a second wave of pressure: optimizing operating costs for all this new infrastructure. Power is already the largest line item in data-center P&L. At hundreds of megawatts, even small efficiency gains drive significant margin expansion. Hammerhead becomes a structural OPEX optimizer—extracting more productive compute from each watt. In a world where building capacity is increasingly straightforward but operating it efficiently is not, this platform could be a long-term margin engine.

Founder-Market Fit

What gives us even more confidence is the team behind the technology. Rahul Kar and Rajeev Singh previously were executives at AutoGrid, where they built and scaled industrial control systems overseeing more than 8 GW of orchestrated energy resources before the company’s acquisition by Schneider Electric. Their expertise in mission-critical energy control, industry first cloud NERC-CIP attestation, and large-scale grid integration is exceptionally rare in the AI infrastructure world.

Additional Resources

• Hammerhead AI’s founding story

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The energy transition is colliding with the harsh reality of time. We don’t have the infrastructure or the systems in place to build fast enough. From clean power plants to advanced manufacturing facilities, deploying next-generation technologies requires an unprecedented buildout of physical infrastructure.

But there’s a catch. The engineering and construction industry isn’t designed for this type of speed or innovation. Traditional Engineering, Procurement, and Construction (EPC) firms are structured for predictability, safety, and large-scale, repeatable projects. They require detailed project scopes up front, and they bill by the hour. All of this makes them a poor fit for startups and scale-ups deploying first-of-a-kind (FOAK) technologies, where iteration is part of the process.

Unlimited Industries is changing that. The company is addressing the gap between today’s infrastructure demands and the outdated tools and workflows of traditional EPC firms, with an AI-native platform to automate project design.

At MCJ, we believe the energy and industrial transition won’t happen without a rethinking of how things get built. That’s why we’re excited to participate in Unlimited Industries’ $12M Seed Round, alongside CIV, Andreessen Horowitz, and other early supporters.

What is Unlimited Industries?

Unlimited is rebuilding the infrastructure development stack from first principles. Instead of forcing startups to work with legacy EPCs, Unlimited’s Project Development Platform enables continuous, AI-powered design iteration, optimizing everything from equipment selection to site layout in real time.

Where traditional firms might model 3-5 design options before locking in a plan, Unlimited’s platform can model thousands of permutations across cost, performance, and risk factors. This approach minimizes capital waste, avoids suboptimal builds, and aligns engineering services with startup-style iteration cycles.

On a recent industrial project, Unlimited reduced the time required for pre-construction engineering from six months to just a few weeks, allowing work to begin far earlier while improving design certainty. In another, its AI platform explored tens of thousands of potential configurations and identified an optimal design that reduced projected capital costs by over 50%.

While their goal is to automate all construction projects, the company is starting with what’s most needed now: rapidly building power in the US for data centers, critical minerals, and advanced manufacturing projects. They currently work with a wide range of customers in this space, from 100 year old public companies to cutting edge energy startups.

In short: Unlimited is bringing software speed and flexibility to hardware-scale projects. We believe this is a critical unlock for delivering the energy transition on the timeline we need.

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Alex Modon serves as Unlimited’s Co-founder and CEO. He’s a multidisciplinary engineer and exited entrepreneur who spent the last two years working alongside founders, the Department of Energy, and research institutions to commercialize deep tech innovations. His background gives him direct experience with the challenges early-stage climate and industrial tech companies face when trying to scale from prototype to infrastructure deployment.

Jordan Stern, Co-founder, was the founding engineer at Rupa Health, where he led product, design, and AI from inception through a successful nine-figure exit. His expertise in building scalable, AI-driven platforms is critical to Unlimited’s strategy of automating and optimizing engineering and construction workflows, a sector historically underserved by modern software tools.

And finally, Tara Viswanathan, Co-founder, was the CEO and Co-founder of Rupa Health, leading the company through rapid growth and a nine-figure acquisition in 2024. She brings extensive experience in startup operations, go-to-market strategy, and scaling service-tech business models.

