Participated · Series A · Oct 2025

SenseNet offers an ultra-early wildfire intelligence platform that combines gas sensors, AI-enabled 24/7 cameras with 50-mile range, and satellite and weather feeds to spot fires—often within three minutes—during the smoldering phase, before smoke is visible. All data streams feed into a single incident-management dashboard that issues verified alerts, maps perimeters, and forecasts spread up to seven days ahead, enabling faster, data-driven response and fewer false alarms. The network already protects more than 130 million acres across North and South America and Southeast Asia and is deployed in Canada, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil, Chile, and other fire-prone regions through 100+ partnerships. Customers include governments, insurers, and energy companies seeking to curb the human and financial toll of wildfires. With total funding now topping $15 million, SenseNet plans to use its latest capital to accelerate U.S. expansion by installing new systems and opening additional offices. Leadership states its mission is to build the world’s most comprehensive wildfire intelligence network to safeguard ecosystems, communities, and infrastructure before fires escalate.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2024

Aiello develops an all-in-one SaaS management platform for the hospitality industry called Aiello-One, with core modules for Interface, Operations, and Insight. Its flagship product, Aiello Voice Assistant, is a talk-and-touch voice AI solution designed to improve hotel operations and guest experiences while generating customer behavior insights. The Voice Assistant has been deployed since 2019 in over 180 hotels covering roughly 20,000 rooms and has answered more than 14 million inquiries from about 2.5 million end users in Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and English. Founded in 2023 and based in Taipei, Aiello is positioning its products for international expansion, particularly into Japan and Southeast Asia. The company raised $5.0M in October 2024 to accelerate that expansion and further develop its hospitality-focused offerings. A representative from the lead investor CDIB Cross Border Innovation Fund II, Kenichi Sawaya, joined Aiello's board as part of the round. Aiello is a Taipei-based NLP and Voice AI startup whose flagship product is the Aiello Voice Assistant (AVA), an NLU-based solution tailored for hospitality. The company offers an AI SaaS platform built on proprietary NLU technology and in-house NLP and ML models. Aiello’s solutions process more than 900,000 speech and text interactions per month in Chinese, English, Thai, and Japanese. In the past six months it has won multiple international hotel contracts and signed corporate-level service contracts across Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. The new funding will be used to accelerate customer acquisition, expand internationally (particularly Japan and Thailand), boost R&D, and launch a Conversation Intelligence Platform by the end of the year. Founded in January 2019 by a team from Google, Qualcomm, and HTC, the company has now raised over $10 million in total.

Participated · Series A · May 2024

XGS Energy builds a proprietary solid-state, water-independent geothermal system that uses thermally conductive materials to produce round-the-clock baseload power anywhere there is hot rock. Its Thermal Reach Enhancement (TRE) technology completed a shallow field test in 2024, and the company is operating its first commercial-scale well in California, validating predictive performance models and accumulating operating history. XGS positions its modular approach to decouple geothermal from traditional water- and geology-dependent constraints, aiming to unlock geographic flexibility, easier permitting, and faster deployment. The firm says it has a multi-gigawatt commercial project pipeline across the Western United States and is ramping commercial operations ahead of a planned growth equity round later this year. XGS is headquartered in Houston, Texas, and plans to aggressively expand its team through year-end to support deployment and project development. The company’s approach targets improved financeability to attract venture and infrastructure capital for large-scale geothermal projects. XGS Energy has developed a proprietary slurry — a mix of water, surfactants and conductive minerals (patent filings mention graphite‑like materials and silica) — that is injected between a metal casing and surrounding rock to fill cracks and improve heat conduction. The slurry’s surfactant breaks at higher temperatures, releasing minerals that settle into fractures a few feet from the borehole, permitting the company to use a single cased borehole rather than multiple wells. By keeping working fluid isolated inside the metal casing, XGS can avoid contaminated surface water and use lower‑cost, higher‑efficiency heat exchangers, reducing operating costs. CEO Josh Prueher says the technique makes wells more productive and predictable — “we know within 30 days where we’re going to be in 30 years” in terms of power production. XGS’s technology can be applied to both new and existing geothermal wells, and the company plans to develop a version for suitably hot legacy oil and gas wells to avoid plugging and abandonment costs. To help commercialize the technology, XGS recently raised funding to build a commercial‑scale prototype at an existing geothermal field in California. XGS Energy is a geothermal company headquartered in Palo Alto, California that develops a proprietary Thermal Reach Enhancement™ (TRE) system and closed-loop well architecture. Its TRE system uses materials the company says are 50 times more conductive than native rock to deliver high-efficiency thermal energy without dependence on water or specific geology. XGS positions the technology for global deployment and says it enables terawatt-scale geothermal heat and power. The company completed more than 24 months of lab testing and is building a North American prototype to demonstrate TRE at full commercial scale. That prototype is intended to validate predictive performance models and support first commercial projects in the Western United States, Japan, and the Philippines. XGS emphasizes that its closed-loop, water-independent approach allows deployment anywhere in the world, unlike traditional geothermal solutions that require hot water reservoirs and specific geological formations. XGS Energy develops proprietary geothermal heat-harvesting technology and a closed-loop well architecture intended to unlock scalable, affordable, carbon-free baseload power. The technology is designed to eliminate reliance on rare geological formations and water availability, allowing broader deployment of geothermal energy. XGS says its approach enables global deployment and terawatt-scale geothermal heat and power. The company plans to use recent financing to accelerate technology development and commercial progress. XGS announced a $19M financing package, including a $14M Series A led by Anzu Partners, to support development efforts. Headquartered in Palo Alto, the company changed its name from Geothermic Solution LLC to XGS Energy, Inc.