Led · Seed · Oct 2025

Eztia Materials develops and manufactures HydraVolt™, a tunable polymer-gel that can be embedded into clothing and gear to absorb body heat and cut skin temperature by roughly 10 °C for as long as eight hours of strenuous activity. The material recharges with ordinary water, making it practical for use in construction, defense, public safety, and other heat-exposed industries. Current customers and pilot partners include PSA Singapore, Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs, Japan’s Kajima Construction, California-based Muller Construction Supply, and units of the U.S. military. The company cites a global market need driven by rising heat stress, which causes nearly 500,000 deaths annually and an estimated $100 billion in U.S. productivity losses. Proceeds from its recent financing will help scale manufacturing capacity and accelerate international expansion, especially across Asia. Headquartered in San Francisco, Eztia is led by CEO and co-founder Tiffany Yeh and supported by physicians and materials engineers. While revenue figures were not disclosed, the firm is focusing resources on commercializing HydraVolt and broadening its customer base in construction, logistics, and defense.

Participated · Seed · May 2025

Rhizome provides a cloud‑based climate resilience planning platform for utilities, built on its scalable Aspen platform. Its flagship product, gridADAPT, supports long‑term infrastructure planning and prioritizes resilience investments; it has since launched gridFIRM for wildfire risk mitigation and gridCAVA for climate vulnerability assessments for municipal and cooperative utilities. The company leverages AI applied to climate risk data and digital representations of physical grid assets to identify vulnerabilities and prioritize upgrades. Current customers include Avangrid, Seattle City Light, Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO) and Vermont Electric Cooperative (VEC). Rhizome also has strategic collaborations with EPRI’s Climate READi, KPMG, Black & Veatch, and the University of Connecticut. The company intends to use the funds to scale its AI platform and expand its team to help utilities protect their grids and customers from extreme weather impacts. Rhizome provides an AI-powered climate resilience planning platform called gridFIRM that helps utilities identify vulnerabilities from climate threats and quantify risk at high resolution. The platform applies machine learning to asset, geographic, and historical datasets to deliver granular, asset-level insight, including the likelihood an asset could ignite a wildfire. It also quantifies the economic and social benefits of grid-enhancing investments to support utility planning and wildfire mitigation. gridFIRM is available to electric utilities in the U.S., Canada, and Australia and was developed using feedback from customers in the Northeast, Pacific Northwest, and Texas. Led by CEO Mishal Thadani and CTO Rahul Dubey, Rhizome plans to use the $1M investment from Convective Capital to expand operations and advance product development. The company is headquartered in Washington, D.C.