DCVC 2023 Q3 update: Climate Week NYC; deep tech and defense; geothermal ground­breaking; first humanoid robot factory; more

Greetings, friends of DCVC!

Capping off a productive Q3 for our firm and our portfolio companies, the two of us recently led separate trips to the East Coast that underscore our commitment to key areas of DCVC investment, and to deep tech broadly.

This year’s New York Climate Week—where the mood was by turns optimistic, urgent, and terrifying — brought together people working on all aspects of the climate crisis: the gathering is starting to feel like the J.P. Morgan Healthcare of climate. We co-hosted a high-energy event with our friends at Activate called ​“Demo Hall: Hard Tech Solutions to the Climate Crisis,” which featured a terrific set of early-stage climate entre­pre­neurs. A big takeaway from the week is captured in the image you see below, in the ​“Featured” content link to my (Zack’s) blog post about the week: we think commer­cial­iza­tion is the name of the game for climate entrepreneurs.

Good news, then, that our climate tech portfolio companies have been hard at work this quarter commer­cial­izing solutions to pressing problems: just last week, Fervo broke ground on the world’s largest next-gen geothermal project in Utah (400 MW), as it continues to lead an ambitious effort to unlock the vast potential of geothermal as a vital source of renewable power. Weeks after raising its Series B, CH4 Global announced the industry’s first ever commercial deal with multi­na­tional Lotte to mitigate enteric methane emissions from up to 4 million cattle in South Korea. Oklo gained further commercial traction for its fast nuclear reactor technology, signing a landmark MOU with Centrus Energy and earning a Notice of Intent to Award a contract from the U.S. Air Force for siting its 4^th reactor. Amogy announced a massive expansion to Houston, where it will manufacture ammonia-based power solutions, and Pano AI’s life-saving technology is helping first responders fight our increasing number of wildfires.

While Zack was in New York in support of our companies fighting climate change, I (Matt) was in Washington, DC working for and with DCVC companies critical to our nation’s security. Together, we and a number of other companies met with the Biden Admin­is­tra­tion and Congres­sional leaders to discuss two related facts: that America’s defense and that of her allies requires tech­no­log­ical superiority we have lost and must regain, and that the Chinese Communist Party’s increas­ingly aggressive actions and posture make this a matter of the greatest urgency (our thinking is laid out in this joint letter, and you can find Bloomberg coverage of the effort here). I’m grateful to Jacob Helberg, a Commis­sioner of the Congres­sion­ally mandated bipartisan US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, for working with me to arrange these vital conver­sa­tions. Like Zack in New York, I was, in Washington, equal parts inspired by the energy and camaraderie I felt around me and sobered by the challenges before us. 

Our defense-facing companies spent the quarter proving how essential they are to meeting those challenges: Fortem continued to provide critical support to Ukrainian forces through the deployment of its Drone­Hunters, which can stop Russian and Iranian suicide drones, and the company was featured on CNN. Planet partnered with a Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Asia for daily global monitoring amid increasing demand from Asia-Pacific governments for civil- and security-related insights that Planet’s technology can provide. (Planet’s technology was also used to map the destruction following the devastating wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii.) Capella expanded its collab­o­ra­tion with the U.S. government to provide global ²⁴⁄₇, all-weather Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery to support Space Force missions. 

As the news briefs below make clear, what we’ve written about above touches only a portion of the good news across our portfolio this quarter. Whether Agility’s ​“beating Tesla to the punch” in opening the first humanoid robot factory in history, Proprio’s big Series B toward scaling up its revo­lu­tionary surgical navigation system, or Noetik’s Seed round toward a better under­standing of cancer through spatial biology and machine learning, we are seeing undeniable progress across funds and investment priorities. 

For those of you who will be attending our Annual General Meeting next week, we look forward to reconnecting!

Very best regards,

Matt and Zack