Starshot Capital Research
Investment Thesis
Starshot Capital is a Los Angeles-based climate venture firm built on the belief that "impact & profits go hand-in-hand." The firm rejects short-term "moonshot" thinking, which it argues drives innovation only until competition is won and funding dries up, in favor of backing "high-impact high-growth businesses" pursuing long-term, collaborative decarbonization. Co-founder Jeremy Brewer has called the climate transition "the largest financial opportunity of the next decade," and the firm explicitly targets historically under-invested climate sectors rather than the most crowded (e.g., solar, EVs) in order to maximize both impact and returns. Every portfolio company is evaluated in part on its potential to help eliminate a cumulative one gigaton of carbon emissions by 2050.
Sector Focus
Starshot invests across hard-tech decarbonization verticals rather than software-only climate plays:
- Energy infrastructure and grid hardware (solid-state transformers, EV charging economics)
- Energy storage (vanadium-free, medium-duration storage)
- Green hydrogen production
- Commercial HVAC decarbonization
- Agricultural decarbonization (methane-reducing livestock feed, fertilizer alternatives, soil measurement, protein-based herbicides)
- Water and beverage efficiency
- Industrial process optimization and AI controls (including data centers)
- Mining yield improvement via novel sensing (cosmic-ray/muon imaging)
- Climate and weather intelligence (Earth-system AI)
Sectors named explicitly by the firm as focus areas include industrial, manufacturing, food & agriculture, the built environment, materials, and chemicals.
Stage Focus
Starshot is an early-stage investor, primarily Seed with some Series A exposure as portfolio companies mature (e.g., follow-on into Phaidra's data-center AI business as it scaled with NVIDIA and ST Telemedia). Public reporting does not disclose a formal typical check size.
Lead Tendency
Mixed evidence: Starshot led Harvest Thermal's 2022 seed round and was an early seed investor in Phaidra (2021), but its most visible portfolio moments frequently involve syndicates and follow-on capital from major strategics and individuals (Bill Gates in Rumin8's 2023 round; NVIDIA and ST Telemedia partnering with Phaidra; Chipotle's Cultivate Next Fund backing IMIO in 2026). Treat as a firm that both leads and participates depending on the round.
Fund Status
Starshot Fund I closed at $35M in April/May 2024 (announced via CNBC and BusinessWire) and remains actively deploying, with new portfolio activity confirmed as recently as Muon Vision and Quercus Bio in April 2026.
Portfolio Highlights
Fifteen named portfolio companies span the firm's decarbonization thesis: Alderbuck Energy (solid-state transformers, deploying at UC San Diego's supercomputer center in 2026), AlphaGrid (EV charger economics), Brightband (Earth-system AI, partnered with NOAA), Ecolectro (green hydrogen electrolyzers, TechCrunch-featured), Harvest Thermal (heat pump + thermal storage, Washington Post and Fast Company featured), IMIO (fertilizer alternatives, backed by Chipotle's venture arm), Miraterra (soil measurement, acquired Trace Genomics in 2025), Mojave (liquid desiccant HVAC), Muon Vision (mining yield via cosmic-ray imaging), Otoro Energy (vanadium-free storage), Phaidra (industrial/data-center AI controls, NVIDIA and ST Telemedia partnerships), Porifera (beverage concentration to cut water shipping), Quercus Bio (AI-discovered protein herbicides), Ren (renewable energy aggregation for supply chains), and Rumin8 (methane-reducing cattle feed, backed by Bill Gates, achieving a 95.2% methane reduction in UC Davis trials and validated in a Brazilian study with Minerva Foods).
Team
- Jeremy Brewer, Managing Partner: co-founder, chairs Work on Climate; prior VC/PE roles at a Canadian family office and product/data/anti-abuse roles at Google, Facebook, and Dataminr; Cornell triple major.
- Sam Levac-Levey, Founding Partner: co-founder and founding member of Work on Climate; built manufacturing tools at SpaceX, product components at Tesla, and fuselage design at Lilium.
- Jeff Seabright, Partner: 40+ years across public and private sector sustainability, including Chief Sustainability Officer at Unilever, SVP Environment at Coca-Cola, and Executive Director of the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Clinton.
- Zoe Samuel, Venture Partner: ex-Google, co-created Alphabet's 4,000+ member internal climate community (Anthropocene) and supported Project Sunroof.
- Jason Titus, Entrepreneur In Residence: repeat founder and former VP at Google and Yahoo!, former CTO of Shazam.
- Dr. Nicholas Gould, Principal: Principal Research Engineer at Air Products (world's largest hydrogen supplier); PhD in Chemical Engineering, University of Delaware.
- Makenna Broadbent, Associate.
- Praveen Mahendran, Chief of Staff: MBA/MS in Sustainable Systems from University of Michigan, prior cleantech consulting across agriculture, energy, and carbon utilization.
Decision Process
Small partnership-style team (two managing/founding partners plus a partner, venture partner, principal, EIR, associate, and chief of staff) rather than a solo GP or large investment committee. The firm leans heavily on its Work on Climate community (28,000+ members) for proprietary deal sourcing, per Zoe Samuel: "By the time they're raising money, often the relationship and the trust are already there."
Founder Preferences
Starshot favors technical, mission-driven founders tackling historically under-invested, hard-tech decarbonization problems (industrial hardware, hydrogen, agriculture, mining) rather than consumer-facing or software-only climate startups, and frequently backs founders already known through the Work on Climate network.
Geographic Focus
Headquartered in Los Angeles, CA; portfolio is predominantly US-based, with global commercial partnerships (e.g., Minerva Foods in Brazil, ST Telemedia in APAC).