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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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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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.

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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Earth data is one of the most powerful but underutilized resources on the planet. Satellites generate more than 100 terabytes of imagery every day, yet turning that data into usable insights is costly, complex, and accessible to only a handful of experts. Answering even basic questions like how wildfire firebreaks have shifted, or whether farmland is being encroached upon, can require custom datasets, teams of GIS specialists, and six-figure budgets.

With increasing climate risks and intensifying natural disasters, geospatial data and modeling are critical to improving resiliency for communities and habitats alike. LGND is solving this problem by creating a foundational geospatial intelligence layer for AI. The company transforms messy Earth data into searchable embeddings that can be queried as easily as text. Instead of bespoke pipelines and retraining models for every use case, analysts and developers can instantly build applications on top of LGND’s infrastructure spanning government, insurance, supply chain, agriculture, climate resilience, and real estate.

MCJ is proud to back Nat Manning and the entire LGND team in the company’s $9M Seed round led by Javelin Venture Partners, with participation from AENU, Space Capital, Overture, Ridgeline, Coalition Operators, Clocktower Ventures, and more.

What is LGND?

LGND is building the infrastructure that makes Earth data usable at scale. At the core of the platform is a geospatial foundation model that takes in raw inputs such as satellite imagery, GIS files, and environmental datasets, and transforms them into embeddings, a compact and AI-ready format that captures relationships across space and time.

These embeddings are then organized in a vector database, making it possible to search and analyze Earth data as easily as typing a query. Instead of commissioning bespoke models or waiting months for custom pipelines, organizations can instantly ask place- and time-specific questions—like tracking how wildfire firebreaks have shifted, measuring deforestation over time, or monitoring supply chain assets against flooding risks.

LGND delivers this capability through both a no-code enterprise app and a developer API, enabling everyone from analysts to engineers to build applications on top of the same intelligence layer.

We believe LGND’s result is a step-change: turning what used to be one-off, six-figure projects into scalable, repeatable workflows that can inform decisions in real-time. Insurers can assess climate risk, logistics companies can optimize supply chains against environmental threats, governments can accelerate disaster response, and investors can evaluate physical asset exposure at a global scale. By transforming Earth into a searchable layer of intelligence, LGND moves geospatial data from a niche specialty to a foundational tool for climate resilience and economic decision-making.

Why Did We Invest?

MCJ bets on founders with a proven track record in building and scaling companies, and the folks behind LGND are no different.

Nat Manning, Co-founder and CEO, is the former founder of Kettle, an AI-driven reinsurance platform for properties exposed to climate disasters. He was named to the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023. Earlier, he served as Chief Data Officer at USAID and CEO of Ushahidi, where he scaled the world’s largest open-source crisis response platform. As a longtime builder and investor at the intersection of AI, climate, and resilience, Nat brings a rare mix of technical depth, policy experience, and entrepreneurial track record to LGND.

LGND’s Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Bruno Sánchez-Andrade Nuño, previously co-founded and led Clay, the leading open-source AI for Earth initiative. Before that, he launched Microsoft’s Planetary Computer to expand global access to environmental data, served as Chief Scientist at Mapbox, and directed data projects at the World Bank. The author of Impact Science and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, Bruno brings unmatched expertise in applying AI and data to global environmental challenges.

Dan Hammer is the Co-founder and chief product officer at LGND. He is also a Co-founder of Clay and Ode. Dan has worked across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, with experience at The White House, NASA, Google X, National Geographic, XPRIZE, and the World Resources Institute. He received the inaugural Pritzker Environmental Genius Award and holds a Ph.D. in environmental economics from UC Berkeley.

In addition to backing an impressive founding team, we believe LGND is building essential infrastructure for our modern world and mounting threats. Billion-dollar climate disasters in the U.S. have increased more than 8× since the 1980s, and utilities are now raising resilience spending by double digits each year. In that context, we see LGND as a critical enabler of infrastructure resilience, giving decision-makers the tools to anticipate and adapt to accelerating climate risk.

Additional Resources

Exclusive: LGND wants to make ChatGPT for the Earth [Tech Crunch]

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Data centers and the AI boom dominate the headlines. As demand for compute skyrockets, the infrastructure powering this growth is being pushed to its limits. Energy needs are surging, and demand is expected to grow 2x or more by 2030. Traditional power solutions can’t keep up—not in terms of cost, deployment speed, or reliability. The result? A scramble among entrepreneurs and investors to meet this moment with new energy technologies that can scale fast.

Meeting this rising demand requires more than just adding electrons to the grid. It calls for abundant, reliable, and locally sourced clean power that can be deployed fast. That’s where Exowatt comes in. By combining solar capture, thermal storage, and on-demand generation into a single modular unit, Exowatt delivers firm renewable power without the delays of interconnection or the constraints of fragile supply chains. It’s a system designed for the scale, speed, and resilience that the AI era demands—and a step toward a more abundant clean energy future.

MCJ is excited to participate in Exowatt’s Series A led by Felicis alongside co-investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Atomic, 8090 Industries, Starwood Capital, Thrive Capital, MVP Ventures, GOAT VC, and StepStone Group.

What is Exowatt?

Exowatt is developing a new model for renewable power delivery that pairs the scalability of solar with the reliability of always-on energy. Its flagship product, the Exowatt P3, is a modular, containerized unit that integrates solar energy capture, thermal storage, and on-demand power generation in a single package. Instead of converting sunlight directly into electricity via photovoltaics, Exowatt’s P3 uses large Fresnel lenses to concentrate solar energy into heat, which is then stored in proprietary solid-state thermal batteries. When power is needed, the stored heat drives an air-based engine to generate electricity, up to 24 hours a day. This approach, unlike conventional solar-plus-storage systems, enables longer-duration energy storage, lower system degradation, and dramatically simpler supply chains, using U.S.-sourced materials without rare earths or lithium.

🎙️Solar-Powered Data Centers w/ Exowatt

Because each module is factory-built and deployable off-grid, Exowatt can deliver clean, dispatchable energy with short lead times. Exowatt is ideal for AI data centers and industrial facilities struggling with grid congestion and long interconnection delays. With a demand backlog of more than hundreds of GWh and commercial deployments underway, the company is scaling fast to meet the moment.

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Exowatt’s founding team brings the kind of deep domain expertise and repeat founder experience we consistently look for—pairing technical depth with a proven ability to build and scale ambitious companies.

Hannan Happi is Co-founder and CEO of Exowatt. A mechanical engineer trained at the Technical University of Munich and Stanford GSB, he previously held roles at GE, Siemens, Accenture, and Tesla before co-founding Volansi, an autonomous drone logistics startup later acquired by a defense firm. Now based in Miami, Hannan is focused on building scalable, dispatchable energy solutions to meet the soaring power demands of the digital age.

Jack Abraham is Co-founder of Exowatt and Founder of Atomic, the venture studio behind startups like Hims & Hers, OpenStore, and Butter. Through Atomic, he has co-founded dozens of companies, including $HIMS, which went public just three years after launch. Prior to Atomic, Jack founded Milo, acquired by eBay at age 24, and has angel invested in companies like Pinterest, Uber, and Postmates. He studied at the Wharton School, where he designed his own major in Technological Entrepreneurship.

