DCVC 2026 Q1 update

Friends of DCVC,

Our portfolio companies had a busy quarter attracting major new funding (about $2 billion in aggregate), securing key commercial part­ner­ships, and scaling fundamental tech­nolo­gies needed to accelerate AI, defense, energy, quantum, agriculture, medicine, and more.

Behind each piece of news below is dazzling technology spun from a flywheel of proprietary data, deep compute, and insight derived from a given product’s contact with the real world. But today we pause to note how real — how basically useful — first-class deep tech can be:

At a time when drone threats to soldiers and civilians alike have reached the level of permanent crisis, Fortem Tech­nolo­gies has emerged as the company with the best way to address it. And at a time when American farmers are under tremendous pressure — in the teeth of planting season — to deal with sudden scarcity of synthetic fertilizer given the stalemate in the Strait of Hormuz, Pivot Bio just lowered the price of its microbial nitrogen product (even in the face of increased demand), which allows growers to increase yields while reducing their use of synthetic fertilizer. Noetik — in a first-of-its-kind deal for biopharma — signed a non-exclusive license with GSK for Noetik AI models, with $50 million in upfront capital and near-term milestones. Finally, at a time when ranchers face their own challenges in a famously tough business, Halter is giving them more time, and far greater sustain­ability, through its solar-powered cattle collars, which replace high-cost physical fencing by guiding cattle with sounds and gentle vibrations through a system that allows remote management.

You’ll see this kind of audacious utility across the portfolio highlights below.

The DCVC partnership got out a lot this quarter:

In January, Zack had another productive trip to Davos for the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum, partic­i­pating in panels, hosting the global deep tech community at our annual ​“Deep Tech in Davos” nightcap, and convening a new Frontiers of Energy VIP dialogue at the USA House, where industry and government leaders spoke in depth and candor about how to provide abundant, sustainable energy to as much of the world as possible.

At NVIDIA GTC, we co-hosted a deep tech happy hour — and were thrilled to see Agility’s Digit robot featured by NVIDIA in its ​“Physical AI” and ​“Industrial Digi­ti­za­tion” showcases. … In Washington, DC, we were honored to co-host this year’s Hill & Valley Forum, with Matt leading a big DCVC and portco presence, because there has never been greater need for deep tech in our nation’s defense. … And in Houston at CERAWeek, we co-hosted a gathering of deep tech energy fellow travelers — and were glad to see Fervo, Brimstone, and Equilibrium Energy getting the attention they deserve.

Lastly, we’re delighted to announce that Dr. Rachel Slaybaugh has been promoted to General Partner. A superbly trained nuclear engineer who served as a Program Director at ARPA‑E, where she created the nuclear fission program, and who held a tenured faculty position at UC Berkeley before joining us four years ago, she has been integral to our iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and support of energy and climate companies the world needs.

We hope you enjoy the highlights below and wish you a wonderful quarter ahead!

FUNDING HIGHLIGHTS

DCVC Flagship / DCVC Energy & Climate

Chariot Defense raised a $34 million Series A with partic­i­pa­tion from DCVC to revo­lu­tionize power management in defense scenarios and ensure critical military operations have reliable energy.

Fervo raised $421 million in non-recourse project financing for its flagship Cape Station development in Utah, for next-gen geothermal energy.

Halter raised a $220 million Series E at a $2 billion valuation (with partic­i­pa­tion from DCVC) to rapidly scale its virtual fencing collars, giving ranchers their time back and ensuring global food security by enabling them to manage land more sustainably.

Humans& raised a $480 million Series Seed (with partic­i­pa­tion from DCVC) to build human-centric AI collab­o­ra­tion tools that empower workers rather than replacing them to ensure technology operates safely and without damaging mental health.

Iceberg Quantum announced its $6 million Series Seed (in which DCVC partic­i­pated) and unveiled Pinnacle, its first full fault-tolerant quantum computing architecture.

Lunar Energy secured $232 million in Series C and D funding joined by DCVC to scale its home battery systems and virtual power plant software to intel­li­gently balance renewable energy supply, lower electricity costs, and alleviate the increasing strain on the aging U.S. power grid.

Proxima closed an over­sub­scribed $80 million Series Seed led by DCVC to advance its AI-driven platform for discovering proximity-based ther­a­peu­tics, opening up entirely new pathways to treat diseases that have histor­i­cally evaded traditional drug discovery.

Radiant expanded its latest financing to over $350 million, building on previous funding that included DCVC, to advance its portable nuclear microre­ac­tors and bring us closer to mass-producing reactors that can provide reliable, carbon-free power to the most remote locations on Earth while meeting soaring AI energy demands.

