Lowercarbon Capital

Heart Aerospace just flew the largest electric aircraft in history for $5 of electricity. Yesterday, twenty-five thousand pounds lifted off from Plattsburgh, New York, at dawn and successfully landed 8 minutes later. The latest leap towards modern air travel happened not with a boom, but with a nearly inaudible buzz. We backed Anders Forslund and the team back when this idea existed as a blueprint. Aviation punishes newcomers, and the erratic cost of jet fuel has stagnated innovation. No problem for Heart. Within a year, they've built a behemoth aircraft capable of carrying 30 passengers on cheap electrons. The 250-mile regional route is coming back. Feel that electricity in the air? You can now ride it. Story link in the comments, and a massive congratulations to the Heart team for pulling off this milestone.

Today, CFS announced another major advance in our fusion energy push: we raised an additional $1 billion in funding. This is the largest investment round in commercial fusion worldwide since our $1.8 billion funding round in 2021, bringing our total capital raised to $4 billion. This investment reflects growing confidence from new partners in our technical progress, our team, and our commercialization path. It comes at a time when it’s clear the world needs a new energy option that provides safe, clean, and firm electricity. “CFS is making what once was impossible into inevitable,” said CFS CEO and Co-founder Bob Mumgaard. “In the 2030s, we will put commercial fusion on the grid. We have the science that works and the proven execution that’s consistently validated by the market. We regularly welcome investors from around the world to our headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts, where they see real and tangible progress as we ready support systems and finalize the assembly of SPARC. In unlocking commercial fusion energy, we’re on a path to make an impact at a civilizational level.” CFS will use the funds raised to further accelerate our commercialization progress. In parallel to completing the assembly of our SPARC fusion demonstration machine, we’ll continue to develop the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant, called ARC, at our Fall Line Fusion Power Station in Chesterfield County, Virginia. #FusionEnergy

Cleared for flight. The Federal Aviation Administration has issued a Special Airworthiness Certificate in the Experimental Category to Heart Aerospace for its X1 demonstrator, authorizing the company to begin flight testing of the X1 immediately. The certificate follows more than a year of collaboration with the FAA and an extensive ground-testing program spanning structural, propulsion, systems, and low- and high-speed taxi testing. With FAA authorization now in hand, our team is completing final preparations for first flight of the X1, which will be the largest electric aircraft ever flown. Read more: https://lnkd.in/g5gf6w5v # # # #Aviation #Aerospace #Innovation #Technology #ElectricAviation #HeartAerospace

There’s a warehouse in Redondo Beach, LA, where former baristas are building aerospace-grade wire harnesses eight weeks after they’re hired. Wire harnesses are the nervous system running through every rocket, EV, aircraft, and data center on Earth. Senra Systems modernizes how they’re manufactured. Founders Jordan Black and Benjamin Shanahan came from SpaceX, where they watched Falcon 9s get hand-wired the same way as the Saturn V. Sixty years without a meaningful upgrade won't cut it for the electric economy, so they built a software platform that guides every crimp, catches every defect, and trains a new hire in weeks. Our portfolio is full of companies that need Senra. We just led Senra’s $65m Series B alongside Interlagos to fix the $350b bottleneck tucked inside the hardware the future depends on. Read our blog in the comments.

Today we're announcing that we co-led Senra Systems's $65m Series B round, alongside our friends at Interlagos, General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Dylan Field, CIV, 8VC, The Friedkin Group, Jaws Estates Capital, Sozo Ventures, and Alumni Ventures. I am excited to join the board and Jordan Black formally on this journey! Wire harnesses are the nervous system of everything electric: rockets, EVs, data centers, the grid. That's a $100B+ market where US manufacturing is short 600K workers and nearly a quarter of the workforce is over 55. Jordan and Benjamin Shanahan left SpaceX to fix this, and the results speak for themselves. Life is too short not to do something that matters 😊.

We're proud to back fusion energy’s biggest, fully secured Series A. Focused Energy has the technology, commercial partners, government backing, and a credible, financeable plan to build an operational fusion pilot plant. Congrats to Thomas Forner, Christopher Wendel, and the entire team.

When Erik Stiebel first came out with the SoCal HardTech landscape map, we printed it out in our LA office and used it (somewhat jokingly) to gut check the names that overlapped with our thesis at Lowercarbon Capital - energy, grid, resilience, & advanced manufacturing. It is wild to see how much the list has grown and how tiny the font has become in the few years since. Adding more names to our own family makes the trips to El Segundo more fun - now with Rainmaker Technology Corporation, Arbor Energy, ARC Boats, Heart Aerospace, Biosphere, and a few that haven't announced building together.

I enjoyed this read from Diego D'Sola at Zanskar this morning. He's making a simple but important point we talk about a lot at Lowercarbon Capital - where value accrues for baseload power and what the market is missing (new tech vs. new discovery). Specifically: - Today, most geothermal markets are focused on engineered solutions like EGS. - But, there are still huge undiscovered naturally occurring resources. - <10% of the western U.S. has been sampled for subsurface temperatures. - ~50% of operating U.S. geothermal fields were found by accident. - Once found, natural resources are cheaper to run than engineered ones. If you think of the O&G analog, Ghawar still produces 30% of Saudi oil at a fraction of Permian Basin costs. It doesn't have to be so complicated, but EGS / conventional is complementary!