Gigascale Capital Raises $250 Million Fund to Back Companies Rebuilding the Physical Economy for Climate Impact

PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Gigascale Capital today announced the close of its first institutional fund, a $250 million vehicle to back founders rebuilding the physical economy. Founded in 2023 by Mike Schroepfer, Gigascale has already partnered with more than 25 early-stage teams building the energy, materials, and infrastructure systems the future demands: technologies that, at scale, can be cheaper, more productive, and cleaner than what they replace.

Rapid electrification, industrial reshoring, AI deployment, and extreme weather are exposing the limits of physical systems built for a different era. Gigascale is focused on the areas where those constraints are most acute: clean energy and grid infrastructure, the supply chains that support them, and AI applied to the design, manufacturing, and deployment of physical systems. Learning curves, automation, and scale-driven cost declines make it possible to build and deploy better systems at the speed and scale this moment demands.

“I’ve spent my career building technology that removes constraints,” said Mike Schroepfer, Founding Partner of Gigascale Capital. "The pattern is always the same: cost curves bend, markets scale, and a better alternative makes the old way obsolete. Solar went from 40 gigawatts a year to 600 in a decade because it got cheaper, not because it got more virtuous. The companies we back win because they're cheaper, faster, and more reliable. That's how adoption scales. Climate impact is the result of better-performing systems."

This fund marks Gigascale’s first institutional raise focused on early-stage companies. Gigascale expects to complement its core investment strategy opportunistically, enabling the firm to support founders from first check through scaled deployment.

"Very few people have successfully scaled cutting-edge technology and delivered it to the world. Even fewer can go deep on the novel physics, the operational work, and the people at the same time," said Bob Mumgaard, CEO and co-founder, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. “Mike Schroepfer and his team do all of it, and their expertise shines through."

"The big opportunities of the next decade are not in either hardware or software. They're at the integration of both, at once,” said Jagdeep Singh, CEO and co-founder, Rhoda AI. “We need teams fluent in physics, manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and deployment, as well as investors who can partner through all of it. That combination is rare, and it's why Gigascale is exactly the kind of partner we wanted on our cap table.”

The portfolio includes founders like Drew Baglino, former SVP of Powertrain and Energy at Tesla, now building industrial power electronics at Heron Power, and Hooman Nezhad, a Thiel Fellow who started building a domestic rare-earth supply chain at Solcoa while still in high school.

Across the portfolio, companies are already hitting technical and commercial milestones. Radiant is poised to be among the first commercial deployments of nuclear microreactor technology in the U.S. Xcimer Energy achieved first light on its laser system for commercial fusion in December 2025. Arbor Energy signed an agreement with GridMarket to deliver up to 5 GW of zero-emission baseload power for the U.S. data center market. Fractile announced a $136 million expansion of its chip production capabilities to deliver processors that enable AI to scale without a proportional increase in energy and cooling demand. Dioxycle signed a multi-year offtake partnership with L’Oréal to turn captured carbon emissions into ethylene, the building block of plastic packaging. Mill is deploying food recyclers into commercial kitchens and across Whole Foods nationwide, with local government pilots underway.

"I've spent over a decade in clean energy, through the solar buildout, the hard years, and the hype cycles," said Victoria Beasley, General Partner, Gigascale Capital. “What's different now isn't narrative. Cost curves have moved, founders can build and deploy faster than ever, and companies being built today are winning on performance, not promise."

The distance from working prototype to deployed infrastructure is where most deep tech companies stall. Gigascale brings technical depth, company-building experience, and a broad network across technology, investing, and climate. The firm partners closely with founders to recruit talent, land first customers, and navigate the technical and operational decisions that turn promising technologies into systems the world can rely on.

About Gigascale Capital

Gigascale Capital backs early-stage companies rebuilding the physical economy for climate impact. Founded in 2023 by former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer, Victoria Beasley, and Evaline Tsai, the firm has invested in more than 25 companies across clean energy, advanced manufacturing, grid infrastructure, and physical AI. Some decarbonize directly. Others build the enabling layers that make physical systems faster and cheaper to design, build, and deploy. In both cases, climate impact follows from better performance.