DCVC Bio

AgZen closed a $10 million Series B funding round led by returning investor DCVC Bio to fuel the rapid growth of its precision AI crop spraying system, which enables farmers to cut chemical inputs by 30 – 50% without expe­ri­encing a drop-off in yield. 

OTHER NEWS

DCVC Flagship / DCVC Energy & Climate

Agility Robotics continued to lead the humanoid robotics race, signing a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) agreement with Toyota Motor Manu­fac­turing Canada following a successful pilot.

AquaFortus appointed Dr. Hoshang Subawalla as its new CEO to drive the global infra­struc­ture expansion of its zero-liquid discharge brine desali­na­tion tech­nolo­gies, which yield clean water and valuable minerals from hypersaline industrial streams.

Fervo Energy drilled its hottest well to date at a new giga-scale site and signed an agreement with ABB to supply advanced motor control solutions for its 500MW Cape Station project, accel­er­ating its mission to deliver ²⁴⁄₇ carbon-free baseload power to meet soaring electricity demand.

Fortem secured a multi­mil­lion-dollar order to protect the 2026 FIFA World Cup venues and a new contract with Lockheed Martin to protect critical infra­struc­ture, building upon an $18 million U.S. Army contract and the first-ever fully autonomous 5‑vs‑5 drone swarm takedown to provide highly scalable, debris-free defenses that safely protect crowds, military personnel, and critical infra­struc­ture from coordinated aerial threats.

Iceberg Quantum posted a paper to preprint repository arXiv showing a way forward toward the breaking of RSA-2048 — the gold standard for securing Internet commu­ni­ca­tions — using an order of magnitude fewer physical qubits than the world thought possible.

Mainspring Energy was selected by the U.S. Air Force to supply linear power generators for multi-fuel testing at Travis Air Force Base to evaluate natural gas and hydrogen capa­bil­i­ties that improve energy efficiency, lower emissions, and guarantee resilience for military installations.

Mythic announced a joint development agreement with Honda worth initially up to $1 billion to co-develop an automotive-grade AI system-on-chip for next-generation software-defined vehicles, leveraging analog compute technology that is 100 times more energy-efficient than conven­tional digital chips to enable advanced autonomous driving capa­bil­i­ties without the massive power draw — and support the goal of zero global traffic fatalities by 2050.

Noetik signed a five-year, $50 million strategic collab­o­ra­tion with GSK to license its self-supervised machine learning cancer research models, repre­senting a break­through in leveraging spatial AI to develop targeted treatments for lung and colorectal cancers. As far as we know, this is the first example of a substantial pure-play AI licensing deal in TechBio, and indeed, in the broader biopharma industry.

Pacific Fusion announced its ambitious $1 billion New Mexico research campus, which aims to accelerate the commer­cial­iza­tion of fusion energy and build a massive new clean tech hub.

Pivot Bio relocated its head­quar­ters to Minnesota and announced a reduction in prices for its nitrogen fixation products, making vital, climate-friendly crop nutrition more accessible to farmers struggling with surging global fertilizer costs and energy crises.

Q‑CTRL demon­strated a field-tested quantum navigation system for GPS-denied envi­ron­ments, achieving unprece­dented positioning accuracy in naval trials to provide highly accurate and resilient navigation alter­na­tives for commercial and defense operators when adversaries jam satellite signals.

Reality Defender expanded its deepfake detection capa­bil­i­ties, forming a strategic training data partnership with ElevenLabs to provide essential infra­struc­ture to combat political misin­for­ma­tion and ensure digital media authen­ticity during critical global elections.

Relation Ther­a­peu­tics unveiled an exclusive research collab­o­ra­tion with Deerfield to create jointly owned new companies originating from novel drug targets found by Relation’s novel Lab-in-the-Loop approach.

unspun appointed former North Face executive Arne Arens as its new CEO to scale its automated and localized 3D weaving manu­fac­turing infra­struc­ture, offering fashion brands massive financial cost savings while simul­ta­ne­ously eliminating waste and slashing their environmental impact.

DCVC Bio
Avicenna Biosciences posted the first part of a three-part series outlining key insights gained from the design, development, and practical application of machine learning in drug discovery at Avicenna to the preprint repository arXiv.

Grove Biopharma published preclinical results in Nature Commu­ni­ca­tions demon­strating targeted degradation of two key oncogenic drivers enabled via its Bionic Biologics platform.

Totus Medicines presented highly encouraging Phase 1a clinical data at the ESMO TAT Congress for TOS-358 and initiated Phase 1b studies to overcome the limitations of currently available therapies and deliver durable tumor control with a class-leading safety profile for heavily pretreated patients with metastatic breast cancer and other solid tumors.