Built for Scale, Priced for Impact

Exowatt claims to have already achieved a competitive Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) of 4 cents/kWh, with the potential to drive down costs even further as its manufacturing scales. Compared to nuclear, geothermal, and solar PV plus storage, Exowatt may represent a more cost-effective and scalable path to clean, dispatchable power. Additionally, Exowatt’s use of abundant, domestically sourced materials like silicon composites, steel and glass has the potential to sidestep the volatile trade and tariff landscape that drives cost uncertainty for solar PV and battery systems. From day one, the company reverse-engineered its product with an economics-driven approach. We believe this level of intentionality positions Exowatt as one of the most promising solutions for delivering abundant clean energy in a time of unprecedented demand.

Additional Resources

• Solar-Powered Data Centers with Exowatt (Inevitable podcast)

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The rules of utility planning are being rewritten by climate volatility.

U.S. losses from billion-dollar climate disasters are now more than 8x higher than in the 1980s. Last year alone, the U.S. saw 27 climate-fueled disasters costing over $182 billion. For utilities, it’s a financial reckoning. Some storms are now racking up over $1.4 billion in losses for a single utility. In response, utilities are increasing resilience spending by 15–25% annually. As extreme weather grows more frequent and severe, grid operators need better tools to assess future risks, justify capital investments, and protect the communities they serve.

Rhizome was founded in 2023 to give utilities the data-driven answers they need. MCJ is excited to participate in Rhizone’s Seed Round led by Base10 Partners. Keep reading to learn more about Rhizome and why we invested.

What is Rhizome?

Rhizome is building an AI-powered software platform that helps electric utilities quantify climate risk, pinpoint infrastructure vulnerabilities, and prioritize grid resilience investments with the highest impact. At its core is a geospatial planning tool. Founder Mish Thadani describes it as “SimCity for resilience,” a tool that integrates climate projections, asset fragility data, and system topology to identify where outages are most likely and what interventions (like reconductoring, vegetation management, or covered conductors) will deliver the greatest bang for the buck. Its product suite includes tools for long-term grid reliability, wildfire mitigation, and asset risk and capacity planning.

Rhizome’s software addresses growing financial and regulatory pressure on utilities. By automating cost-benefit analyses, resilience impact modeling, and tracking investment benefits, it helps utilities justify infrastructure upgrades to regulators, critical at a time when over 100 utilities have faced credit downgrades and the sector is staring down a $500B resilience funding gap. It replaces disconnected, spreadsheet-heavy planning workflows with a unified platform designed for capital efficiency and regulatory alignment.

🎙️ Rhizome's Resilience Planning

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Rhizome was co-founded by Mish Thadani and Rahul Dubey, who bring deep expertise in grid resilience, AI, and climate risk modeling.

Mish, the company’s CEO, previously worked across public policy, advanced energy systems, and grid modernization, including roles in regulatory advocacy and distributed energy integration. Most notably, Mish served as the VP of Strategy and Policy at Urbint, an AI platform helping utilities predict and prevent safety risks to workers and critical infrastructure. His path to Rhizome started with a bold proposal to replace a $250M substation upgrade in D.C. with a distributed battery network, a move that foreshadowed his drive to challenge outdated grid planning norms.

Rahul, Rhizome’s CTO, is the former VP of Engineering at Jupiter Intelligence, a pioneer in climate risk analytics. With over 20 years of experience leading software and AI teams and building peta-scale distributed cloud systems, Rahul brings a rare combination of technical depth and domain fluency. Rahul also sits on the board of directors for MAAD and is a technology advisor to a few startups.

Early Customer Traction

Rhizome has already demonstrated real-world value, with its platform now in use at utilities like National Grid, Avangrid, and Seattle City Light. In one case, its models identified 72% more potential asset failures than the utility's prior approach. As aging infrastructure and climate-driven storms strain power systems nationwide, Rhizome equips planners with the data and foresight to strengthen the grid before disaster strikes.

At MCJ, we believe the investment case for infrastructure resilience today mirrors the early days of cybersecurity. Rhizome aligns with our thesis around digital tools that accelerate energy adaptation, unlock capital efficiency, and integrate with incumbent utility planning cycles. We’re excited to partner with Mish and the team as they expand across geographies, grow their team, and build out Rhizome’s platform capabilities.

Additional Resources

• 🎙️ MCJ Startup Series: Rhizome's Resilience Planning for Utilities

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For decades, fusion energy has been the ultimate scientific challenge—a tantalizing promise of clean, abundant power that has eluded researchers for over half a century. While numerous attempts have fallen short, recent scientific breakthroughs have transformed fusion from an impossible dream to a tractable set of engineering problems.

Pacific Fusion, founded in 2023 and based in Fremont, California, builds directly on the breakthrough ignition milestone that occurred at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in 2022. In particular, Pacific Fusion takes a pulsed magnetic approach - using electric currents to more efficiently create the physical conditions that delivered ignition on the NIF, and laying the foundation for a future powered by affordable fusion power. MCJ is proud to back Pacific Fusion in its Series A funding, led by General Catalyst, with participation from prominent investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Eric Schmidt, and Patrick Collison.

What is Pacific Fusion?

For many years, researchers have pursued different paths to fusion in parallel. Some built on relatively mature science but lacked a tractable path to low cost. Others had more tractable paths to low cost but lacked a strong scientific basis.

The story of Pacific Fusion begins in 2022, when a series of technical breakthroughs both demonstrated the conditions required for ignition and high gain and opened a clear path to building an affordable, deployable machine that can reach those conditions.

Instead of using lasers, Pacific Fusion employs fast-rising, high-current pulses to magnetically squeeze and heat a small fuel-filled metal cylinder, creating the extreme conditions necessary for fusion in a fraction of a second. This approach allows Pacific Fusion to build a machine that delivers 100-fold higher gain than has been demonstrated on the NIF - at less than 10% of the cost, driving a 1000x leap forward in practical performance without going beyond physical conditions already demonstrated.

This approach is uniquely suited to affordable deployment at scale for a few reasons.

First, the system is far more efficient than lasers, and can be made from modular, mass-manufacturable components to keep capital costs low. Second, it avoids challenges to affordable operations and maintenance faced by magnetic confinement approaches, including loss of plasma stability and a breakdown of magnetic confinement.

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Our investment in Pacific Fusion is more than a bet on a technology—it's a bet on human ingenuity. The caliber of the founding team cannot be overstated and is what foremost gives us strong conviction in the company’s future success.

Will Regan serves as President of Pacific Fusion. Will previously worked at ARPA-E co-developing the Accelerating Low-Cost Plasma Heating and Assembly (ALPHA) Program, where he gained an intimate understanding of the challenges and commercial viability of novel approaches to fusion. He then spent nearly eight years at Google’s moonshot division, X, where he founded the Mineral project and developed experience leading cross-functional teams working to achieve breakthrough engineering milestones.

Eric S. Lander serves as the Founding CEO of Pacific Fusion. Eric is a world-renowned scientist who has led major international projects (including the Human Genome Project), founded major scientific institutions (notably, the Broad Institute), founded companies, and advised the government. Eric is also a professor of biology at MIT and professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School.

Keith LeChien, CTO, holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and pulsed power science. Keith has had an extraordinary career leading pulsed magnetic fusion at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and served as the Director of Inertial Confinement Fusion at the National Nuclear Security Administration. This unique background makes him one of the leading experts in pulsed magnetic fusion. Keith is also one of the inventors of the Impedance-Matched Marx Generator (IMG), a technology that underpins Pacific Fusion’s architecture.

Pacific Fusion’s Senior Founding Engineer, Leland Ellison, worked as a computational physicist and lead magnetohydrodynamics developer for the Ares multiphysics code at LLNL. He is applying that experience at Pacific Fusion, serving as the Simulation and Modeling Lead.

