Participated · Seed · Aug 2025

Raise Robotics is a San Francisco, CA-based startup that builds robots to automate hazardous tasks on vertical construction sites. Led by Conley Oster and Gary Chen, the company provides contractors across multiple trades with versatile automated tools that perform high-risk activities such as layout, drilling, fastening, and inspection. Its robots adapt to specific site requirements and integrate into existing workflows. On August 5, 2025, Raise raised $7.8M in seed funding led by MaC Ventures, with participation from Undivided Ventures, Cybernetix Ventures, Zacua Ventures and Union Labs. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its development efforts.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2025

Foundation EGI offers an engineering general intelligence (EGI) platform that combines purpose-built large language models with physics-based context and engineering best practices to tackle design-to-manufacturing complexity. The platform transforms disorganized specifications, siloed tribal knowledge, and outdated instructions into succinct, structured, auditable, and human- and machine-executable workflows. It targets multiple manufacturing domains including automotive, heavy industry, appliances, power tools, and advanced manufacturing and is used at leading Fortune 500 industrial brands. The company was born from MIT cross-disciplinary research led by co-founders Wojciech Matusik and Michael Foshey and cites a 2024 paper, "Large Language Models for Design and Manufacturing," as foundational. Foundation EGI says its vision is to turn manufacturing's biggest bottlenecks into breakthroughs and enable AI-native co-design between humans and machines. Financially, the company announced an oversubscribed Series A of $23M, raising over $30M in total. Foundation EGI has launched a proprietary domain-specific large language model and agentic AI platform purpose-built for engineering and manufacturing workflows. The platform interprets complex natural-language instructions, converts them into clean, structured code and machine-executable workflows, and integrates with industry-standard design tools. Early pilots with several unnamed Fortune 500 industrial companies reportedly show reductions in design-to-manufacture cycles, fewer production errors, and faster time-to-market. The company plans to use the new funding to expand engineering and product teams, scale enterprise pilots and onboard new clients, enhance integrations with leading engineering tools, and advance its core LLM to cover more specialized manufacturing domains. Foundation EGI was co-founded by Mok Oh, Ph.D., Professor Wojciech Matusik, and Michael Foshey, and its work was catalyzed by a 2024 MIT paper titled “Large Language Models for Design and Manufacturing.”

Participated · Series B · Feb 2025

Urban Sky develops high-altitude balloons (Microballoon™/mHAB), custom stratospheric payloads, control software, and AI-derived forecasting and autonomous flight control systems. Its flagship mHAB product is a rapidly deployable, navigable stratospheric balloon that can operate above 60,000 feet for multiple days. The company serves commercial, civil government, and U.S. defense customers, including NASA, the oil & gas sector, wildfire monitoring organizations, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Air Force. Urban Sky demonstrated its Hot Spot LWIR imaging system with NASA and the Air Force, producing wildfire heat maps the company says are 100x finer than publicly available MODIS and VIIRS data. The firm plans to develop and commercialize a connected suite of products and to pioneer technologies to deploy a global constellation of long-duration, persistent stratospheric balloons for search & rescue, environmental monitoring, disaster response, communications, and intelligence support. Financially, Urban Sky closed a $30M Series B to accelerate development and commercialization of its technology and product portfolio. Urban Sky builds small, reusable stratospheric balloons—branded Microballoons—that are deployed from a pickup truck to collect high-resolution Earth imagery and data products. The company offers natural color optical images today and is developing near-infrared and long-wave infrared sensors (the latter, HotSpot, has been demonstrated to monitor wildfires in real time under a NASA grant with Air Force support). Urban Sky uses a patented termination and descent mechanism to recover balloons and a stratospheric flight simulator to back-predict launch sites, lowering operational costs. The 14-person startup has been running tasking missions in the Rocky Mountain region and has brought in millions in revenue. It plans to scale operations by building a routine catalogue of refreshed data over highly populated areas and other customer areas of interest. Urban Sky aims to drive down imagery costs—reporting roughly $5–$10 per square kilometer at 10 cm resolution—and compete on cost and revisit cadence with traditional satellite providers. Urban Sky is a Denver, CO startup focused on stratospheric technology and remote sensing. The company develops the Microballoon, leveraging component miniaturization and first-of-its-kind balloon reusability to operate in the stratosphere. Its approach uses the high vantage point of the stratosphere to reduce the cost of high-resolution remote sensing and weather-related data capture over broad areas. Urban Sky says this enables more impactful data collection across larger regions than traditional platforms. The company announced an over-subscribed $4.1 million Seed financing round. Investors in the round include Catapult Ventures, Union Labs, TenOneTen Ventures, New Stack Ventures, and Techstars.

Participated · Seed · Jul 2024

California-based SirenOpt is developing PlasmaSens, a manufacturing intelligence system that pairs cold atmospheric plasma sensing with machine-learning analytics to detect defects and material inconsistencies in real time. The platform integrates into both roll-to-roll and piece-to-piece production lines, providing micron-level resolution and actionable feedback that can boost yields, cut waste, and shorten product-development cycles. Initial target markets include battery electrode fabrication, aerospace composites, semiconductors, power-generation components, and automotive parts. The company has seen strong early interest from blue-chip customers and plans to complete its first full inline factory deployments in 2026. To speed commercialization, SirenOpt is expanding its engineering, product, and commercial teams and broadening pilot programs across the US, Europe, and Asia. Financially, the firm just secured a $6.5 million equity round and recently won a $2.4 million grant from the California Energy Commission to tailor PlasmaSens for battery-electrode manufacturing.

Participated · Series A · Aug 2023

Pico MES offers a no-code, remote software platform that digitizes shop-floor processes and connects machines, tools, and people via an open API. The product measures shop-floor processes and digitizes assembly lines to create continuous digital data streams. Since its launch in 2019, Pico MES has integrated 10,000 processes from over 700 workstations and connected more than 1,900 devices, and has been deployed in dozens of factories serving Tier 1, 2, and 3 OEM suppliers in the EV, aerospace, and battery industries. Led by CEO Ryan Kuhlenbeck, the company plans to use new funding to bolster U.S. green infrastructure, empower mid-sized factories, and replace outdated manual methods. Its platform is designed to be integrated across supply chains supporting OEMs in capital-intensive sectors. The company raised $12.35M in Series A financing to support those efforts. Pico MES offers an interactive MES platform aimed at small and midsize factories, with a no-code device library and IoT network to simplify machine connectivity and monitoring. The product includes low-cost IoT hardware, pre-built integrations, and error-proofing that can automatically stop tools when problems arise. Pico consolidates documentation and workflows into digital twins that record intended versus actual production steps and surface actionable continuous-improvement feedback. The company says its software can be deployed in as little as a day and targets the roughly 90% of small and midsize factories that lack an MES; it notes 98.6% of U.S. manufacturers have fewer than 500 employees and produce over $3 trillion in goods annually. Pico has 22 employees and expects headcount to increase by 30–50% by year end. Management plans future work to support AR/VR and advanced robotics and will expand features such as an automated business-intelligence platform and scope 3 emissions tracking.