Participated · Series B · Aug 2026

Ampaire develops hybrid-electric retrofit systems that combine electric propulsion with conventional engines for existing commercial aircraft to lower fuel burn, reduce emissions and cut airline operating costs. The company has demonstrated its technology in flight and is pursuing product certification and scaled production. Ampaire plans to use the new Series B proceeds to accelerate commercialisation, build supply chains, expand manufacturing and scale operating capabilities. It has engaged with airlines and industry partners, including participation in an IAG-run accelerator where it explored hybrid-electric auxiliary power unit (APU) solutions. Investors in the latest round include IAGi Ventures, Alaska Airlines and DiamondStream Partners. The company positions its offerings as practical retrofit options for aircraft already in service.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2025

Exowatt’s core product is the P3 unit, a shipping-container-sized metal box topped with lenses that concentrate sunlight onto heat-retaining bricks. A fan carries the heat to a Stirling engine and generator, enabling each thermal battery to store energy for up to five days and deliver round-the-clock electricity. The system’s efficiency rivals photovoltaic solar plus lithium-ion storage, while its compact, modular design is intended to unlock mass manufacturing learning curves. Exowatt is targeting production of one million units per year, a scale that management says will let it hit its one-cent-per-kilowatt-hour cost goal. Demand appears strong: the company reports a backlog of roughly 10 million P3 units, equivalent to 90 GWh of capacity. Longer term, Exowatt intends to deploy millions—and eventually billions—of units to power the rapidly expanding fleet of AI data centers in sun-rich regions. The approach repurposes decades-old concentrated solar technology but packages it for low-cost, large-scale manufacturing.

Participated · Series B · Apr 2025

Ocient builds data analytics software that delivers high-performance, compute-intensive analysis of very large and complex datasets using technologies such as Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture (CASA), Megalane™, OcientML®, and OcientGeo®. The company offers pilot-to-production deployments on premises, in the OcientCloud®, or in public clouds and emphasizes up to 90% price savings and reduced environmental impact. Ocient plans to use new capital to advance development and delivery of energy-efficient solutions for costly, complex, and operationally burdensome data and AI workloads and to expand customer deployments globally. The startup reported doubling revenues for the third straight year as it transitions into growth stage and has deepening industry partnerships with AMD, Solidigm, Amdocs, and others. Ocient was also accepted into the NVIDIA Inception program and recently launched a named telecommunications solution for data retention and disclosure. The company appointed Henry Marshall as CFO to manage financial operations as it scales. Ocient provides data analytics software that enables always-on, compute-intensive analysis of large, complex datasets, including in-database ML and geospatial capabilities. Its Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture (CASA) removes network bottlenecks to facilitate rapid data access and supports always-on loading, ETL/ELT, Zero Copy Reliability™, OcientML™, and OcientGeo™. The company says its platform delivers energy and cost efficiencies—including up to 80% price savings—and is positioned for next-generation, growth-scale analytics. Enterprises can deploy Ocient on premises, in OcientCloud™, or in the public cloud with minimal integration from pilot to production. Ocient reported 109% year-over-year revenue growth in its last fiscal year and plans to use new funding to advance product capabilities and deliver hyperscale data analytics solutions to a growing global customer base. Founded in 2016, Ocient is a global, carbon-neutral company headquartered in Chicago and has been recognized in the GigaOm Radar for Data Warehouses as a Fast Mover and Challenger. Ocient provides a proprietary data analytics solution (Ocient DAS) designed to enable rapid analysis of extremely large datasets. The platform can hold quadrillions of rows, ingest billions of rows per second, and filter and compute across trillions of rows per second. Ocient is deploying its DAS in Auction & Exchange Analytics, Security, and Geospatial customer use cases using industry-standard interfaces and hardware. The company was co‑founded in March 2016 by Chris Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski, and George Kondiles. Ocient closed a $40M Series B that brought total invested capital to $65M. The company plans to use the funds to grow engineering, customer success, operations, and sales and marketing, and expects headcount to double to 150 by the end of 2021. Ocient builds an ultra-large-scale relational database platform and SaaS designed to analyze multi-petabyte to exabyte-class datasets with interactive, sub-second query latency. Its DAS product can hold quadrillions of rows, ingest billions of rows per second, and filter/compute trillions of rows per second, and runs on commodity hardware or public cloud. The system targets use cases where NoSQL and Hadoop fall short, offering massively parallel processing and benchmarks that are typically ~50× faster than alternatives such as Presto (and up to 1,000× in some comparisons). The company says analytics that once took an hour can now take 10 seconds or less, enabling interactive insights on previously intractable datasets. Ocient has been expanding its team (hiring 15 employees and 9 interns in 2020 to reach over 50 employees) and plans to more than double headcount over the following year. The company also added senior management and advisory board members as it scales commercial and technical efforts. Ocient builds a relational database and analytics software platform designed to handle petabyte- to exabyte-scale data sets. Its platform is engineered to hold quadrillions of rows, ingest data at speeds of billions of rows per second, and filter and compute results at rates up to trillions of rows per second. The product targets organizations that need to analyze immense amounts of data at extreme scale. The company will use the new capital to support its engineering team, continue research and development, and activate a new development lab. Ocient was co-founded by Chris Gladwin, Joseph Jablonski and George Kondiles and is based in Chicago, IL. It secured about $10M in Series A funding to advance product and engineering work.