Unlimited’s core team beyond its founders include:

James Betts, Head of Projects, is a chartered mechanical engineer with 15+ years delivering infrastructure across oil & gas, hydrogen, mining, and transmission. James has led multi-million and billion-dollar projects at BP, PwC, and Anglo American/First Mode, where he ran their EPC team.

Russ Higgins brings over a decade of multidisciplinary engineering and management experience. His work spans the full product lifecycle, from concept design to operations, for both vehicle product and infrastructure projects. Russ specializes in model-based and optimization-focused approaches to complex problems that have unlocked tens of millions in savings and guided hundred-million-dollar projects.

Multiple Catalysts Converging

This investment in Unlimited Industries aligns with MCJ’s New Industrialism thesis, as multiple catalysts are converging to create a rare opportunity to modernize how infrastructure is built. A wave of well-capitalized climate tech companies is moving from pilot to commercial deployment, creating unprecedented demand for new plants and facilities. At the same time, bipartisan infrastructure policies are accelerating project timelines, while AI capabilities have reached a maturity level that makes complex engineering workflows faster, cheaper, and smarter. Legacy EPC firms are not designed for this moment for all of the reasons we listed above. Meanwhile, an aging EPC workforce is creating critical knowledge gaps that technology must fill. Unlimited’s AI-driven platform directly addresses these challenges, bringing startup-style speed, automation, and aligned incentives to industrial development. By backing Unlimited, MCJ is supporting a new class of infrastructure partner to meet the scale and urgency of the energy transition.

Additional Resources

• AI-Powered Infrastructure Development with Unlimited Industries

• The Rise of American Dynamism with a16z

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Of all the founders we’ve backed at MCJ, Dr. Stephen Beaton stands out for how methodically he’s building Circularity Fuels. Stephen brought an unusual background to entrepreneurship, with a chemistry PhD from Oxford and years in the US Air Force overseeing jet fuel quality control in the Middle East. He also had a leadership stint at the Air Force’s E-fuels program, where he awarded their first E-fuels contract. Stephen witnessed firsthand the Pentagon’s interest in distributed fuel production for Pacific Theater operations and understood both the technical challenges and the market realities of competing in the fuels industry.

The problem Circularity Fuels solves is one of the most critical in the energy transition. Aviation, shipping, and chemical manufacturing will depend on liquid fuels and specialized gases for decades, regardless of how quickly we electrify other sectors. These industries need molecules, not just electrons. Stephen’s technology synthesizes those molecules from air, water, and renewable electricity, offering a credible pathway to decarbonize essential industries without requiring trillions in infrastructure replacement.

MCJ is proud to be have invested in Circularity Fuels (CF) at the pre-seed stage. Keep reading to learn more about our thesis for supporting Dr. Beaton and his team.

What is Circularity Fuels?

CF builds compact, vertically integrated reactors that convert waste carbon streams—starting with biogas from dairies, landfills, and food waste—into sustainable liquid fuels, especially sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Their platform converts mixed hydrocarbons into syngas, then uses Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, a chemical process that builds liquid fuels from gas, to produce drop-in jet fuel. It’s designed for small footprints, flexible operation, and high purity.

By rethinking reactor architecture (not simply repurposing oil & gas hardware), CF targets lower capex/opex and faster deployment, enabling cost-competitive, potentially carbon-negative SAF at scale.

Why Did We Invest?

Finding Market Fit First

CF’s CEO and Co-founder, Dr. Stephen Beaton, took an unconventional path that most deep-tech founders overlook: he found a paying customer before chasing the biggest market. Rather than competing with commodity fossil fuels from day one, Stephen partnered with synthetic diamond growers who pay nearly $80,000 per ton for ultra-high-purity methane.

That early beachhead de-risked the business on several fronts. It proved the reactors could operate at a commercial scale inside diamond facilities. It also generated early revenue that quickly attracted more than $5 million in non-dilutive grants from ARPA-E, NSF, and the California Energy Commission. These early wins attracted top-tier backers and built confidence in CF’s approach.