The company’s COO, Carrie von Muench, brings wide-ranging business experience, including industrials & public sector consulting at Boston Consulting Group and early-pipeline strategy at Google X. She most recently served as an investor at Innovation Endeavors, founded by Eric Schmidt.

The founding team has also recruited a number of key employees, including Nathan Meezan, who spent over 20 years at LLNL leading target design teams and is now Head of Target Design at Pacific Fusion, and Alex Zylstra, principal experimentalist responsible for achieving ignition on NIF, now Head of Experiments at Pacific Fusion.

Leveraging NIF’s Ignition Breakthrough

On December 5, 2022, NIF announced a watershed achievement in which scientists conducted an experiment using a method known as inertial confinement fusion (ICF). During this historic experiment, scientists used 192 lasers to fire 2.05 megajoules of energy onto a target containing a tiny diamond capsule (which contained deuterium and tritium), resulting in fusion ignition that released 3.15 megajoules of energy—the first demonstration of net target-level energy gain from a controlled fusion reaction.

Thanks to its team and collaborators, Pacific Fusion draws on insights from the NIF and is advancing the lab’s progress by integrating key technologies like the impedance-matched Marx generator (IMG) pulsed power system and pulsed magnetic fusion concepts such as MagLIF. Once it is able to achieve “net facility gain” — net energy output at the facility level — the company sees several opportunities to commercialize its technology in electrical power and industrial process heat markets.

As Pacific Fusion moves toward net facility gain, its pathway to commercialization opens doors across electricity generation and high-heat industrial applications. It’s a bold bet—but one we believe is well-timed and deeply strategic.

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Hydrogen has long been hailed as a critical enabler of industrial decarbonization, with use cases spanning feedstock, power backup, fuel, and long-duration energy storage. But while the promise of green hydrogen is massive, its practicality has remained elusive. Today, the vast majority of hydrogen is produced centrally and transported via tankers or cylinder banks, a model that imposes steep economic and logistical penalties. The costs of compressing, transporting, and storing hydrogen are often 7 to 15 times higher than the cost of production itself. This has ultimately made the economics of hydrogen production difficult for smaller-scale production and use.

Fourier is turning this model on its head. By delivering cost-efficient, modular, and intelligent on-site hydrogen generation, Fourier removes the need for long-haul delivery and high-pressure storage —unlocking a new economic equation for industries that have been stuck paying a premium for access. MCJ is excited to participate in Fourier’s $18.5M Series A led by General Catalyst and Paramark Ventures with significant participation from Airbus Ventures, GSBackers, Borusan Ventures, Positive Ventures and others.

What is Fourier?

At its core, Fourier is rethinking how hydrogen gets made—not in centralized plants with billion-dollar infrastructure but locally, on demand, wherever it’s needed. The company’s flagship product is a modular hydrogen generator, designed from the ground up to be as flexible and scalable as a server rack. Built from an array of small, intelligent electrolysis stacks, each device is fully automated and optimized by software to respond to real-world operating conditions—adjusting in real time to degradation, shifting loads, and customer-specific usage patterns. This architecture allows Fourier to produce hydrogen from electricity and water at significantly lower cost than traditional transported hydrogen while also eliminating the need for high-pressure storage or volatile distribution systems. The system is fast to deploy, safe to operate, and built to scale. By putting smart hydrogen production at the edge of the grid, Fourier is unlocking new economics for industries that have historically been priced out of the hydrogen market.

🎙️ Distributed Hydrogen with Fourier

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Fourier is co-founded by Siva Yellamraju. A computer science graduate from IIT Guwahati with an MBA from Stanford, Siva has co-founded multiple startups across video collaboration, AI, and hardware—three of which were acquired by industry giants Poly, Google, and Apple. Most recently, he led camera innovation at Apple, including foundational work on features like Center Stage.

Ali-Amir Aldan is the co-founder of Fourier alongside Siva. Ali-Amir is a seasoned software and hardware systems engineer with deep expertise in embedded systems, imaging, and firmware. After graduating from MIT, he began his career at Google and Facebook before teaming up with Siva on two startups, including Akruta, where he led firmware development. Now as co-founder of Fourier, Ali applies his deep technical foundation to the electrochemical systems powering the future of distributed hydrogen.

Modular Architecture Built for Flex and Scale to Meet Mid-Market Industrial Demand

Hydrogen, already a $200B global market with strong unit economics for industrial feedstock, is expanding—yet a critical gap exists. While large industrial players enjoy cost-effective in-house production and smaller users accept expensive delivered hydrogen, mid-market users—petrochemical manufacturers, pharma producers, and metal refiners—have been left without viable options.

Fourier addresses this $40B opportunity with the first scalable hydrogen solution designed specifically for mid-market industrials. Traditional hydrogen systems feature massive, centralized infrastructure with monolithic electrolyzers, but Fourier's innovative approach uses small, interchangeable electrolysis stacks managed independently by integrated software. This fundamentally different architecture enables real-time optimization, graceful degradation as components wear down, and precise scaling based on actual customer needs.

The economic impact is transformative. Mid-market companies typically pay 2-4x the production cost for delivered hydrogen, burdened by the 7-15x cost premium of compression, transportation, and storage. Fourier eliminates these inefficiencies, delivering hydrogen at competitive costs without requiring massive capital investments while simultaneously improving safety, reducing emissions, and simplifying operations.

Market validation has been swift. After successful pilots with a pharmaceutical manufacturer and solar energy company in April 2024, Fourier has secured commercial-scale pilots across specialty chemicals, flat glass, and energy storage, with launches coming up in Ohio and California in 2025 and full deployments planned for early 2026.

As energy demands increase from AI and advanced technologies, Fourier's software-defined system is making hydrogen viable for industries historically priced out of the market—transforming the hydrogen economy through modularity, flexibility, and scale.

Additional Resources

• MCJ Startup Series: Distributed Hydrogen with Fourier

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At MCJ, we support founders driving the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy. To get to a fully renewable grid, power generators today face two major challenges: rising electricity demand and the need for reliable energy sources to complement intermittent renewables like wind and solar. The result is a difficult balancing act—existing infrastructure, such as natural gas plants, produces massive emissions. Yet firm, low-carbon baseload power remains essential until a fully clean grid is feasible. Addressing this challenge requires immediate solutions to drastically reduce or eliminate CO₂ emissions from existing power plants and industrial facilities.

To put this into concrete terms, with the rapid expansion of data centers, the growing adoption of electric vehicles, and heightened cooling needs from heat waves, the world is experiencing an unprecedented surge in energy demand after two decades of relative stability. In response, utilities have doubled their projected power needs through 2028, leading states like Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia to plan dozens of new natural gas power plants over the next 15 years to provide reliable baseload power. At the same time, natural gas remains a critical energy source beyond the grid, fueling a wide range of industrial processes that require behind-the-meter power and heat.

Point source carbon capture has emerged as a promising solution to meet growing energy demands while maintaining progress toward a cleaner grid by sequestering CO₂ directly from the fossil fuel combustion process. To this end, we’re proud to back Cameron Halliday, Danielle Colson, Sean Robertson, and the entire Mantel team in their Series A, co-led by Shell Ventures and Eni Next with participation from Engine Ventures, New Climate Ventures, and others. Keep reading to learn how Mantel reduces industrial CO₂ emissions through their unique carbon capture technology.

What is Mantel?

