Eclipse Ventures raises $1.3B fund, backing industrial and physical-world tech as the new frontier

Summary

Eclipse Ventures raises $1.3B fund

Eclipse Ventures has closed a $1.3B new fund, bringing total AUM to roughly $10B. The firm has backed physical-world industries — manufacturing, semiconductors, defense, space, robotics — since its founding 11 years ago, when that focus was, as Lior Susan puts it, "fairly controversial."

Susan's background shapes the firm's identity. He served in Israeli special forces, sold a networking company to Cisco, then spent three years at Flextronics under CEO Mike McNamara. That time in US manufacturing convinced him that physical industries representing 85% of world GDP had no dedicated venture platform. Eclipse was built to be that platform.

Operator model

Eclipse leads rounds at every stage — Series A through D — takes board seats on every deal, and incubates roughly one third of its portfolio companies outright. Deal volume is deliberately low. Susan describes the firm as "operators with capital" rather than traditional investors, and says he thinks of himself as part of each management team regardless of whether the company was his idea.

“We started the firm eleven years ago. We all operators that left their job building companies in the physical world to build a firm that we can build more than one company at a time. We grew the firm roughly to a $10,000,000,000 AUM, and we just announced our raise of $1,300,000,000. We are now crossing the chasm with robotics, moving from a control-based PLC to a much more general purpose, much more using physical AI.”

Portfolio

Cerebras has been an Eclipse company for ten years. The original investment thesis, formed in 2015, had nothing to do with AI — it was a bet that Moore's Law was approaching a physical ceiling and that wafer-scale integration (connecting an entire silicon wafer as a single large chip rather than cutting it into individual dies) was the next physics. The AI wave validated the architecture years later.

Vulcan Forms uses 160 fiber lasers fused into a single head to melt metal powder and produce high-precision parts. The firm booked a billion-dollar deal the year before last and multi-billion-dollar deals last year. Eclipse is now building four US factories to serve medical devices, consumer electronics, and aerospace and defense customers.

Robotics: cautious on valuation, bullish on adoption

Susan sees signs of 2021-style excess entering hard-tech sectors — companies raising $1B at launch with "crazy valuations," burning fast on the assumption that contracts and follow-on capital will always materialize. His concern is specific to physical-world businesses, where factories, supply chains, and CapEx don't tolerate the same growth-at-all-costs playbook that enterprise software can absorb.

On adoption, he is genuinely bullish. Robotics is crossing the chasm from control-based, PLC-driven systems to general-purpose physical AI, and he expects meaningful commercial uptake as a result.

IPO outlook

Susan expects a wave of public listings over the next 18 months, concentrated in semiconductors, space, AI infrastructure, and data centers. His read is that physical-world businesses command durable public-market valuations precisely because they are hard to replicate — SpaceX's IPO premium is the clearest example. The SaaS correction, by contrast, reflects low barriers to entry and overstated TAMs.

True Anomaly, an Eclipse-backed space defense company, is the firm's bet on conflict extending into orbit as space becomes commercially crowded.