CF has since extended this strategy beyond diamonds. Its proprietary electric-powered Ouro Reactor recently turned raw biogas from a Central Valley dairy farm into syngas, the key precursor to SAF, using a unit that costs roughly one-hundredth as much as conventional reformers. This demonstration not only validates the technology’s flexibility but also opens a massive new opportunity to convert agricultural waste into jet fuel, giving airlines a cost-effective path to meet SAF mandates while unlocking new revenue streams for farmers.

Stephen’s “market-fit-first” approach gives CF a rare combination of early revenue, proven technology and a clear glide path from high-margin niches to multi-billion-dollar markets such as renewable natural gas and SAF.

Additional Resources

• From Diamonds to Sustainable Jet Fuel: the Story Behind Circularity Fuels

• E-fuels startup will make diamonds before powering jet planes (TechCrunch)

From heat pumps and home batteries to electric appliances and solar panels, smart products are transforming how we build and retrofit our homes. The promise isn’t just about accelerating the energy transition—it’s about creating genuinely better products that people actually want to use.

At MCJ, we’re backing the startups defining this new generation of home technology: companies building products that make our homes cleaner, healthier, and more efficient. Our portfolio includes Quilt’s elegantly designed heat pumps and Base Power’s distributed battery and energy storage solutions—products that don’t ask homeowners to compromise on performance or experience.

Today, we’re excited to announce our investment in Reservoir.

Reservoir is reimagining the heat pump water heater from the ground up. Their system delivers up to 6x the efficiency of gas units while solving frustrations that homeowners didn’t even know were solvable.

The standout feature? No-Wait Shower—hot water delivered to your faucet before you even turn it on. By intelligently combining heat pump technology with recirculation, Reservoir eliminates the wasteful ritual of running water down the drain while waiting for heat. It’s the kind of luxury-meets-efficiency innovation that changes how people think about “smart home” technology.

Reservoir’s Home Protect system brings commercial-grade monitoring to residential applications, using ultrasonic flow sensing powerful enough to detect thermal expansion. It predicts freezing pipes, alerts you to leaks, and uses electronic corrosion control to extend tank life up to 20 years. And all of it is controllable from anywhere. This is home technology that doesn’t just perform better—it makes daily life noticeably better.

We’re excited to announce that MCJ participated in Reservoir’s $5 million Seed round, led by Founder Collective.

What is Reservoir?

Reservoir is the world’s smartest water heater, engineered to deliver efficiency without sacrifice. The system achieves up to 6x the efficiency of traditional gas tank heaters while introducing three core innovations that fundamentally improve the hot water experience.

Thermal Intelligence - Reservoir’s adaptive software ensures you get plenty of hot water without oversizing your system. By intelligently managing heating cycles and capacity, it delivers performance that makes traditional sizing calculations obsolete.

No-Wait Shower - The signature feature that makes Reservoir instantly recognizable: hot water at your faucet before you even turn it on. Reservoir is the only water heater smart enough to combine a heat pump with recirculation, eliminating the waste of running water down the drain while waiting for heat. It’s a luxury experience that also happens to be dramatically more efficient.

Home Protect - Commercial-grade protection designed for residential homes. Reservoir’s system includes:

• Ultrasonic flow sensing so powerful it can detect the thermal expansion of water, catching leaks before they become disasters

• Predictive monitoring that alerts freezing pipe danger

• Active protection using built-in recirculation to heat hot water lines

• Electronic corrosion control that extends tank life up to 20 years

All of this is manageable from anywhere through Reservoir’s app, giving residents as much or as little control over the home’s hot water system.

Reservoir works by managing four independent heating elements, including an ultra-efficient heat pump, to deliver abundant hot water with maximum efficiency. Unlike traditional heaters that simply fire on demand, Reservoir uses intelligence to decide when and how to store energy. In practice, it becomes a thermal battery that provides a foundation for future feature upgrades.

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Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

While Reservoir’s product sets a new standard for heat pump water heaters, we invested in their stellar team. Water heating accounts for 20% of home energy use, making it one of the highest-impact opportunities in residential decarbonization—and we couldn’t be more excited to back the founders reimagining it.