Boston-based Mantel aims to capture 95% of carbon emissions directly from industrial smokestacks, leveraging a novel high-temperature liquid solvent. This innovative technology uses molten salt that thrives in the high-heat environments typical of industrial processes.

Unlike traditional amine-based systems, which operate at lower temperatures and are prone to degradation in harsh conditions, Mantel's molten borates are specifically designed to handle industrial impurities such as sulfur oxides, nitrogen oxides, ash, and dust. This robustness ensures longer-lasting performance and reliability in demanding industrial settings.

Mantel's system achieves remarkable efficiency by recycling heat through the industrial process rather than generating extra heat for CO₂ release. This approach drastically reduces energy consumption and operational costs, overcoming the energy penalty that burdens traditional solutions like liquid amines. End-to-end, Mantel's carbon capture cuts costs by more than 50% compared to conventional methods, making it a financially attractive solution for industries with high emissions.

🎙️ MCJ Startup Series Podcast: Mantel

Additionally, Mantel's technology integrates seamlessly into existing infrastructure with minimal disruption to ongoing operations. By addressing the limitations of traditional carbon capture technologies, Mantel's molten salt innovation delivers a scalable, cost-effective path to cutting industrial emissions—helping accelerate the global transition to a net-zero future.

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Besides its innovative carbon capture solution, a key driver behind our investment in Mantel is the deep expertise and leadership of Cameron, Danielle, and Sean, each of whom brings a unique and valuable skill set to the company.

Cameron Halliday, the company’s CEO, is commercializing his PhD research, leveraging years of academic and industry experience to drive innovation in the field. Cameron developed Mantel’s core molten borate technology as part of his PhD/MBA in Chemical Engineering at MIT. He previously worked with Shell (new energies research & technology group), EGA, and ABB (process safety consulting). Cameron studied Chemical Engineering at Loughborough University, and he’s a member of Forbes 30 Under 30 Energy Class 2023.

Danielle Colson, Mantel’s COO, brings over 10 years of engineering, business operations, and startup experience to the Mantel team. She previously managed operations at natural gas combined cycle power plants at NextEra Energy. Danielle received her MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Duke University. She is also a member of Forbes 30 Under 30 Energy Class 2023.

Mantel’s CTO, Sean Robertson, is a nuclear engineer with specialized expertise in molten salt chemistry and material science. He previously worked at Transatomic Power, helping to design a molten-salt reactor. Sean holds his PhD in Nuclear Science and Engineering from MIT, a M.S. in Nuclear Reactor Physics and Engineering from the Université Paris-Saclay, and a B.S. in Chemistry from Mount Allison University.

As the world grapples with the dual challenge of rising energy demand and the urgent need to reduce emissions, we believe technologies like Mantel’s will play a critical role in bridging the gap. Their molten salt-based carbon capture solution doesn’t just offer incremental improvement—it rethinks how industrial decarbonization can be achieved at scale with lower costs and higher reliability. Backed by a deeply technical and mission-driven founding team, Mantel is poised to unlock a cleaner path forward for some of the world’s most emission-intensive sectors.

Additional Resources

• MCJ Startup Series: Cracking the Carbon Capture Challenge with Mantel

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The commuter motorcycle market is enormous, with an estimated 600 million vehicles currently on the road globally, and projections reaching 1.5 billion by 2040. Most of this growth will come from emerging economies, where rising demand for affordable, accessible transportation combined with rapid urbanization fuels the growing need for 100-200cc motorbikes.

While drivers prefer electric options, regions like India and East Africa remain dominated by petrol-powered bikes. Despite these bikes' high fuel cost and environmental impact in densely populated areas, petrol-powered models are often more affordable upfront than electric alternatives. At MCJ, we understand that without electric options matching the upfront cost, performance, and practicality of petrol-powered bikes, transitioning is difficult, if not impossible, for those who rely on them for their livelihoods.

That’s where Zeno comes in. The company is developing a 100-200cc equivalent electric motorcycle designed to compete directly with today’s most popular internal combustion engine models. Zeno uses a battery-as-a-service subscription model, allowing customers to purchase the motorcycle upfront and subscribe to access both the battery and Zeno's charging network. MCJ is excited to participate in Zeno’s Seed round, alongside firms such as Lowercarbon, Toyota Ventures, and others. Keep reading to see why we’re thrilled to support Michael Spencer and the team at Zeno as they address the electric 2-wheel mobility and energy gap in emerging markets.

What is Zeno?

Zeno is creating a comprehensive electric mobility ecosystem from the ground up. Serving emerging markets like India and East Africa, Zeno’s product features a 100-200 cc equivalent entry-level sport utility electric motorbike engineered to rival today’s top commuter motorcycles in every aspect. Zeno’s proprietary battery-as-a-service model allows riders to avoid the high upfront cost of purchasing a bike with a built-in battery. The company’s cloud-managed swap network ensures riders have seamless access to a dependable and flexible multimodal charging system, including battery swapping, public fast charging, and at-home slow charging options. This eliminates the wait time for recharging, reduces downtime, and increases reliability, making it easier for riders to stay on the road and boost their earning potential.

The primary audience for Zeno’s first product is motorbike taxi drivers, known as boda drivers in East Africa, who often cover up to 150 km daily on rugged terrain while transporting heavy loads. Current electric options are limited: low-quality pedal-assisted bikes struggle with durability, hills, and load capacity, while premium electric bikes come with built-in batteries that increase costs, require long charging times, and often need financing. Zeno provides a superior solution—offering better quality and affordability than both the low-end and premium electric alternatives, while enhancing the riding experience compared to gas-powered bikes.

Why Did We Invest?

Competitive Landscape

Most companies tackling two-wheel electric mobility today focus on e-bikes or lower-end scooters or mopeds, however, we believe the real market opportunity lies in the 100-200cc commuter motorcycle segment. Despite accounting for 60-80% of the global market, this segment is underserved in terms of electric options. Zeno is poised to fill this gap by leveraging advancements in battery technology and its innovative battery-as-a-service subscription model, which makes electric motorcycles more cost-competitive with gas-powered models. By targeting this segment in emerging markets like East Africa and South Asia, Zeno has the potential to capture significant market share and become a key player in the global shift toward sustainable mobility.

Economic and Quality of Life Benefits 

Electric motorbikes present a significant opportunity for economic uplift and improved quality of life, especially for commercial motorbike taxis in emerging markets. Transitioning to electric motorbikes offers significant cost savings, enabling drivers to increase their take-home income by up to 50%. As a result, drivers can see an immediate improvement in their economic stability and the ability to support their families.

Beyond individual economic benefits, electric motorbikes also contribute to public health. With a reduction in air pollution compared to traditional motorbikes, the shift to electric options reduces the harmful emissions that contribute to respiratory issues and other health problems. Cleaner air leads to better health outcomes for entire communities, which is crucial in densely populated urban areas where pollution levels are particularly high.

Furthermore, Zeno’s battery infrastructure could serve as a decentralized energy source. Their distributed network of batteries could be leveraged to provide grid services through a virtual power plant, or backup power to those without reliable access to electricity. This power can used for essential activities like cooking, lighting, and other household needs, raising the overall standard of living.

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Zeno’s Founder and CEO, Michael Spencer, brings a decade of experience in building climate-focused businesses across East Africa, the U.S., and Europe. Most recently, he led Model 3 production ramp-up, supercharger network deployment across the U.S. and Europe, and home energy product launch at Tesla. His previous ventures include developing affordable, sustainable housing, turning around a conservation and regenerative agriculture business, and founding two affordable healthcare companies in Kenya.

