22-year-old Jakob Diepenbrock closes $30M Fund II for Discipulus Ventures, backing El Segundo hardware founders before anyone else

Jakob Diepenbrock just closed a $30M Fund II for Discipulus Ventures, the El Segundo-based pre-seed fund he runs at 22. The strategy is straightforward: get to founders before anyone else, often helping them incorporate, take a meaningful chunk at low prices, and funnel them into the right investor networks. Most of Fund II will go into cohort companies, with more follow-on reserved than in the first fund.

“We just raised $30M for the second fund. Our strategy: we get good sized chunks for the fund at low prices. We're the first investor in all companies we bring through. A lot of times we help them incorporate the companies and help them raise a larger round. I think LA is the best place to build hardware — El Segundo is the best place to build hardware, and all the best engineers and supply chain is already built out here. The bonfire is a very good index on how many people are here — our last one had close to 200 people, and when we first started they were thirty, forty, fifty.”

The El Segundo thesis

Diepenbrock's core argument is that the LA aerospace corridor, specifically El Segundo, Torrance, and Hawthorne, has already won on engineering talent and supply chain for hardware. The community signal he points to is the monthly bonfire gathering, which has grown from 30-40 people at launch to close to 200 at the most recent Friday event. He says founders are now relocating from London specifically to build in El Segundo.

Industrial space is tightening. El Segundo rents are high enough that second facilities are increasingly landing in Hawthorne, Torrance, and Long Beach. The emerging pattern, which Diepenbrock sees playing out at companies like Hadrian, is R&D anchored in LA with large-scale manufacturing pushed to cheaper Midwest or Southern sites.

Sector shift

Defense was the dominant theme early in the fund's life. Diepenbrock says the category has become crowded, with roughly a thousand drone companies and a wave of missile startups making it harder to find differentiated bets. The focus is shifting toward advanced manufacturing, chemicals, industrial, and energy, sectors where the LA talent and supply-chain base still confers an edge but competition for deals is thinner.

SpaceX liquidity effect

Discipulus already has SpaceX employees as LPs. Diepenbrock expects the post-IPO lockup expiration to trigger a wave of new company formations from engineers who now have the financial cushion to take the risk. He points to Radiant and Impulse Space (founded by SpaceX alum Tom Mueller) as early examples of what that talent pipeline can produce.

AI tailwinds

The AI boom is making fundraising easier for portfolio companies rather than reshaping what they build. One Discipulus-backed company building large-scale generators added "data centers" to its pitch and closed a round within weeks. Diepenbrock is careful to say the companies aren't dependent on AI demand, but positioning within the trend clearly accelerates capital formation.

The fund's edge is access density, being physically embedded in the corridor where the next generation of hard-tech founders is concentrating, before larger pre-seed and seed funds can find them. At $30M, Discipulus stays small enough to move first and own enough to matter.