The company’s co-founders crossed paths via the MCJ network in the summer of 2023. Luke Winston was exploring his next adventure after scaling one of the most iconic 3D-printing companies in the world, and Gabe Parisi-Amon was looking to build his next startup in the electrification space after a long career as an Apple supply chain leader.

Reinventing a $100B+ home energy market requires an unusual combination: proven hardware scale-up experience, climate tech impact, and deep technical expertise. Reservoir’s leadership has all three.

Luke Winston (CEO) scaled Formlabs from an early-stage startup into a $2B global 3D printing leader with 1,000 employees, building out its 300-person sales and service organization along the way. He has deep experience taking novel hardware products from lab prototype to mass adoption. Luke holds degrees in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard, plus an MBA and MPP in Climate Policy from Harvard Business School and the Kennedy School.

Gabriel Parisi-Amon (CPO) co-founded Nebia (YC ’15), a water technology company that saved 1 billion gallons of water and 40 GWh of energy before its 2023 acquisition. He brings consumer product design expertise and a proven track record building climate hardware that customers love. Gabe holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Jake Felser (CTO) is a full-stack engineering leader who served as CTO at Freight Farms and VP at Eatsa, with expertise spanning mechanical, electrical, firmware, and software systems. He also built the San Francisco office for Cooper Perkins, giving him the cross-disciplinary depth to integrate advanced hydronics, heat pumps, and machine learning into one cohesive product. Jake holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Olin College.

Together, the team combines proven go-to-market execution, thoughtful consumer product design, and comprehensive technical expertise—everything needed to transform how Americans heat water in their homes.

A Wedge with Grid-Scale Potential

Reservoir is starting with domestic water heating—a $15B annual replacement market—but the technology unlocks something far more valuable. By integrating heat pumps, advanced hydronics, and machine learning, Reservoir transforms hot water from a utility into a distributed energy asset.

At scale, millions of Reservoir units can function as a virtual power plant, delivering tens of gigawatt-hours of storage capacity and gigawatts of flexible demand response—all while improving, not compromising, the customer experience. Water is one of nature’s most efficient energy storage mediums, and Reservoir is the first to truly harness that potential at the residential level.

The path forward is clear: start with the water heater, expand into whole-home heating and cooling, and build the distributed thermal energy infrastructure that modern homes need. Reservoir isn’t just making a better appliance—they’re creating an expandable platform at the intersection of hardware, software, and the grid.

And progress has been swift. The company recently achieved full certification and is ramping up production just one year after raising its Seed funding. Reservoir is launching first in the Boston area, and we’re excited to support them as they scale from single-home installations to grid-scale impact.

The story of human civilization is the story of energy. Each leap forward, from wood to coal to oil, has unlocked new levels of prosperity and possibility. Today, we are on the cusp of another inflection point: a world of exponential energy demand, driven by electrification and AI. Meeting that demand with abundant energy will unlock breakthroughs across every sector of society, from medicine to manufacturing to space exploration – so long as that energy is affordable.

Fusion energy, the same process that powers the stars, offers an attractive solution to this problem. It is safe, limitless, and now, within reach. For the first time in history, we have a clear path to harness this stellar power here on Earth — not in 30 years, but within the next decade.

The decisive factors will be time and cost. Fusion will not transform the world until it can deliver power cheaper than fossil fuels and deploy at scale even faster. Building on recent scientific breakthroughs, the primary remaining challenge is engineering systems that can operate reliably, at scale, and at a price point that’s cost competitive.

Dozens of companies are racing to reach that milestone. Every dollar invested, every advance in design and supply chains, and every supportive policy brings us closer to a future where fusion is not just possible, but can also outcompete all other power sources on cost and scale.

Energy’s Holy Grail

The prospect of fusion energy has captivated scientists for more than 100 years, since British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington first hypothesized in the 1920s that stars released energy through the fusion of atoms. Humankind has always looked up to the sun as the source of life and energy. Well, it’s also powered by fusion energy, which works by taking two hydrogen atoms and squeezing them together at high temperature and pressure until they fuse into helium and release energy. It’s a process that, according to Einstein’s famous equation E=mc², converts a small amount of mass into huge amounts of energy. That energy can be harnessed to generate limitless amounts of emissions-free electricity — provided we can produce it reliably and affordably enough here on earth.