But Michael doesn’t operate alone. He has assembled a highly skilled team capable of bringing a challenger brand to market from scratch and driving sales. Michael has attracted some of the industry’s top talent, from several engineering leaders at India’s largest electric two-wheeler OEMs to executives from East Africa’s largest ride-hailing companies. We believe this team not only has the market know-how but also the technical and logistical chops to tackle the complex challenge of battery swapping logistics—an essential component to making electric mobility reliable and scalable in emerging markets. We’re excited to watch this team grow! 

Additional Resources

• Zeno emerges from stealth to crib Tesla’s master plan for Africa and beyond [Tech Crunch]

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The US has myriad clean energy projects planned, with over 2,000 gigawatts of proposed wind, solar, and battery projects proposed. These projects in the pipeline provide enough power to achieve 80% carbon-free electricity in the US by 2030. There’s only one catch: the majority of these projects won’t get built. Poor due diligence, slow transmission construction, high interconnection costs, and long wait times are major blockers. These issues result in 80% of renewable energy projects stalling or failing before construction even begins.

At MCJ we recognize that a fully electrified economy requires trillions of dollars worth of energy infrastructure to be built quickly and efficiently. However, inefficiencies and a lack of transparency in site origination and due diligence processes need to be addressed to fully realize this potential. Critical data including spatial, zoning, permitting, interconnection, and environmental metrics has been historically elusive and manually handled. It’s no wonder that wind, solar, and battery projects take years to be plugged into the grid if they aren’t stalled or withdrawn completely. Action is needed to bring clean energy technology to market or we risk major setbacks in our decarbonization efforts.

Paces offers a solution by addressing these critical inefficiencies with its advanced tooling and platform. Paces condenses site selection and due diligence from months to minutes, dramatically improving efficiency and transparency. We are thrilled to announce our participation in Paces' successful $11 million Series A funding round. 

What is Paces?

Paces' platform reshapes the landscape for green developers by transforming how project sites are selected and managed. By seamlessly integrating comprehensive environmental, permitting, zoning, and energy grid data, Paces leverages advanced AI to highlight the most viable locations for development. With features like Project Search and Permitting Predictor, the platform simplifies the intricate process of risk assessment and site vetting. The software Paces is building accelerates the pace of constructing vital clean energy infrastructure, empowering developers to expedite their groundbreaking projects with unprecedented efficiency. Paces will enable more successful projects while lowering development soft costs. 

Why We Invested

Massive and Growing Market 

With its latest product expansions, Paces now serves the entire clean energy infrastructure, addressing the market's generation and load sides. On the generation side, Paces supports a wide range of green development projects, including solar, wind, battery storage, and other renewable energy sources. On the load side, Paces caters to critical industries such as data centers, EV charging infrastructure, cold chain distribution, manufacturing, and more. 

Green development in the US is a $10B total addressable market in soft costs - consulting, permitting and various software solutions.  The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) projects that across all cases, compared with 2022, solar generating capacity will grow by about 325% to 1019% by 2050, and wind generating capacity by about 138% to 235%. 

Worldwide, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that “global energy investment is set to exceed USD 3 trillion for the first time in 2024, with USD 2 trillion going to clean energy technologies and infrastructure. Investment in clean energy has accelerated since 2020, and spending on renewable power, grids and storage is now higher than total spending on oil, gas, and coal.” 

According to Precedence Research, the global data center market stood at $229.23 billion in 2023. This market is projected to expand to $256.05 billion in 2024, and it is estimated to reach approximately $775.73 billion by 2034, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.72 %. Expansion of AI over-indexes this growth, with Gartner forecasting 25.3% growth in data center systems, largely due to AI services and GPU-based specialized services for AI workloads. This explosion in “AI Data Centers” comes with intense power needs, and thus grid-integrated project development plans have become far more complex.

Arcane and Ineffective Legacy Solutions

The development phase for green and energy intensive projects comprises Siting and Due Diligence processes. These processes involve various poorly coordinated parties, including real estate agents, consultants, GIS analysts, lawyers and grid interconnection engineering specialists. While there are a few software-based point solutions, most of the work is still done with spreadsheets and notebooks. These approaches lack historical data and fail to consider pending regulations and the interdependencies among various permitting agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. This often results in generic siting based on limited and outdated data, which is a major cause of project failures. Paces addresses this gap by offering an integrated, purpose-built solution to manage the development phase of green projects.

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Leading the charge as CEO of Paces, James McWalter brings over 15 years of tech industry experience. As the first employee at Hello Vera, an AI startup later acquired by Google, James honed his skills in enterprise SaaS sales across various sectors. He also hosts the Build, Repeat Podcast, engaging in deep, insightful conversations with climate-focused founders and investors. Raised on a sheep farm in Ireland and armed with a graduate degree in philosophy, James combines a grounded upbringing with a sharp, inquisitive mind.

Charles Bai, Co-founder and CTO of Paces, spearheaded AI efficiency at Facebook AI, focusing on large model inferences and developing metrics to track power and carbon costs of AI models. Prior to Facebook, Charles gained valuable experience at various startups, creating data-intensive software solutions. Originally from Beijing, Charles holds a Computer Science degree from Cornell, blending his global perspective with technical prowess.

Conclusion

Paces is building an automated workflow solution for green project developers that utilizes AI to help users make better and more well-informed decisions, which is already leading to greater success rates and lower development costs. As they continue to add more clients and projects, Paces is building a compounding moat with the largest repository of current as well as historical data on zoning and permitting regulations, interdependencies and nationwide community context. These assets will allow Paces to expand into more use cases over time. 

We look forward to supporting James McWalter and Charles Bai as they accelerate clean energy development.

Additional Resources

• Job opportunities in Brooklyn, NY

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The U.S. and other Western countries largely stopped building new nuclear reactors in the 1980s. The resulting decades-long decline of nuclear power in the U.S. has led to a decay of the industry’s workforce, which has undergone a loss of vital professions such as skilled welders, pipefitters, and electricians, and risks ceding American leadership in this critical sector needed to produce carbon-free energy. Despite America’s history as a nuclear energy juggernaut and nuclear’s lower operational costs compared to other forms of generation, the cost of constructing nuclear power plants has increased by about 33% while the cost of new solar generation has fallen 90%. All this comes amid the Biden Administration's goal of the U.S. achieving net zero energy by 2035, surging energy demand resulting from mass electrification and the advent of artificial intelligence, and the rapid deployment of nuclear reactors in China. 

While many view America’s preeminent legacy in nuclear power in decline, the nation remains the largest generator of nuclear energy, representing 30% of the world’s output. With 94 reactors in operation today — down from a peak of 112 in 1990 — the U.S. derives approximately 19% of its domestic electricity needs from nuclear fission. The opportunity for growth and expansion of American nuclear production is as vast as it is necessary. The country that capitalizes on this historic moment will set the tone for the future of nuclear energy worldwide.

The Nuclear Company aims to restore America’s leadership in nuclear power by building fleets of nuclear power plants on time and on budget. With a focus on America’s heartland, the company envisions employing methods that drive down the expense of nuclear power plant construction. By taking an end-to-end approach toward power plant development, The Nuclear Company envisions reducing the cost of new nuclear deployment similar to how SpaceX has lowered the cost of space travel. MCJ is excited to announce its investment in The Nuclear Company, which is founded by an amazing team of seasoned entrepreneurs and operators that include Jonathan Webb, Patrick Maloney, and Kiran Bhatraju.

