Activate
2600 10th St Ste 300, Berkeley, CA, 94710-3100, United States
Overview
Activate empowers entrepreneurial scientists and engineers to transform their research into world-changing products and businesses. By supporting scientists from the very beginning of their entrepreneurial endeavors, they often find us to be the decisive factor in enabling them to either successfully scale their ideas or prevent them from ever taking off. These scientists will introduce innovative products to the market that revolutionize the way they generate energy, manufacture goods, operate our buildings, facilitate global transportation, and utilize resources to sustain their society.
- Total investments
- 2
- Lead investments
- 1
- Investments · 12mo
- 2
- Active investors
- 10
Sector focus
- Product Research
Investment portfolio
- Mandrake Bio
Led · Seed · Jul 2026
Mandrake Bio is developing programmable gene-editing enzymes designed from scratch using AI-driven protein design rather than modifying naturally occurring enzymes. Founded by Tanay Lohia and Dr. Kutubuddin Molla, the startup is initially focusing on agricultural applications and plans to target seed companies and therapeutic firms as customers through a licensing-fee business model. The company is pre-revenue, has a team of eight employees, and expects to validate its first enzymes in laboratory conditions within the next two months. Mandrake intends to expand its AI protein-design platform, hire additional AI and wet-lab researchers, and invest in compute infrastructure and wet-lab experimentation with the fresh capital. After initial validation, the company plans to raise a larger round to establish its own laboratory and increase the scale of experiments.
- Tomorrow.io
Participated · Series F · Feb 2026
Tomorrow.io positions itself as the world's leading Resilience Platform, combining a proprietary satellite constellation with a generative AI–integrated forecasting engine to deliver weather intelligence. The company says it operates a fully operational proprietary satellite constellation and leverages next-generation space technology, advanced AI, and proprietary weather modeling. Tomorrow.io is deploying DeepSky, described as the world's first AI-native weather satellite constellation, and aims to expand its space-based observation network. Its platform is used to provide real-time, actionable resilience intelligence and is trusted by six of the top ten Fortune 500 companies. The company has been recognized as a TIME 100 Most Influential Company and a Fast Company Most Innovative Company. The recent expansion of its Series F to $210 million is intended to accelerate its AI capabilities and further develop its agentic platform.