Actually achieving fusion has eluded scientists for decades, largely because recreating the sun’s conditions required levels of heat and pressure that pushed the limits of available technology – until a series of breakthroughs reframed the timeline.

Everything changed in December 2022. After decades of research, a series of scientific breakthroughs charted a real path toward viable fusion energy. First, scientists at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California achieved controlled fusion ignition, demonstrating the physical conditions needed for commercial relevance. Around the same time, the Z Machine, 1,000 miles away at Sandia National Labs in New Mexico, showed that a more energy-efficient path to ignition was possible using pulsed electrical current rather than lasers.

Neither facility was designed to release net energy or generate electricity, but the breakthroughs energized the private sector. There are now 53 companies around the world actively working to commercialize fusion, according to the Fusion Industry Association. They’ve raised a combined more than $10 billion in private capital, with more than 30% of that raised in the past year alone.

Fusion’s appeal is clear. It uses fuel sources abundant enough to last for billions of years. It’s safe and, unlike nuclear fission, it neither “melts down” nor produces high-level radioactive waste. It’s clean, with no greenhouse gas emissions. Critically, the demand for low-cost, carbon-free, on-demand power has never been higher. The explosion of artificial intelligence is one reason why the U.S. is experiencing electricity load growth at levels not seen since the end of World War II.

The industry is now racing toward the next major milestone: net facility gain — that long-sought point at which a fusion system as a whole produces more energy output than is initially stored. This is essential, but it’s still only part of the challenge. Net facility gain will prove that fusion power is possible, but it won’t prove that it’s yet practical at scale. To become a viable source of low-cost, on-demand electricity deployed fast enough to meet soaring global energy demand, fusion must overcome the same kinds of hurdles that automobiles once faced: building infrastructure, reducing costs, and earning public trust. So while what once seemed like science fiction is quickly becoming real, we must also solve several practical challenges, starting with:

#1 Designing for safety, low-cost and repairability

To compete with existing sources of energy, fusion must be able to deliver reliable power for less than $100 per MWh — an approximate threshold for market viability today. That means:

• Reducing capital expenditure for deployment. The rise of modular design has transformed replicable construction, significantly cutting build times and construction costs. This philosophy applies to energy-related megaprojects, too, where replicable modularity in design and speed in iteration can play a critical role in project success. Fusion systems should be similarly modular for affordable deployment, with components that can be shipped in containers and assembled quickly.

• Reducing maintenance complexity and increasing operational performance. Fusion systems will inevitably suffer from wear and tear: Plasma-facing surfaces must either survive extreme conditions for extended periods of time or be rapidly and cost-effectively replaced. Systems that are designed with this in mind – with standardized, modular parts, or materials that are durable or self-healing – can minimize downtime for both planned and unplanned maintenance.

• Ensuring operational safety. The safety of workers, communities and the environment is paramount. Fusion systems are different from traditional nuclear fission reactors in that they do not produce high-level nuclear waste, have no potential for meltdown, and do not use fissile material. However, like any power plant, it is still essential that they be designed and built for safe operations. Affordable and robust shielding around plasma regions, remote operation and monitoring technologies, and comprehensive safety protocols will be essential.

#2 Building systems for resource availability

The generation of fusion power is just the midpoint of a complex chain of supply and delivery. To ultimately deliver electrons to the grid, we’ll need:

• A sustainable fusion fuel economy. Fusion fuel commonly consists of two isotopes of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Deuterium can be easily extracted from water. Tritium, on the other hand, is rare in nature and requires specialized processes to produce sufficient quantities to support the growth of the new fusion energy industry. The degree of tritium handling complexity scales with its volume. As a result, viable systems must (1) minimize how much tritium is required, (2) engineer systems to produce tritium efficiently, and (3) minimize losses via efficient recycling — all while working with governments to secure stable reserves.