What is The Nuclear Company?

The Nuclear Company is revolutionizing nuclear power plant development by addressing delays and budget overruns that have plagued the industry. Unlike traditional approaches that rely on multiple siloed subcontractors, The Nuclear Company adopts a comprehensive oversight strategy. By managing the entire process from start to finish, the company focuses on the 88% of costs associated with infrastructure and operations that exist outside of the reactor and steam system. This allows for effective cost-containment. Additionally, The Nuclear Company takes direct control over supply chain management, sourcing, workforce coordination, and financing required for constructing power plant fleets. Through this approach, The Nuclear Company aims to achieve the same efficiencies found in state-sponsored models without the bureaucratic and heavy-handed deficiencies.

Why Did We Invest?

There are many aspects to The Nuclear Company that drove our excitement and reason for investing.

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Foremost, The Nuclear Company’s three founders and the management team they’ve assembled are the basis of why we invested. The company’s CEO & Co-Founder, Jonathan Webb, previously founded AppHarvest, which built large indoor mechanized farms in Appalachia. In that role, he demonstrated his ability as a roll-up-your-sleeves leader and someone who prides himself on being at the construction site to ensure projects are built to spec. Prior to founding AppHarvest, he worked with the U.S. Department of Defense on a massive solar project to help achieve a White House goal of ensuring the military’s hundreds of installations receive 20 percent of their electricity from renewable sources. As a native son of Kentucky, he has strong ties to both community and political leaders in the region. Serving as Chairman, Patrick Maloney is an inveterate entrepreneur, having built and sold multiple companies in the energy space. Most recently, he founded Inspire, a clean energy technology company that provides renewable electricity and energy management services to consumers and small businesses; Inspire was acquired by Shell in 2022. The third co-founder, Kiran Bhatraju, is well known as the CEO of Arcadia, which has made a name for itself providing consumers with access to community solar as well as serving as one of the leading utility data platforms. As an investor in Arcadia, MCJ jumped at the opportunity to back Kiran again in this new venture. The founders have assembled an impressive management team, including Ron DeGregorio who has over 40 years in leadership at large energy companies and most notably served as CEO of Net Power and President of Exelon Power, and Juliann Edwards, who has spent decades in leadership roles throughout the nuclear sector and is the Chair of U.S. Women in Nuclear. 

Need For Clean Baseload Energy

Energy demand is on the rise, driven by the growing EVs, heat pumps, and other electrical devices and assets being plugged into the grid. In 2023, U.S. energy demand rose 4.7% alone and consumption is expected to increase exponentially over the coming decades. Another major catalyst is the boom in data center construction, spurred by investments in AI. The explosive growth in data center build-out by companies dubbed “hyperscalers” has made the demand for clean baseload power particularly acute. The Nuclear Company plans to partner with energy-hungry tech companies as well as heavy industry in the green steel and hydrogen space, providing them with reliable energy that helps them achieve their decarbonization goals.  

A recently announced nuclear-power purchase agreement between Talen Energy and Amazon represents a 50% premium over what nuclear power plants command today in the wholesale market and signals the tailwinds nuclear power plant operators will benefit from as a result of the AI boom.

A Reactor-Agnostic Platform To Scale Nuclear

As MCJ’s first investment in fission, The Nuclear Company offers an appealing opportunity to back a company that can enable current and novel reactor technologies. The company is philosophically agnostic to any specific type of reactor and is open to working with any technology that is safe, economical, and regulatory-approved.

Bi-Partisan Support

While solutions to address climate change often elicit polarizing political sentiment (nuclear is certainly no exception), there has been growing support from both Democrats and Republicans for deploying more nuclear energy. On July 9th, President Biden signed the ADVANCE (Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy) Act, which garnered an overwhelming majority of congressional support from both sides of the aisle. The law represents shared interest across party lines in restoring America’s leadership in nuclear development by streamlining the approval process at the NRC. 

Staging America’s Nuclear Comeback

The United States, once a leader in nuclear development, now faces an industry that has atrophied. However, with the increasing demand for clean energy and the success of nuclear energy development abroad, there is potential for the U.S. to reclaim its former leadership in the sector. The obstacles for developers are primarily related to mobilizing and managing human talent and financial resources, as well as navigating the U.S. regulatory environment. Despite the industry's struggle to adapt to the changing economic and social landscape, the U.S.'s long-standing legacy in nuclear energy gives it a distinct advantage. In light of that history and the dire contemporary need, we are enthusiastic about The Nuclear Company ushering in America’s nuclear comeback.

Additional Resources

• Axios: “Exclusive: New nuclear startup aims big”

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If you haven’t noticed, pickup trucks in the U.S. today are huge. This isn’t just an observed phenomenon; the U.S. pickup truck market has indeed shifted toward larger vehicles, a trend driven by EPA regulations implemented since 2010 that linked fuel efficiency to vehicle weight. An unintended consequence of these regulations has been increased truck sizes, with manufacturers frequently opting to follow this tack rather than focus on improving fuel efficiency. For example, the best-selling vehicle in the U.S. in 2023, and for the past 42 years, has been the Ford F-Series, which includes the F-150 and its larger counterparts. This model continues to dominate the market. While its design and bed capacity have evolved, one thing is abundantly clear; the Ford F-150 models have become bigger and heavier. But while large trucks remain popular in the U.S., they are often impractical for many commercial and consumer applications, especially in dense urban settings.

At the same time, the automotive industry is undergoing a major transformation towards electrification. Electric vehicles (EVs) offer numerous benefits, including better performance, improved fuel economy, and reduced environmental impact. The International Energy Agency's Global EV Outlook reported a 40% increase in new EV registrations in 2023, totaling 1.4 million vehicles. We believe this growing demand extends beyond electric cars, with individual buyers and fleet customers alike increasingly seeking electric solutions offering greater capacity and utility.

Despite several legacy OEMs introducing electric pickup options, their focus has primarily been on producing EVs that match the size and performance of traditional ICE trucks. As a result, the large size of these EV trucks often creates a barrier for use in urban environments. This situation creates a significant market gap for smaller, electric trucks that can easily navigate tight spaces while offering the utility and performance expected from a pickup.

TELO Trucks aims to address this gap by developing lightweight, compact electric pickups designed for urban adventures. We are thrilled to announce MCJ's investment in TELO's Seed round, led by Neo, with additional investment from Spero Ventures and multiple prominent angel investors in the space. We believe TELO Trucks is poised to redefine the future of urban mobility with its groundbreaking electric pickups, and we are excited to support Jason Marks, Forrest North, and Yves Béhar in this journey.

What is TELO?

The TELO Truck is redefining the footprint and function of electric mobility. A mini-truck with purpose, the TELO Truck combines the compact size of a two-door MINI Cooper with the utility of a Toyota Tacoma. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Carlos, CA, TELO is representative of a different era of EV companies. The vehicle - which is intelligently constructed and cleverly configured to fit all your people, pets, and gear, includes a 5-seat cabin with a full 5-foot truck bed, a configurable mid-partition that allows for additional seating for up to eight passengers, and a fast-charge battery allows charging from 20-80 percent in twenty minutes while also enabling drivers to travel 350 miles in range before a recharge is needed. The team has redesigned what an electric truck looks like by taking advantage of the best in electric and autonomous tech, using advanced driving and safety technologies.

