Prelude Ventures
One Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Overview
Prelude Ventures invests in and supports early-stage startups with the greatest potential to mitigate climate change. Our goal is to help build the next generation of category-defining businesses.
- Total investments
- 116
- Lead investments
- 36
- Investments · 12mo
- 10
- Active investors
- 9
Sector focus
- AgTech
- Automotive
- Carbon Capture
- Clean Energy
- CleanTech
- Food and Beverage
- Green Building
- Industrial
Investment portfolio
- Form Energy
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.
- Quaise
Led · Series B · Jul 2026
Quaise Energy develops superhot geothermal power systems and the millimeter wave drilling technology to access deep, high-temperature rock. Its drilling approach, developed after research at MIT, ablates rock and aims to reach temperatures of roughly 300–500°C at depths beyond what conventional drilling can economically access. The company has demonstrated field progress, drilling more than 100 meters through granite in 2025 and is approaching one kilometer of depth at its Central Texas site. Quaise is both a technology innovator and project developer and is constructing Project Obsidian on federal geothermal leases in Oregon with construction underway. The company says Project Obsidian has gigawatt-scale potential and plans to deliver first electrons to the grid by 2030. Quaise has raised $230 million to date, with the recent $134 million Series B serving as the initial equity component of a broader capital program that includes project-level equity and debt.
- Morpho Labs
Participated · Equity · Jun 2026
Morpho Labs operates a decentralized lending and borrowing protocol that aggregates markets and allows users to create their own on-chain lending markets with bespoke risk parameters. The protocol had about $6.6 billion in assets locked and counts customers and integrators such as Coinbase, Kraken, Anchorage Digital, and Galaxy Digital. Morpho was initially built on top of Aave before evolving into a distinct protocol that seeks to compete with incumbents by offering customizable markets and higher yields. The team includes cofounder Paul Frambot, who launched the project at age 20, alongside Merlin Egalite, Julien Thomas, and Mathis Gontier Delaunay. Morpho has experienced some security exposure tied to a broader exploit that affected Aave but has continued to grow adoption. The company has signaled plans to court traditional financial institutions as it further develops its protocol and market reach.
- Thea Energy
Participated · Series B · May 2026
Thea Energy builds pixel-inspired rectangular magnets and software to generate and fine-tune stellarator magnetic fields, using many smaller planar coils to shape plasma confinement. The company says its approach lets software control arrays of regular magnets to create complex stellarator fields, and it has built dozens of full-scale magnet iterations in its Jersey City lab. Thea originally spun out of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and has iterated its design to include a set of larger magnets alongside more than 300 smaller coils that fine-tune the plasma. With $130 million in total private funding after the new Series B, Thea is scaling magnet manufacturing and plans to begin construction of its Eos demonstration reactor next year. The company aims to complete Eos by 2030 and bring a commercial device, Helios, online in 2034.
- Exponent
Participated · Seed · Apr 2026
Exponent operates an onchain yield exchange on Solana that lets users convert variable yield exposures—such as staking or lending returns—into fixed-rate or leveraged positions via an onchain interest rate order book. The company is updating its platform to introduce fully onchain order book functionality and strategy vaults that allow asset managers to package interest-rate strategies for users under predefined governance policies. Exponent has processed over $2 billion in yield volume across more than 35,000 users since launching in late 2024 and generates revenue from fees on issuing derivative positions tied to yield assets and from trading activity. It is onboarding partners and preparing markets across stablecoins, real-world assets, and Solana-denominated products, with early strategy-vault partners including RockawayX, Hastra, OnRe, and Solstice. The startup operates with a 12-person team, plans to allocate part of its recent funding toward security (audits and a bug bounty), and intends to remain focused on building on Solana. The company began fundraising for its seed in May and closed the round in August.