• Systems made from simple, domestic building blocks. Fusion systems designed with simple, widely available materials, including components sourced from a broad range of domestic suppliers, will more readily ensure a clear path to widespread deployment. The Fusion Industry Association’s 2025 Supply Chain report warns that the availability of parts at scale remains a serious vulnerability. This is particularly true for fusion systems reliant on inherently rare or expensive materials – or supply chains only available overseas. As the semiconductor industry has shown, robust domestic supply chains are essential for affordable deployment and also for energy and national security.

#3 Appropriate regulation

The fastest way to slow fusion deployment is to lump its regulation together with fission.

Fortunately, in 2024, the U.S. passed the bipartisan ADVANCE Act, which formally clarified that fusion should not be regulated like conventional nuclear fission reactors. This created a path forward for fusion energy, and followed years of detailed deliberation by the nation’s nuclear regulator, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It served as an acknowledgment that fusion’s safety profile is fundamentally different from that of fission’s. Implementing rules anticipated for release by the end of 2027 will provide the needed regulatory momentum for future fusion deployment.

What matters now is implementation, especially at the state and local level, to ensure the timely approval of fusion power plants. By following federal direction, state policymakers can craft a regulatory framework that supports safe deployment with clear but flexible rules, consistent timelines, and efficient processes.

Building for the future

Achieving net facility gain may be the next major breakthrough, but realizing this vision of abundant commercial fusion energy will depend upon solving a series of manufacturing and regulatory challenges.

These hurdles are not new: nearly every major energy source or revolutionary technology has faced a similar landscape. For cars, deployment accelerated once the Ford Model T transformed mass manufacturing with the assembly line, greatly lowering costs and democratizing ownership. While fusion is uniquely situated to address the complex challenges of the coming decades, it too will require favorable conditions to turn scientific progress into scalable power.

That moment is now within reach. The breakthroughs of recent years have de-risked the science; what remains is the race to industrialize the technology. Companies that can deliver reliable, modular systems, build resilient supply chains, and navigate regulation with speed will unlock an energy source with virtually no fuel constraints and a cost curve that only improves with scale. The next frontier is not proving that fusion works, but proving it works cheaper and faster than the alternatives.

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🎙️ The Inevitable Podcast

🐺 Colossal Biosciences is rewriting the rulebook on life itself. CEO Ben Lamm shares how his team uses synthetic biology and AI to resurrect extinct species—from dire wolves to future woolly mammoths—and build a venture-scale de-extinction platform. Listen to the episode.

💎 Circularity Fuels is turning waste carbon into high-value products, and starting with lab-grown diamonds. CEO Stephen Beaton shares how this bold beachhead market proves their reactor tech before scaling to sustainable aviation fuel. MCJ is proud to be an investor in Circularity Fuels. Listen to the episode and check out Stephen’s Guide to First-Market Fit for Climate Tech Founders.

🎥 The Lean Back

Electrifying marine vessels with Arc Boat Company.

👩‍💻 Climate Jobs

Check out the Job Openings space in the MCJ Collective Member Hub or the MCJ Job Board for more.

• Training Manager at Aalo Atomics (Idaho Falls, ID)

• Validation Engineer at Base Power Company (Austin, TX)

• Operations Manager at Charm Industrial (Fort Lupton, CO)

• Staff Software Engineer at Crusoe (SF, CA)

• Senior Mechanical Engineer at Kodama (Remote)

• Senior Accountant at Lightship (Broomfield, CO)

• Senior Director, Software Engineering at The Nuclear Company (Seattle, WA)

• Head of Product Marketing at Patch (SF, CA)

• Head of HR & Recruiting at Runwise (New York, NY)

• Director - Utility Business Development at Weave Grid (SF, CA)

• Sr. Process Engineer at Windfall Bio (Houston, TX)

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💭 If you have feedback or items you’d like to include, feel free to reach out.

🤝 If you’d like to join the MCJ Collective, apply today.

