Gigascale Capital

Hear the words "nuclear reactor," and you're probably thinking of mammoth infrastructure made of towers and an entire facility surrounding them. Now imagine that much, much smaller. Safe and portable. Radiant is building that vision as an economical product: a fission reactor mass-produced like cars and computers which brings costs down. So remote teams, communities, and events can ditch heavily polluting diesel generators. Doug Bernauer, CEO of Radiant, talks about how they're on track to produce more reactors in the next decade than currently exist in the world 👇

Heron Power's 5-megawatt converter keeps running when one of its 30 power cells fails. One person swaps the dead cell with a simple service tool, and the replacement arrives in a sprinter van. Hear founder Drew Baglino tell Gigascale Founder and Partner Mike Schroepfer "Schrep" how he convinces buyers to bet on new power electronics that are 30% smaller and a 10th of the weight of the massive, analog hardware they're used to.

Welcome Simran Arora, our new Head of Finance at Gigascale. Simran joins Gigascale with more than a decade of experience across venture capital and private markets. At Gigascale, Simran will run our financial engine end to end: fund accounting, valuations, tax, treasury, and management company operations. Just a few weeks in and Simran is already demonstrating how strategic her work is for our firm. Before Gigascale, Simran was Director of Finance at SemperVirens Venture Capital, where she built and led the firm’s finance and fund operations function and helped launch two new funds. Prior to that, she served as Senior Manager of Finance at Khosla Ventures, managing finance operations across 15+ venture funds investing from early seed rounds through growth-stage financings. She began her career in audit at Deloitte and KPMG, but she traces her passion for finance to childhood. Her father, a chartered accountant in India, imparted her earliest lessons on how financial statements tell the story of a business. Welcome aboard, Simran.

Xcimer is building the world's largest privately-owned laser to drive nuclear fusion. Panthalassa is deploying autonomous ocean nodes designed to generate wave energy at terawatt scale. Both showed up to the closing fireside chat at our SF Deep Tech Week event, hosted by Gigascale Founder & Partner Mike Schroepfer "Schrep," to explain how they're getting there. Panthalassa's Garth Sheldon-Coulson iterates by starting small: wave tanks, then platforms, then the open ocean. His team spent years prototyping every piece of the offshore wave energy platform separately, from wave tanks to communications systems, before combining those learnings into a full-scale system. Small was the fastest path to learning. Xcimer Energy's Alexander Valys doesn't have the option to start small. Laser fusion can't be meaningfully tested at a smaller scale, so the bottleneck moves somewhere else: how fast you can build the full-scale thing itself. A custom lens can take up to two years to source from an outside supplier. Xcimer's approach is to build the long-lead, mission-critical components in-house, which hands the team control over its own timeline and lets it iterate much faster. Two completely different technologies, same instinct: design your approach around how fast you can learn. More from SF Deep Tech Week soon, including the Radiant speaker who asked the room to imagine life as a neutron. Thanks to everyone who brought their curiosity and ideas.

The easiest way to sound smart is to explain why something won't work. The reasons are always available: Too slow. Too hard. Too early. The market isn't ready. Gigascale Founder and Partner Mike Schroepfer "Schrep" calls this “stop energy.” Stop energy feels clever, and it's hard to disprove in the moment. But it's mostly unexplored assumptions delivered with confidence. It's still the dominant mode of discourse around building hardware and physical technology. If you're building in the physical economy, your early investors should bring capital, yes, but they should also help you pressure-test these assumptions. They should help you tell them apart from legitimate constraints before they harden into architecture, GTM motions, hiring decisions, or a capital strategy. Choosing an early investor is just as much a technical decision as a financing one. Read Schrep's full piece on how to find investors who can see past the untested assumptions and show up when things get hard: https://lnkd.in/gwfHtued

