Skipless Ventures opens Cohort 3 applications, positioning El Segundo as the new hard-tech hub

Skipless Ventures has opened applications for Cohort 3, its latest intake of pre-seed hard-tech founders based in El Segundo, California. Fund 1 closed at roughly $9 million and is structured to support five cohorts total, with three launching in the coming year and one closing in October. Each cohort takes 10 to 12 founders and deploys $100K per company, working out to roughly $1.2 million per cohort plus a small reserve for pro-rata follow-on.

“Jakob Diepenbrock: 'Cohort 3 applications are live. The culture is very attractive to mostly young people who want to build companies that really do matter for the country. If you want to build in hardware or aerospace defense, you should be in El Segundo. SpaceX started down the street from where I'm based.' On fund economics: 'Fund one ended up being right around $9 million. We're doing five cohorts. Each cohort we do 10 to 12 founders — a $100K check per company, around $1.2M per cohort.'”

The geographic concentration argument drives the strategy. El Segundo sits near SpaceX's original campus, a deep supply chain, and a dense cluster of potential customers and recruits for aerospace, defense, and hardware companies. Skipless positions itself as the institutional entry point into that ecosystem, offering access to prominent operators, a demo day with roughly 120 partners from top VC firms, and a shared house with a chef and gym.

Cohort 1 companies included Rain Maker and Valor, both at pre-seed stage when they joined. Skipless has also absorbed the Bonfire networking series, with the most recent event drawing close to 200 attendees, a record for the series.

El Segundo resembles Mountain View circa 2009–2012: dense with builders but removed enough from LA's social scene to stay focused. The town's name traces to Chevron—El Segundo means "the second," referring to the second Chevron refinery in California, which originally anchored the community. Skipless is positioning itself as the institutional anchor that El Segundo's hard-tech cluster currently lacks, functioning as a local on-ramp for founders seeking proximity to defense and aerospace customers without routing through San Francisco or the generalist accelerator circuit.