Lowercarbon Capital

Stellarators have been theoretically attractive and practically impossible for decades because the magnets are a nightmare to build. Thea just raised $100m Series B to make them like any other industrial component. The round bankrolls magnet de-risking/manufacturing and groundbreaking on Eos, Thea's prototype stellarator as the final step ahead of their demonstration fusion power plant Helios. Great momentum for the energy endgame. Congrats to Brian Berzin and the team.

Antora Energy just turned an empty lot into 5 GWh in under 12 months. Built in San Jose, shipped to the Great Plains, and now displacing expensive natural gas. Every heavy industrial site serious about surviving the next decade of demand needs to install 200 batteries in its yard. Great work by Antora and POET.

When we founded Crux, we set out to unlock bottlenecks in clean energy and critical infrastructure financing. Today marks a major milestone in that mission. I'm proud to announce that Crux has closed a $500 million debt financing facility with Nuveen Energy Infrastructure Credit, part of Nuveen, a TIAA company. This facility will support Crux-led tax driven investments — including hybrid tax equity — as we scale our commercial participation in the clean energy financing market. The context matters: US ⚡️ demand is surging, driven by AI, electrification, and population growth. We believe the need for domestically produced clean energy has never been more urgent, and this partnership positions Crux to deploy capital at the speed and volume this moment demands. Thank you to the Nuveen EIC team, our partners at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Affiliates and Milbank LLP, and the entire Crux team who made this possible. https://lnkd.in/eTv53QJH

Insurance companies have spent years running for the exits in California. Mercury Insurance just went the other way by investing in Burnbot to advance wildfire mitigation solutions the state desperately needs. Robots that eat fuel before it becomes a fire offer a far better deal than paying out after one. Congrats to the team.

I’m excited to share the first episode of Critical Capital — a new podcast I’m hosting in collaboration with Latitude Media unpacking the markets, policy, and capital flows shaping the future of energy. We started this show because energy is one of the biggest untold stories of our generation. Energy and finance are converging. Digital demand is colliding with physical infrastructure. Yet very few conversations are connecting these dots. Our first guest is Aidan Madigan-Curtis. Aidan and I first met in business school and, since then, she has built deep expertise across technology and VC investing, now as a Partner at Eclipse. She also has a serious command of history and geopolitics that just makes any conversation with her so incredibly interesting. In this episode, we talk about why the next trillion-dollar company will be built on “both atoms and bits”. Aidan draws fascinating parallels between today’s moment in American energy and the Gilded Age, when industrial innovation and financing shifts converged to unlock enormous growth. We also discuss how moving forces in globalization and manufacturing going back to the 1980s impact AI and critical minerals at the center of strategic competition today. Listen on 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://lnkd.in/gcYkwwJu 🟢 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gAriRxyE 💻 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g7v7ijGU 🔗 Web: https://lnkd.in/gT6bAxSU New episodes drop biweekly on Tuesdays. Huge shoutout to the entire Latitude team who helped bring this idea to life, including Stephen Lacey, Jenna Herzog, Anne Bailey, John Sheehan and Sean Marquand, and from Crux Emily Hughes and her rockstar team. https://lnkd.in/euXh2HUH

Eighty-five meters of steel taking on the power of the open ocean. Congrats to the Panthalassa team on the raise and launching energy solutions beyond the coastline.

Living Carbon, one of the first suppliers to sign up to Isometric's Reforestation Protocol, has received $500 million in project financing from Octopus Energy Generation to remove up to 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The investment will support Living Carbon's work to reforest degraded mining and agricultural land across the US, while restoring habitats, improving water quality, and generating income for local communities. Living Carbon will generate carbon removal credits under Isometric's Reforestation Protocol, which was approved by The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM) in February to issue credits with the Core Carbon Principles (CCP) label. Find out more about the news: https://lnkd.in/dsnzYenu