With a strong emphasis on advanced safety features and innovative battery design, we are convinced that TELO is well-positioned to capture a unique segment in the EV market. Its trucks are not only visually appealing, but the product design also meets the needs of many commercial fleets in dense urban settings. For example, TELO’s compact pickups can easily navigate tight alleys and underground parking structures for municipal waste companies, as well as effortlessly maneuver busy city streets for construction teams.

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

The founding TELO team combines an extensive history in automotive safety, autonomous vehicles, battery design, EV engineering and industrial design. We are confident that the skills and discipline co-founders Jason Marks, Forrest North and Yves Béhar bring to the table will be pivotal for developing a competitive product. 

Jason Marks, the company's CEO, built his first two vehicles from scratch in high school. He later developed test systems for the first radar and LiDAR semiconductor wafers and created testing procedures for numerous safety systems used in the initial electric pickup trucks. With a long history of navigating regulatory and safety challenges in the automotive industry, Jason has a proven track record of innovation. During his tenure as Chief Development Manager at National Instruments, he also led the Autonomous Vehicles and Driver Assistance Systems test programs. Jason holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University. 

Forrest North, TELO’s CTO, was part of the Stanford Solar Car Project Team, which was key to the inception of Tesla. He was instrumental in developing the battery packs for Tesla's first Roadsters. Forrest also founded Mission Motors, an electric motorcycle company, and subsequently developed and sold PlugShare, the top app for locating vehicle charging stations. He’s an experienced entrepreneur with over 15 patents in electric vehicle batteries and charging. Forrest holds a Bachelor’s in Urban Studies and Product Design from Stanford. 

Yves Béhar, TELO’S Chief Creative Officer, founded Fuseproject in 1999, an award-winning, international multidisciplinary design studio. He has worked with brands like Herman Miller, MINI, Samsung, L’Oreal, Puma, SodaStream and Prada and has also co-founded startups including August Home, Canopy Space and Forme Life. Béhar’s works are included in permanent museum collections worldwide, and he speaks frequently on topics including design, technology and sustainability. 

Smart Scaling and Superior Safety

Bringing an automotive product from ideation to market has historically been challenging, especially in areas with established competition. However, we believe TELO’s approach of using off-the-shelf parts, domestic contract manufacturing, and virtual validation enhances the company’s ability to scale quickly and supply its niche customers with safe, affordable vehicles.

By leveraging off-the-shelf components, TELO can focus its innovation efforts where it matters most, such as in battery pack design and crash safety features. Rather than aiming for mass production of 50,000 vehicles, TELO’s strategy involves working with domestic contract manufacturers to produce on a much smaller, more flexible scale. This approach extends to the design and prototyping phase, where virtual validation techniques streamline the process.

TELO’s nimble and cost-effective manufacturing strategy showcases that they are representative of a different era of EV start-ups and positions the company to rapidly meet market demands while also maintaining high standards of innovation and safety. Employing cutting-edge safety technologies, including sensors that anticipate and identify potential collisions, as well as state-of-the-art airbags and structural improvements, it’s evident that TELO prioritizes the safety of its vehicles for both occupants and vulnerable road users, such as pedestrians and cyclists.

The company’s scalable approach allows TELO to respond to evolving market needs quickly, ensuring sustainable growth as it expands its footprint in the EV industry. By leveraging these strategic advantages, we believe TELO is well-equipped to capture a significant share of a missing segment in the pickup truck market, driving both near-term success and long-term impact.

Additional Resources

• Pint-sized pickup startup Telo Trucks adds Tesla co-founder to board as interest grows from fleet customers (TechCrunch)

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In February of 2021, severe winter storms swept across Texas putting it in a deep freeze and resulting in one of the worst energy infrastructure crises in the Lone Star State’s history. More than 4.5 million homes, approximately a quarter of all residences, were without power for several days. While there are many reasons why Texas’ energy infrastructure suffered near collapse, they largely all point to a system that is undergoing greater strain in the face of climate change and the electrification of the economy. Intense heat waves, prompting peak air conditioner use, make blackout warnings from the state’s sole energy operator, ERCOT, increasingly frequent.

In addition to extreme weather, the confluence of greater solar and wind energy and electrification of homes and buildings highlights the need for more battery storage to make the energy grid more resilient in light of these pressures. However, simply building out grid-scale storage presents numerous challenges. Utilities face steep capital expenditures to build and deploy batteries and transmission lines. The sometimes vast distances those lines have to traverse are costly and result in electricity “loss” through dissipation. They also present multiple points of failure should their connection to the grid be severed. Moreover, deployment of this infrastructure is often hampered by slow permitting.

Base Power, located in Austin, Texas, is solving the problem of providing consumers with reliable and affordable energy by building the largest distributed battery storage network. The company deploys batteries to homes, which serve as a seamless source of backup electricity during outages. Base Power provides homeowners with a free battery, which normally can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the homeowner simply pays a one-time installation fee. Complementing its battery, Base Power also provides its customers with affordable electricity, serving as a retail energy provider (REP). MCJ is excited to announce its investment in Base Power and back its co-founders, Zach Dell and Justin Lopas, whose vision for deploying storage across the nation comes at a critical time in America’s energy transition.

What is Base Power?

Base Power is deploying and operating battery storage at homes and eventually businesses while also providing customers with reliable and affordable electricity. Focusing on Texas as its first market, the company offers homeowners a large battery for free with a $2,000 installation fee. With home batteries ranging between $10,000 to $15,000, depending on whether it’s added to rooftop solar, energy storage is cost-prohibitive for many homeowners. Base Power removes that price barrier to adoption by reducing much of the upfront cost. It’s able to do this by pairing its battery with retail energy which it monetizes by charging customers the cost of providing them with energy; in addition, it generates revenue from selling electricity back to the grid during peak demand and price volatility. As the customer-facing provider of electricity, Base Power is positioned to become a trusted energy brand for households and businesses, and it intends to deliver a seamless digital experience for all its customers’ energy needs. On the back end, Base Power is striving to build, own, and operate the largest distributed battery farm — one that makes the grid more resilient, scalable, and cost-effective.

Why Did We Invest?

MCJ easily found many reasons to get excited about Base Power.

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

One of the leading reasons underlying MCJ’s investment is Zach and Justin. The two founders represent a complementary pairing of operators with each having an impressive background in his own right. Together, we feel they constitute a strong founder-market fit with the opportunity Base Power is pursuing and believe they can scale the company quickly.

Zach has gained formative experience in private equity at Blackstone and venture capital at Thrive. Thrive, one of his early investors, is credited by Zach for providing him with insight into the battery space. When we first met him, he spoke passionately about how deals he worked on in the battery supply chain galvanized his belief that energy storage would be key as the U.S. expanded its adoption of renewables and that the time to work in this area is now.   

A mechanical engineer by training, Justin has spent his early career as a manufacturing engineer at SpaceX, rising to lead engineer of the company’s Starship manufacturing. In this role, he led an over 70-person cross-functional fabrication, integration, and engineering team across multiple sites and he was responsible for process and tooling design as well as physical build and integration of Starship-family vehicles. Justin went on to serve as Head of Manufacturing at Anduril, where he led an over 150-person team tasked with designing and building next generation systems for defense of the U.S. and its allies. 

What Zach and Justin have accomplished at Base Power in 10 mere months — in the way of assembling talent and backing as well as launch readiness — is nothing short of impressive. For this reason, we have a very strong conviction that they are capable of building a generational business and brand in the energy space. 