💡 Have a climate-related event or content topic that you’d like to see in the MCJ newsletter? Email us at content@mcj.vc

Consider the US’ current energy mix: solar/wind, nuclear, natural gas, coal, and geothermal.

• Four of these are firm baseload sources, critical for keeping the grid stable.

• Only two – nuclear and geothermal — run at capacity factors above 80%, providing round-the-clock reliability.

• And just one of them comes with zero fuel costs: geothermal.

And yet, when we look at the breakdown:

Despite being one of the reliable forms of clean baseload power, geothermal is a drop in the US energy bucket.

Why?

A combination of high OPEX and CAPEX costs, and an inability to access project financing, all underpinned by geologic risk.

But with loosening regulatory restrictions and new drilling technologies bringing faster project timelines, coupled with insatiable demand for baseload power, private capital into next-gen geothermal startups has grown more than 5× since 2021.

Despite these tailwinds, one bottleneck remains: deep tech energy startups must access FOAK project financing- that is, non-dilutive capital for new technologies to grow from pilot to commercial scale.

Rodatherm aims to pave a path for the new era of geothermal to achieve “product-finance fit” by focusing on low-risk sedimentary geology, lowering operations and maintenance (O&M) through a closed-loop process design, and maximizing heat output with an optimized working fluid.

MCJ is excited to announce our investment in Rodatherm’s $38M Series A led by Evok Innovations, with participation from TDK Ventures, Toyota Ventures, TechEnergy Ventures, Active Impact Investments, among others.

What is Rodatherm?

Rodatherm is building a ‘heat pump’ at depth, a closed-loop advanced geothermal system designed to deliver clean, firm baseload power at or below the cost of fossil fuels.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Curtis Cook, Rodatherm is built for bankability. The company drastically reduces both technical and geological risk by leveraging proven oil and gas industry components, targeting sedimentary basins, and using organic working fluids.

The Rodatherm loop design is targeting an LCOE of $50/MWh. This is achieved in part by maximizing both conductive and convective heat transfer from hot wet rock, and by using a heat extraction process that is 50% more efficient than traditional water-based binary systems. The closed-loop nature of the system negates any fluid loss and limits corrosion, further reducing O&M costs while increasing the system’s reliability and longevity to well over 40 years. As the system is completely closed, there are no emissions to the atmosphere.

Rodatherm’s CEO, Curtis Cook, has a track record of building and scaling large-scale energy businesses. Most recently, he founded Vesta Energy, transforming a single well discovery into a shale company with a $1B asset value. The design of Rodatherm’s 5-loop closed system was built from Curtis’ decades of experience in horizontal drilling at Vesta and his other ventures.

Operating in stealth since 2022, Rodatherm has a pilot project underway in Utah, with plans for testing its 1.8 MW demonstration project by the end of 2026. Rodatherm has also secured an offtake agreement with UAMPS, the local power utility.

Why Did We Invest?

Product-Financing Fit

In today’s energy landscape, product–market fit is clear - the world has an insatiable appetite for clean, firm baseload power. The harder challenge is product–finance fit: securing the non-dilutive, project-level capital required to build high-CAPEX, first-of-a-kind plants. This financing bottleneck (often called “Valley of Death”) is the critical stopgap for scaling deep-tech energy solutions.

Curtis and the Rodatherm team are tackling this head-on. With decades of experience financing and scaling multi-billion-dollar energy projects, Curtis knows that a technology must be engineered not just for physics, but for project finance underwriting. Every element of Rodatherm’s design reflects this: off-the-shelf oil and gas components, a well-understood process cycle, a closed-loop system with no fluid loss or corrosion, sedimentary basins with low subsurface risk, and efficient PAD design to maximize capital efficiency.

This focus on bankability—reducing risk, stabilizing costs, and boosting efficiency— positions Rodatherm to effectively navigate its non-dilutive financing needs after the completion and successful demonstration of its pilot project in Utah. We are thrilled to support Rodatherm in its mission to bring firm, carbon-free baseload power to the U.S. grid and to markets around the world.