🌱 DEEP TECH JOBS & INTERNSHIPS 🌱 Work directly with deep tech companies in sectors decisive for climate impact. Explore the open roles below, and help us spread the word. ▶ Commonwealth Fusion Systems R&D Engineer - Magnets | https://lnkd.in/e-sfVq9S Senior R&D Electromagnetic Analysis Engineer | https://lnkd.in/eDuAEYCe ▶ Mill Firmware Engineering Manager | https://lnkd.in/eCDQ796b Sr. Global Mechanical Supply Chain Manager | https://lnkd.in/eWBe573y ▶ Arbor Energy Sr. Combustion Engineer (Syngas Oxyfuel) | https://lnkd.in/enkYGUPa R&D Process Engineer | https://lnkd.in/eCmYT4E6 ▶ Radiant Senior Manager, Power Systems | https://lnkd.in/eKrAeVH8 Business Development Manager | https://lnkd.in/ecmb-kYM ▶ Panthalassa Offshore Technician, Communications | https://lnkd.in/gVXM9cwp Offshore Technician | https://lnkd.in/eDdFDg7W ▶ Solcoa Industries Head of Government Relations | https://lnkd.in/ed8f5bb7 Mechanical Engineer | https://lnkd.in/eZs8VkSj ▶ Dioxycle Process Development Engineer - Industrialisation | https://lnkd.in/eEufzu43 Electromechanical Technician | https://lnkd.in/eydV-4CT ▶ Form Energy Staff Project Engineer| https://lnkd.in/eZr4_3d9 Warehouse Operations Associate | https://lnkd.in/eqUcH2VM ▶ Xcimer Energy Director of Shot Operations and Maintenance | https://lnkd.in/eGej7nkB Staff Accountant | https://lnkd.in/ecQ3bg9c ▶ Heron Power Intern, Electronics Design Engineer, Spring 2027 | https://lnkd.in/edAFFtcg Workplace Operations Manager | https://lnkd.in/eGkjBNF4 View more open roles here: https://lnkd.in/ePAHmv7Y

Choosing an early investor is a technical decision, not just a financing one. Physical companies don't behave like software companies with heavier capex. They have different failure modes and the consequential ones happen early. A lab result doesn't always survive the first manufacturing run. A first customer can take eighteen months, not six. A technical decision becomes a financing constraint. A hiring gap becomes a commercialization problem. A seed-stage architecture choice can determine what's possible at Series B. The right early-stage firm helps founders separate real technical constraints from untested assumptions — before those assumptions harden into architecture, hiring decisions, or capital strategy. Questions founders should ask any potential investor: 1/ Recruiting: Who has the firm helped place in critical roles? 2/ Narrative: Can they help shape, early and intentionally, what the market believes you're building? 3/ Customer discovery: Can they get you in front of buyers to learn who owns the problem and help find out what getting to yes actually requires? 4/ First customers: Have their intros led to pilots, contracts, or partnerships? What did they do beyond the intro? 5/ Scale-up: Has anyone at the firm navigated from prototype to factory? What broke? 6/ Capital formation: Can they help plan follow-on, project finance, and non-dilutive capital before you're obvious to later-stage investors? 7/ Technical de-risking: Can they evaluate architecture and manufacturing tradeoffs with you? To boil it down to a single question: who shows up when things get hard? Read more from our Founding Partner Mike Schroepfer "Schrep" on what physical economy startups should expect of their investors: https://lnkd.in/gwfHtued

Earlier this month, we announced Gigascale’s $250M Fund I to back early-stage companies rebuilding the physical economy. The next generation of enduring companies will be built in atoms, across energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, and industrial systems. Our view is that climate progress comes from better-performing systems: technologies that are cheaper to deploy, faster to scale, and cleaner than what they replace. Here’s a round-up of recent conversations and coverage on our announcement, our thesis, and the opportunity ahead: Bloomberg: https://lnkd.in/gWY2DbHQ TechCrunch: https://lnkd.in/dpmsNEXi Fox Business (The Claman Countdown): https://lnkd.in/g33-zvX2 TBPN: https://lnkd.in/gaXxs6Xw CTVC: https://lnkd.in/gaJgMy6x Axios: https://lnkd.in/erjUZqdE The Next Web: https://lnkd.in/dxKnecCC ESG Today: https://lnkd.in/dXy2ycFa Forbes (Current Climate newsletter): https://lnkd.in/efuPPzT9