Participated · Series B · Feb 2025

Mast Reforestation provides post-wildfire reforestation services and is integrating biomass burial (Biomass Carbon Removal & Storage, BiCRS) to generate restorative carbon removal credits. The company is launching its first restorative biomass burial project, Mast Wood Preserve MT1 in central Montana, with burial activities planned for 2025 and expected generation of up to 30,000 tonnes of removal credits through 2026, available for presale. Mast pairs burial with restoration using native species grown from wild-collected seed in-house and manages two large nurseries, Silvaseed and Cal Forest, producing an average of 36 million seedlings annually. The MT1 project is designed as a geotechnically engineered, anoxic chamber protected under a 100-year easement, and Mast has submitted the project for a BeZero rating while pursuing registration and future verification with Puro.earth. Since 2020 Mast has specialized in carbon-financed reforestation across the U.S. and Canada and has restored thousands of acres in California, Montana, and Oregon. The company lists buyers such as Shopify and TIME CO2 and is using recent funding to scale its restorative reforestation and durable carbon removal efforts. DroneSeed’s core product is an automated drone system that delivers engineered seed packets and, when needed, applies treatments to accelerate forest recovery after wildfires. Its drones map terrain, select optimal planting sites, and deploy squirrel-resistant, nutrient-filled seed “pucks,” while collecting granular data for auditing and growth tracking. The company has expanded operational capability through FAA approvals for swarms and beyond-line-of-sight flight, and has grown its team to over 60 employees. To address nursery and seed shortages it acquired Silvaseed, a roughly 150-year-old seed supplier, and committed to expanding that seed-sorting and seedling-growing capacity. DroneSeed now grows millions of seedlings annually and says it is doubling capacity, positioning itself as a vertically integrated, one-stop reforestation provider. Financially, the company is pursuing carbon futures (“ex ante” credits) as a funding mechanism to accelerate projects and provide upfront capital for large-scale restoration. The recent funding round is intended to scale operations, expand nursery capacity, and support its integrated reforestation and carbon-finance model.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2024

Knit is an end-to-end, AI-native platform transforming how enterprises conduct consumer research by combining human researcher expertise with generative AI. The platform enables teams to run custom quantitative and qualitative studies and receive report-ready insights within days. Knit embeds customer context and researcher nuance into its models so AI outputs preserve depth and rigor while accelerating analysis, synthesis, and reporting. The company reports 5X year-over-year growth and serves more than 60 enterprise brands, including Amazon, NASCAR, Mars Wrigley, and Overtime. Knit has raised over $30M in total funding to date and uses its product to make research faster and more decision-ready. Future plans include accelerating product development with new AI-powered features, expanding research use cases, scaling go-to-market and research teams, and growing international research capabilities. Knit provides an end-to-end, AI-native platform that streamlines the consumer research process by marrying quantitative and qualitative data in the same survey. The product uses researcher-driven AI to take time-intensive tasks off researchers' plates and deliver stakeholder-ready reports faster. In the past year Knit has onboarded more than 30 enterprise brands, including T-Mobile, NASCAR, the WNBA, Mars Wrigley, Overtime, and JBL. The company reports that its annual recurring revenue grew 5X over the past year. Knit launched Report-Ready Insights — an offering that produces agency-quality quantitative and qualitative research at DIY costs. The company says its approach centers researcher expertise as the engine with AI as the navigator, enabling faster, more customizable research. Knit was founded in 2021 and is based in Austin, Texas.