Gigascale Capital raises $250M Fund I for physical economy startups

Why it matters

Gigascale Capital is betting that hardware and infrastructure startups can again deliver venture-scale outcomes, but the fund is entering categories where technical proof, manufacturing risk and capital needs can punish software-style investing assumptions.

Mike Schroepfer (@schrep), the former Meta Platforms CTO who now invests in climate technology through Gigascale Capital, said on X that the firm has raised Gigascale Capital Fund I, a $250 million first institutional fund to back early-stage founders rebuilding the physical economy.

https://x.com/schrep/status/2061474431118229932?s=20

Schroepfer framed the fund as validation of a thesis that sounded non-obvious when he founded Gigascale Capital in 2023: hardware and infrastructure could again produce venture-scale companies. He said demand is rising from data centers, onshoring, electrification and industrial growth, making the central constraint for the best companies less about whether customers exist and more about how quickly they can supply the market.

The firm is also selling investors and founders on the operating history of its partnership. Schroepfer has spent 25 years across technology and science as an executive, entrepreneur and investor, with a record of identifying technical disruptions and scaling companies around them. He started Gigascale to put his time, expertise and capital behind companies he believes can become trillion-dollar businesses while delivering climate impact at scale.

Before Gigascale Capital, Schroepfer spent 13 years as an operator at Meta, including 9 years as CTO. His remit included scaling products from tens of millions to billions of users, building tens of millions of square feet of data centers, shipping first-of-a-kind consumer hardware, growing the engineering organization from 150 people to 35,000, founding Meta's AI Research Lab in 2013 and running the acquisitions of Oculus and Instagram. He continues to advise Meta on AI as a senior fellow.

Schroepfer's earlier operating background runs through Mozilla, where he led engineering, and a Sequoia-backed startup he founded that exited to Sun Microsystems during the dot-com bust. Beyond Gigascale, he serves on private and nonprofit boards and has previously served on public-company boards. His philanthropic work includes founding Additional Ventures, which aims to cure single ventricle heart disease through research and strategic investments, as well as the Carbon-to-Sea Initiative and Outlier Projects, which fund research and policy to accelerate climate solutions.

Victoria Beasley, a founding partner at Gigascale Capital, brings more than 15 years in climate as an investor, founder and operator. At Gigascale, she co-leads firm strategy with Schroepfer, oversees operations and manages both the investment and platform teams. She is a board observer for portfolio companies Arch, Dioxycle, Estes, Homeboost and Light Energy.

Beasley was previously one of four general partners at Prelude Ventures, a $1.5 billion AUM fund, where she led 12 investments across energy, mobility, food and agriculture, carbon management, materials and industrials. Earlier, she was head of finance at Suniva, an early-stage solar company, where she helped raise $105 million in equity and worked on manufacturing expansion and cost reduction, including an effort to reduce silver use in solar cells. She also founded an agriculture supply-chain company, worked on climate strategy at BCG and interned with d.light.

Evaline Tsai, a partner at Gigascale Capital, adds scientific and company-building experience to the investment team. She serves as a board observer for Cocoon, Dioxycle, Pasture Biosciences, Skouria, Terradot and Vor Systems, and the firm says she focuses on how novel science scales, what drives costs down and where it can win commercially. Tsai was named a Business Insider Rising Star of Venture Capital in 2023 and is a Kauffman Fellow.

Before Gigascale, Tsai spent two years at Fine Structure Ventures, where she was a board observer for Debut Biotech, Hoxton Farms and Boston Metal, and invested in Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Phytoform. She founded Cambridge Cancer Genomics, a Y Combinator-backed healthcare company, while completing a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and biotechnology at the University of Cambridge. She later joined Samsara as the first product manager for AI and machine learning, where she was granted four patents.

The broader Gigascale bench extends the same physical-world bias. Associate Haley Prout brings hardware product engineering and development experience from Stryker, where she led orthopedic implant and surgical instrumentation projects, including one that delivered more than 50 SKUs to market. At DCVC and the Stanford Impact Fund, she worked on batteries and carbon removal theses. Advising partner John Lilly, a former Greylock general partner, led investments in Instagram, Dropbox, Figma, Tumblr and Quip, and previously led Mozilla as CEO as Firefox reached more than 450 million users.

Gigascale Capital is arguing that physical-economy startups need different underwriting than software companies. Schroepfer said physical companies "don't behave like software with heavier capex," because lab results can fail in manufacturing and early architecture choices can determine what is possible by a Series B round.

Since 2023, Gigascale Capital has backed more than 25 companies across energy, grid infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, materials and AI for physical systems. The portfolio examples underscore how broad that bet is: Heron Power, where former Tesla executive Drew Baglino is building grid power electronics; Solcoa, which produced rare-earth materials without the environmental toll of conventional production; Radiant, which is working toward commercial deployment of nuclear microreactors; Xcimer Energy, which achieved first light on its fusion laser system; and Arbor Energy, which signed for up to 5 GW of zero-emission baseload power for U.S. data centers. The firm also pointed to Panthalassa, Fractile, Dioxycle and Mill as companies moving physical technology toward deployment.

The announcement does not name the fund's limited partners or break out how much of the $250 million has already been committed. The strategic signal is clearer: Gigascale Capital is betting that the next climate cycle will be won by founders who can make cleaner systems simpler, more scalable and cost competitive, not just more virtuous.