Lithos Capital Research
Overview
Lithos Capital, formerly Linse Capital, is a deep-tech venture and growth firm based in San Juan, Puerto Rico. It was founded in 2015 by Michael Linse, a former Kleiner Perkins partner, and is co-led with Bastiaan Janmaat, former CEO and co-founder of DataFox (acquired by Oracle). The firm announced its rebrand from Linse to Lithos on October 15, 2026 and moved its website from linsecapital.com to lithos.com. The old domain still serves the same site and now points to the new name. Lithos is ancient Greek for stone, the root of monolith and lithography. The firm says it has raised over $1.7 billion to date and has backed nine growth-stage companies and fourteen early-stage companies.
Investment Thesis
Lithos backs deep-tech companies tackling some of the world's most complex and consequential problems. Its tagline is that it is all in on the future. The partners began investing in renewable energy and industrial technology long before deep tech was a familiar category, and the firm describes its partners as having first worked together in 2007 across generations of hardware. The firm looks beyond the market category to the engineering, product economics and team, and tries to understand what gives a company a lasting advantage.
Concentration Philosophy
The firm backs fewer companies so it can give each more capital, more time and more of itself. Each partner sits on at most three boards. Its largest investment began as a $4 million check and grew to $330 million invested over five years. This commitment that grows over time is the core of the pitch to founders.
Stage Focus
Lithos was originally a growth-stage firm. It now invests across any stage. In 2026 it launched Ignition, a $75 million early-stage fund, alongside a $75 million co-investment vehicle, so it can write first checks and follow through to scale. In December 2022 it raised a $700 million fund for late-stage industrial technology startups.
Check Size
The firm does not publish a check range. The only stated data point is the $4 million initial check that grew to $330 million. Growth checks are large and concentrated. Early checks from the Ignition fund are smaller, but the range is not disclosed.
Lead Tendency
The firm describes itself as backing a small number of companies with large, concentrated checks. That implies it takes large positions and often leads, but no source states a lead policy, so lead tendency is recorded as unknown.
Sector Focus
Stated areas are space, robotics, energy, mobility, defense, drones, critical infrastructure and AI. The portfolio page groups companies into themes such as autonomous drones, space mobility and manufacturing, autonomous driving, edge AI, chipmaking, EV charging, energy efficiency, fusion energy, defense technology, aerospace manufacturing and logistics technology.
Portfolio Highlights
- Skydio: autonomous drones for inspection and emergency response
- SpaceX: space exploration and communications
- Impulse Space: orbital transfer and delivery of payloads
- Verkada: physical security systems for the enterprise
- Varda: in-orbit materials processing
- Wayve and Waabi: autonomous driving and autonomous trucking
- Mythic: energy-efficient edge AI processors
- Lace Lithography and Fab2: next-generation chipmaking
- ChargePoint: EV charging hardware, software and services
- Thea Energy: fusion energy
- Talos Devices, Particle Labs, UFORCE: defense technology
- Freeform: AI-native manufacturing
- Kargo: loading dock data
The portfolio page also names Onodrim Industries and Amca, whose cards could not be read from image captions. They are named in page links only and are not included in the structured list.
Team
- Michael Linse, Founding Partner: Kleiner Perkins, Goldman Sachs, Harvard MBA
- Bastiaan Janmaat, Partner: DataFox CEO and co-founder (acquired by Oracle), Goldman Sachs, Stanford MBA
- Dario Constantine, Principal: Maxar Technologies, Columbia mechanical engineering, Stanford MBA
- Alex Gross, Principal: SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, University of Southern California
- Regan Brady, Associate: Stride Funding, Emerson Collective, Harvard
- Ryan Heaton is CFO and Frances Graterole is executive assistant; neither is an investor.
The investment team includes firsthand experience founding a company and designing satellites.
Decision Process
The firm is a small partnership led by two senior partners. No formal process is published.
Founder Preferences
Teams with real engineering depth building hardware-heavy or physical-world businesses that need a lot of capital over many years. The firm values founders who want a long-term partner that stays through the ups and downs.
Geographic Focus
No stated geographic restriction. The portfolio includes US companies plus Wayve (UK), Waabi (Canada) and Valens (Israel).
Gaps
Check size range, fund-level lead policy, partner emails and per-company investment stage and dates are not disclosed on the site. No investment stages are recorded per company because no company-specific round source was gathered.