Need and Momentum for Battery Storage

Before 2020, large-scale batteries barely existed in places like Texas. Recently, it has been reported that battery storage constitutes nearly 60% of projects in the state seeking connection to the grid. In the summer of 2023, Texas had approximately 4,000 megawatts of batteries, which is expected to grow each of the next two summers to reach 12,000 to 14,000 megawatts. As the state that generates and consumes the most electricity, including from renewables, Texas represents ground zero for the deployment of energy storage, and states like California, Massachusetts, and New York are following suit. 

Additional momentum propelling storage is coming from both the public and private sectors. For the first time, tax credits from the IRA have incentivized stand-alone battery deployment. As a result, developers are aggressively deploying batteries as private equity invests heavily in new storage technologies and companies. According to PitchBook, venture capital firms invested $4.9 billion in rechargeable battery companies in 2021, up from $1.6 billion in 2020. All the while, battery costs have declined since 2015 as the technology has improved.

Vision and Solution

We believe Base Power offers an elegant solution that not only delivers value to homes and businesses but also to the grid as a whole. For its customers, Base Power provides energy backup when needed and electricity when it’s most affordable. By purchasing renewable energy from the wholesale market and by intelligently optimizing for when electricity is cheapest, the company economically provides energy to its customers. The company believes “your home or office should run on 4am power, not 6pm power.”

In addition, Base Power is solving many of the aforementioned challenges associated with grid-scale storage. Its decentralized strategy takes advantage of existing grid interconnections at homes and businesses, and its business model allows for more economic installations of batteries. Most importantly, by distributing storage across customers, Base Power creates greater resilience in the event of outages at power generation sites.

As America’s economy becomes ever more dependent on a 24/7 electricity grid, solutions like Base Power will become critical to ensuring the energy transition is smooth and seamless.

Additional Resources

• Bloomberg: “​​A New Kind of Power Company Will Put a Battery in Every Home”

• Follow Base Power, Zach, and Justin on X.

• Hiring for various roles in Austin, Texas – see Base Power’s careers page

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As the world increasingly feels the effects of climate change, the call for sustainable, clean energy is louder than ever. Corporate and governmental clean energy commitments that aim to reduce emissions through renewable energy generation have become increasingly common. However, procuring, managing, and reporting on clean energy remains extremely complex and expensive, effectively limiting clean energy portfolios to only the biggest organizations.

Most companies utilize renewable energy certificates (RECs) as their method of procuring clean energy. RECs, which separate credits from the physical energy generation, have experienced significant cost fluctuations and thus no longer promote new renewable energy project development. Several studies have concluded that carbon emissions reductions through RECs are actually much lower than many companies have claimed. While some companies have switched to power purchase agreements (PPAs), which provide price stability and specify the amount of clean energy purchased on an annualized basis, neither RECs or PPAs include specifics on the timing of energy generation. Considering the electricity grid uses significant renewable energy during the day (e.g. solar) but often relies on fossil fuels at night, this characteristic hinders actual emissions reductions. RECs and PPAs may provide corporations with the chance to acquire clean energy offsets that only cover their daytime grid usage in the case of solar power while disregarding their energy consumption at night. 

So, how can we unlock the benefits of clean power for organizations everywhere? 

Seyed Madaeni and Matt Penfold created Verse to solve this problem. Founded on deep industry experience and a profound understanding of the challenges associated with procuring and optimizing clean power, Verse’s platform, Aria, uses generative artificial intelligence (AI) to provide a comprehensive solution for organizations to buy and manage clean power at a fraction of the time and cost required today. We’re absolutely thrilled to support Seyed, Matt, and the growing Verse team as they pursue their mission of unlocking clean energy for organizations everywhere.  

What is Verse? 

Verse has created a SaaS platform called Aria that uses generative AI to ensure companies get their desired mix of carbon-free energy round-the-clock in just minutes. Aria lets companies define, design, manage, and report on optimal portfolios of clean energy assets to meet their financial and emissions-reduction targets. To achieve this, Verse's tool matches companies with clean power plants and digitally controls them through AI and machine learning. 

Verse empowers companies by allowing them to set parameters that target specific goals (e.g., financial, emissions, etc.), hedge exposure to fossil fuel price fluctuations, optimize clean power asset management, and report on portfolio performance. By doing so, Verse's Aria platform opens new opportunities for corporate and institutional offtakers while drastically simplifying the process and driving decarbonization across industries. 

Verse also assists companies in optimizing the mix of electrons they consume directly or in finding and sponsoring clean and renewable energy projects on grids with higher typical emissions than their local grid. This concept, known as emissionality, is gaining recognition as a way to further support decarbonization efforts.

Why Did We Invest?

Compelling Founder-Market Fit

Both of Verse’s co-founders, Seyed Madaeni and Matt Penfold, have significant experience in energy markets, a track record of scaling clean energy software, and a history of building successful businesses. Prior to launching Verse, the pair worked together at Advanced Microgrid Solutions (AMS) on an AI-powered SaaS platform that provided wholesale market optimization for utility-scale solar, wind, and energy storage. AMS was subsequently acquired by Fluence [NYSE: FLNC], and its software became Fluence’s Mosaic Bidding platform.

Seyed has been building software products to optimize the electricity sector for over 10 years. Before founding Verse, Seyed served as the Chief Digital Officer at Fluence, where he played a central role in the company's successful $5B+ IPO, overseeing its digital business unit. Seyed was instrumental in growing Fluence’s renewable portfolio to over 10GW. Earlier in his career, Seyed was the CEO of AMS, where he pioneered a flagship market bidding product that eventually led to the company's acquisition by Fluence. Seyed also contributed significantly to Tesla, SolarCity and PG&E, providing technical oversight for several groundbreaking wholesale market-facing software applications. Seyed holds a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering from Ohio State University. 

Verse’s CCO, Matt Penfold, previously held the positions of Vice President at Fluence Digital and CCO at AMS, leading commercialization of the world’s leading AI wholesale market bidding software for utility scale clean energy assets, taking the idea from a whiteboard sketch to 10GW of assets under management. Before that, he was a Manager at Bain & Company. Matt holds an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelor’s of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering from the University of Melbourne. 

Leveraging the Power of AI to Speed and Scale Corporate Power Procurement 

Electricity accounts for approximately 25% of global carbon emissions, with the majority of this demand stemming from commercial and industrial organizations. To reduce electricity production’s contribution to climate change, we must transition to clean power as quickly as possible—a goal that is being recognized by companies everywhere. Corporate sentiment is shifting towards a more diversified approach to clean energy procurement that ensures a positive environmental impact and moving away from traditional PPAs and RECs.

However, directly buying clean power or implementing a diversified clean energy procurement strategy is difficult for most companies, especially for those without dedicated teams and resources. Even further, most organizations are still using manual processes to manage and report on their energy portfolios. 

This is where Verse comes in. With its Aria platform, Verse provides granular control over the clean energy procurement process, simplifying and speeding the transition to a diversified clean energy mix. The platform streamlines the identification and procurement of solar, wind, storage, and other renewable energy sources through a data-driven approach, making it faster, easier, and more cost-effective for companies to transition off fossil fuels. 

We believe that Verse's platform is the next step in making clean power accessible as it enables companies to transition to a clean, de-risked power portfolio without needing to invest in full teams or use legacy tools like spreadsheets. By leveraging AI to help companies accelerate the clean energy transition, Verse is poised to become a significant player in the corporate clean energy market.

Additional Resources

• Job Opportunities

• Verse Launch Announcement (LinkedIn)

If you are an accredited investor and want to learn more about becoming an LP in our current fund, reach out here and include information about your background, your investor status and ways you can be helpful to the portfolio.

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