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The rise in data centers comes with an obvious surge in power demand. Massive clusters of GPUs now require gigawatts of new electricity, and the growth curve is only accelerating. Global electricity demand is set to double by 2050. But the grid was not built for this pace. Interconnection queues stretch for years, renewable projects wait for transmission upgrades, and reliability expectations for critical computing approach 100% uptime.

Where will the energy-hungry AI era find round-the-clock, carbon-free power? Nuclear delivers true clean baseload electricity, power that’s available every hour of every day, independent of weather or geography. To meet the unprecedented demands of hyperscale computing, Aalo is building nuclear plants purpose-built for the data-center economy.

After following the team’s progress for a while, we’re thrilled to share that MCJ has joined Aalo’s $100 million Series B, led by Valor Equity Partners.

What is Aalo?

Aalo is building factory-manufactured 50-megawatt nuclear plants, designed as pods of five 10-megawatt reactors. These “XMRs” (extra-modular reactors) are inspired by the MARVEL test reactor at Idaho National Lab, where Co-founder and CTO Yasir Arafat was chief designer.

Matt Loszak, the company’s CEO and Co-founder, explains that in conventional nuclear, “the reactor is not the product, the plant is the product.” Aalo’s approach reimagines the whole nuclear facility—reactors, turbine, containment, and balance-of-plant—as a single modular product built off-site. This factory model solves the cost overruns and decade-long timelines that have historically hampered nuclear development. The plants ship pad-ready, plug-and-play, slashing siting and interconnection timelines for data-center customers.

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

In just a short time, Aalo’s team has proven its ability to execute at a pace rarely seen in advanced nuclear.

Matt Loszak is a serial entrepreneur with a background in engineering and physics, and more than a decade in the software startup world. Before founding Aalo, Matt co-founded a B2B SaaS platform that scaled to 150 employees, raised over $50M in funding, and exited earlier this year.

Yasir Arafat, Aalo’s CTO and Co-founder, is a recognized leader in the nuclear industry. Yasir founded Westinghouse’s eVinci microreactor program and later led the Department of Energy’s MARVEL project, achieving the first DOE reactor authorization in just 30 months with his core team. At Aalo, he brings unmatched experience in pioneering advanced reactor technologies and driving them from concept to regulatory approval.

A notable senior leader is Jon Guidroz, who serves as Aalo’s SVP. Jon previously served as Director of Energy at Microsoft, Google, and AWS, where he authored the original six-pager that led Jeff Bezos to launch Amazon’s energy vertical. He brings decades of experience at the intersection of technology, energy, and hyperscale data centers to Aalo’s mission of delivering abundant, low-cost clean power.

Key Developments

Not only is Aalo’s founding roster stacked with the skills and expertise needed to tackle energy-hungry data centers, but the company has created a strong competitive position in the advanced nuclear space, and has executed tremendously well in a short period of time.

Aalo’s modular-based approach is optimized for data center development patterns, as the company is targeting 52-week deployment versus industry norms of 10-15 years. While the timeline remains unproven at commercial scale, the company has achieved a vertically integrated manufacturing platform with an operational factory in Austin.

The regulatory environment for nuclear energy has dramatically improved under the administration's May 2025 executive orders mandating 18-month NRC review timelines, designating AI data centers as 'critical defense facilities,' and setting a 400 GW nuclear target by 2050. The relaunch of the DOE's $900M SMR program and new executive orders enabling commercial reactors on federal land directly benefit Aalo's data center partnerships. The U.S. Department of Energy also selected Aalo as one of 11 companies in the President’s Nuclear Reactor Pilot Program, aiming to achieve criticality of at least three test reactors by July 4, 2026. And finally, the company recently celebrated its Aalo-X groundbreaking in the desert beside INL, just two years after its founding in 2023.

For all of these reasons, MCJ is proud to back the team at Aalo as they continue to see success and reach milestones at record speed.

Additional Resources:

• Redesigning Nuclear Reactors for Mass Manufacturing with Aalo

• The Most Important Nuclear Reactor (You’ve Never Heard of) by Matt Lozak

• Aalo Atomics raises $100M to build a microreactor and data center together

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