- Former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer has closed Gigascale Capital‘s first institutional fund at $250 million, backing more than 25 early-stage companies building energy, materials, and infrastructure systems.
- The fund marks Gigascale’s shift from Schroepfer’s personal capital to institutional backing, a signal that deep-tech climate investing is attracting LP conviction at scale even as early-stage climate VC participationfell 11% in 2025.
- Climate tech VC investment reached $40.5 billion globally in 2025, up 8% year-on-year, according to Sightline Climate.
Solar went from 40 gigawatts of annual deployment to 600 in a decade, not because it got more virtuous, but because it got cheaper. That logic sits at the centre of Gigascale Capital‘s investment thesis, and it now has $250 million behind it.
Gigascale, founded in 2023 and headquartered in Palo Alto, has closed its first institutional fund. Mike Schroepfer, the firm’s founding partner and Meta’s CTO from 2013 to 2022, built the firm initially on personal capital before this raise. He is joined by General Partner Victoria Beasley and Partner Evaline Tsai. The firm does not publicly disclose headcount.
Gigascale backs early-stage companies solving infrastructure constraints in clean energy, advanced manufacturing, grid systems, and physical AI, the hardware-software integrations that determine whether renewable and industrial technologies can actually deploy at speed. The bet is not on climate virtue; it is on cost curves. As TFN has tracked across this year’s largest deep-tech rounds, that framing is increasingly how founders are pitching and how investors are deciding.
“The pattern is always the same: cost curves bend, markets scale, and a better alternative makes the old way obsolete,” Schroepfer said. “Climate impact is the result of better-performing systems.”
The portfolio reflects that framing. Radiant is among the first companies approaching commercial deployment of nuclear microreactor technology in the US. Xcimer Energy completed the world’s first private-sector electron-beam excimer laser in June 2025, a foundational milestone on its roadmap toward commercial fusion. Arbor Energy signed an agreement with GridMarket to deliver up to 5 GW of zero-emission baseload power for US data centres. Fractile: a portfolio company building AI inference chips that run calculations directly in memory, raised $220 million in a round co-led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund to expand chip production. Former Tesla SVP Drew Baglino now builds next-generation solid-state grid transformers at portfolio company Heron Power, which raised $38 million in May 2025.
The raise puts Gigascale in direct competition with the two best-resourced firms in the category. Lowercarbon Capital, founded by Chris Sacca, manages over $2 billion and has backed more than 100 companies across energy and carbon removal, including Antora Energy and Charm Industrial. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, founded by Bill Gates in 2015 with backing from Jeff Bezos and others, has deployed over $2 billion across 60-plus companies with a 20-year investment horizon and gigaton-scale mandate. Where both firms invest across stages and sectors globally, Gigascale is narrower: early-stage, US-focused, and built around the specific technical and operational expertise needed to take physical systems from prototype to deployment, the distance where most deep-tech companies stall. TFN has previously covered how that prototype-to-deployment gap continues to define winners and losers in the current funding cycle.
The global climate tech market was estimated at $38.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $115.4 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 20.9%, according to Grand View Research. In 2025, climate tech VC and growth investment rose to $40.5 billion, up 8% year-on-year, though investor participation fell 11%, suggesting capital is concentrating rather than broadening, a dynamic TFN has covered in its running analysis of the US climate funding landscape.
“I’ve spent over a decade in clean energy, through the solar buildout, the hard years, and the hype cycles,” said Beasley. “What’s different now isn’t narrative. Cost curves have moved, founders can build and deploy faster than ever, and companies being built today are winning on performance, not promise.”
The deeper question this fund raises is not whether climate tech can produce returns, that case is largely made. It is whether a firm built around one founder’s operational fluency can replicate that edge across a 25-plus company portfolio, all building different physical systems simultaneously. As capital concentrates at the top of the climate VC market, the firms that can answer that question will define the category’s next decade.