🏆Emerald AI is so honored to be named one of the TIME 100 Most Influential Companies of 2026! We have a long journey ahead to truly earn our place alongside the extraordinary titans on this list, but we have our sights set on nothing less than a moonshot to turbocharge the AI revolution, unlock the energy bottleneck for compute, and protect energy affordability and reliability through flexible AI Factories. 🔗Read the full list here: https://ti.me/100companies 🔗And read Emerald AI's entry here: https://lnkd.in/ekbYKTc9 as well as our announcement here https://lnkd.in/etzhYvGS It's inspiring and humbling to join the world's most impactful companies, including our close partner, major investor, and the most valuable company on Earth, NVIDIA. Thank you for the support to dream big—that we can unlock hundreds of gigawatts of power around the globe for AI Factories that can flexibly control their power use while protecting the performance of high-value AI workloads. The rewards are massive: unlocking trillions of AI investment, accelerating life-saving scientific discoveries, and reducing energy bills for local communities as the next generation of AI data centers serves as grid allies and lucrative customers to anchor generations of revenue for public power systems. Emerald AI aims to make AI the hero, not the villain. And we stand on the shoulders of giants, such as pioneers in this field like Google, whom we're so honored to join on this list. Achieving this transformation will require bringing the entire ecosystem together to fundamentally change how the energy system and the burgeoning network of AI infrastructure interact. That's why partnerships are at the center of our strategy, and we're delighted to see our partner and leading power company NextEra Energy, Inc. on this list. 🙏 A massive thank you to our team, so many of whom come from wonderful firms on this list and have chosen to build and launch our own rocketship. We've come together because of our shared mission to change the world and align the AI revolution with benefits for innovation, local communities, and global challenges. Thank you to our investors and incredible partners across the ecosystem. And thank you to Jessica Sibley, CEO of TIME, and the fantastic Justin Worland for writing the entry about Emerald AI! 🚀

Overview Energy just signed a first-of-its-kind GW-scale power deal with Meta. The team is one big step closer to putting solar energy on the night shift. For anyone playing catch-up, Overview is building satellites to collect sunlight in geosynchronous orbit and beam it as infrared energy to existing solar farms on the ground, turning intermittent panels into round-the-clock baseload. Congrats to Marc Berte and the team on the first hyperscaler power deal to extend beyond the atmosphere. Learn more in Bloomberg: https://lnkd.in/g7P8Q6mG And full story on their airborne demo here: https://lnkd.in/evj8Cz8k

Ulysses has raised $46M led by a16z American Dynamism. We are building The Ocean Company. The ocean is 71% of the planet. But it is less explored than Mars, and full of secrets, waiting to be told. It is the backbone of global defense. Home to the critical infrastructure that powers our world. And the key to the health of our planet. This frontier needs technology to protect and steward it. We are building it. And we need more builders Join us and explore the Great Blue Frontier: https://lnkd.in/gzhRpb5z **** I want to thank our customers. There are too many to name but countless groups around the world have chosen to partner with Ulysses to solve critical underwater tasks and we are so grateful for your trust and continued partnership. We are excited to continue serving you and your mission. This funding helps us do this better and faster. We are very grateful to our investors. We are excited to partner with Erin Price-Wright, David Ulevitch, and Ryan McEntush at Andreessen Horowitz for this next phase of growth. They understood our vision from the first time we met and have been great partners so far. Additionally, our seed leads at Pebblebed, Keith Adams and Pamela Vagata, have been friends for years, and it's such a joy to be finally in business together. They have been our supporters since day 1, letting us stay with them on our first trip to SF all those years ago. And all our follow investors. New ones like Booz Allen Hamilton (Taylor Rhoten, Brian MacCarthy), Harpoon (Jeremy Stein, Jacob Windle, Andrew Couillard, Larsen Jensen, Clint Brown) and Genius Ventures (Adam Gefkovicz, Ben Taft). We are excited to have you guys on the journey with us. And to those who have believed in us since the pre-seed and have doubled down, Lowercarbon Capital (Ryan Orbuch, Duncan Carlson), ReGen Ventures (Dan Fitzgerald, Tom McQuillen, Elena Klonsky), and Superorganism (Tom Quigley, Kevin Webb). If you want to learn more about Ulysses, our vision to become The Ocean Company, and the funding round, we sat down with my friend Kylie Robison at Core Memory to discuss: https://lnkd.in/gNB2A_Tj Also, Erin and Ryan at a16z wrote a great piece here about their decision to invest in Ulysses here: https://lnkd.in/gX4_xx7P