The Venture Codex

Participated · Series G · Aug 2026

Form Energy develops iron-air long-duration batteries capable of delivering up to 100 hours of discharge. Its chemistry relies on iron oxidation and reduction, enabling lower-cost storage by avoiding higher-priced minerals like lithium, cobalt, and nickel. The company has secured large commercial customers including Google, Crusoe, Xcel Energy, and FuturEnergy Ireland and reports a commercial project backlog of about 80 gigawatt-hours. About 80% of the company’s materials supply is sourced from the U.S., with the remainder from Europe and Asia. Form is expanding manufacturing capacity in West Virginia following its recent financing. The company’s positioning and technology aim to address growing demand for long-duration storage as U.S. electricity demand rises and renewable generation expands.

Led · Seed · Jun 2026

Red Metals was founded by Jackson Switzer to reshore copper refining and finished copper product manufacturing in the U.S. The company has developed a proprietary refining process that integrates physical processing, advanced sorting, and metallurgical refining into a single continuous operation to eliminate many traditional intermediate steps. Initially focused on domestic copper scrap, Red Metals’ first commercial product will be high-conductivity copper rod used in wire, magnet wire, and other electrical applications. The approach is intended to reduce supply chain complexity, lower emissions, and shorten production timelines from months to days. Red Metals plans to build its first production facility in Charleston, South Carolina, with a planned investment of about $70 million and expects the initial phase to create at least 45 jobs. The company targets growing end markets including data centers, grid modernization, electrification, and defense systems.

Participated · Series B · May 2026

Founded in 2022, Fractile develops chips and systems aimed at dramatically speeding up inference for frontier AI models. The company’s thesis is that time-to-output and inference unit economics—particularly memory bandwidth limits—are the next major bottlenecks as models generate increasingly long outputs. Fractile is working across AI research, chip microarchitecture, and foundry process innovation to reduce inference latency and cost. Its technology targets workloads that can require tens of millions of tokens and seeks to enable new, longer-running AI tasks by making faster inference economically viable. The company is expanding its team and hiring across London, Bristol, San Francisco, and Taipei as it scales development. Financial metrics, customers, and prior funding amounts were not disclosed in the articles.

Participated · Series B · May 2026

Panthalassa builds self-propelled, autonomous floating nodes that capture wave energy to generate continuous clean electricity and run AI inference computing onboard, transmitting results to land via low-Earth-orbit satellites. The company has spent about a decade developing its power generation, propulsion, autonomy, and at-sea computing technologies and demonstrated capabilities with Ocean-1, Ocean-2, and Wavehopper prototypes in 2021 and 2024. Panthalassa plans to deploy its Ocean-3 pilot node series in the northern Pacific in 2026 to demonstrate AI inference at sea and to refine manufacturing ahead of commercial deployments in 2027. The platform uses the ocean for free supercooling to extend chip lifetimes and avoids transmitting power to shore by performing computing onboard. The company is a public benefit corporation headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and recently raised $140 million in a Series B to complete a pilot manufacturing facility and accelerate initial deployments.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2026

Cocoon develops a rapid cooling, low-capex, modular process that retrofits into existing electric arc furnace waste handling to convert steel slag into a high-performance supplementary cementitious material (SCM). The company’s product matches traditional SCM performance while reducing the embodied CO2 of concrete by up to 40%. Cocoon has piloted its technology at a major steel mill, completed third-party validation of its material in concrete applications, and established an R&D facility and concrete testing lab in London. With demand for SCMs growing roughly 6–7% annually and supply tightening as legacy industrial sources retire, Cocoon targets faster, capital-efficient deployment by co-locating at steel plants to minimize logistics and leverage existing operations. The company is scaling hiring across the U.K. and U.S. and aims to deploy more than 50 sites in the U.S. and Europe (targeting 50 sites by 2035) following its U.S. commercial demo.