New deep tech fund Wave Operate Ventures raises $15 million

When Jamie Gull graduated from Stanford College in 2007 with a grasp’s diploma in aeronautics, there was one place he wished to go subsequent: the desert.

The Mojave desert, to be particular. An organization referred to as Scaled Composites had spent years growing experimental plane out on that arid land, and Gull wished in.

He might have tried to get a extra conventional aerospace job, however Gull was nervous he’d “work 5 years on a latch” — a typical joke about these greater, slow-moving firms. However at Scaled Composites? “I knew I might construct one thing, and I might do it shortly, and I might be a school graduate who would personal an precise final result,” he stated.

Two years later, Gull jumped to SpaceX, the place he helped make the Falcon 9 rocket reusable — a serious milestone in that firm’s historical past, and the muse on which it has constructed an enormously useful enterprise.

Now, Gull is gearing up for a brand new problem: launching an early-stage deep tech fund referred to as Wave Operate Ventures. Simply final week, he closed Wave Operate’s first fund of $15.1 million, and he’s already off and operating.

Gull has made 9 investments in startups that span industries like nuclear power (Deep Fission), humanoid robotics (Persona AI), and, in fact, aerospace (Airship Industries). He informed TechCrunch he expects to do about 25 seed or pre-seed investments out of this fund. (Gull declined to call the anchor LP, and stated the remainder of the fund was crammed by excessive internet value people, with help from different funds and “massive household workplaces.”)

Wave Operate’s emergence comes at a time when deep tech funding is on the rise, buoyed partially by the elevated consideration on fields like aerospace and protection. It’s sufficient of a pattern that earlier this yr, a brand new Silicon Valley-based deep tech fund referred to as Leitmotif broke cowl with $300 million in capital from the Volkswagen Group, a part of a bid to carry up {hardware} and manufacturing startups in the US and Europe.

It’s the form of setting that appears ripe for somebody with a background like Gull’s — and never simply his previous as an achieved aerospace engineer.

Close to the top of his time at SpaceX in 2016, Gull began angel investing, making bets on firms like Growth Supersonic, K2 House, and Varda. He additionally co-founded electrical vertical takeoff and touchdown (eVTOL) startup Talyn Air as a part of Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch, and have become a enterprise accomplice at YC’s Pioneer Fund — a place he nonetheless holds. (Talyn was acquired in 2023 by one other eVTOL firm, Ampaire.)

Gull needs to place all this different expertise — doing fast prototyping, founding a startup, angel investing — to make use of at Wave Operate.

“I can actually leverage that to assist all my founders get by these early phases when issues are like essentially the most unsure, after which assist them construct their firms,” he stated.

Gull additionally believes deep tech goes to be a spot for giant returns within the subsequent 10 to twenty years. Startups on this house could require extra capital up entrance, he stated, however they will leverage non-venture funding (like authorities contracts or asset-backed lending) to scale and set up a extra strong moat than software program firms.

Attending to these large returns will take time and Gull is ok with that. Whereas he started his profession as an keen builder, he additionally is aware of the worth of persistence.

When he was at Scaled Composites fifteen years in the past, one of many initiatives he labored on was Stratolaunch, the biggest airplane on the earth on the time. It was such an enormously complicated plane that it remained in growth lengthy after Gull moved to SpaceX and past.

It wasn’t till 2019 when Gull and his Talyn co-founder Evan Mucasey had been planning to move to a “fly-in” (assume: automobile present however for cool planes) on the Mojave airport that he acquired a touch he would possibly see the enormous airplane fly.

“I referred to as a buddy and stated, ‘what time ought to we be there for the airplane present?’ And he stated, ‘6 a.m.’ I used to be like, that is not sensible,” Gull stated. He didn’t know what his buddy was hinting at, however he believed it might be well worth the early flight.

Certain sufficient, as Gull and Mucasey approached the airport, there was Stratolaunch, parked on the runway and prepped for flight. They landed and, per Gull’s recollection, Stratolaunch took off quarter-hour later.

“I feel it was virtually precisely 10 years after I had labored on it on a pc display,” Gull stated. “It was wild.”