Gigascale Capital raises $250 million for clean tech

Published: 2026-06-02T10:27:28.000Z

The climate tech crowd has thinned out, with much of venture capital chasing AI instead. Gigascale Capital is running the other way. The firm, started by former Meta tech chief Mike Schroepfer, has closed its first institutional fund at $250 million for early-stage clean tech.

The climate tech crowd has thinned out over the past couple of years, with much of venture capital chasing artificial intelligence instead. Gigascale Capital is running the other way. The Palo Alto firm, started in 2023 by former Meta technology chief Mike Schroepfer, has closed its first institutional fund at $250 million, money earmarked for early-stage companies he describes as rebuilding the physical economy. In a market that has cooled on the climate label, the raise reads as a deliberate contrarian move. What is interesting is how Schroepfer frames the bet. He is not pitching these startups on virtue or good intentions. His argument is that the companies win because they end up cheaper, faster and more reliable than what they replace, and that the climate benefit simply falls out of building better systems. He points to solar as the template, noting it scaled massively over a decade because the cost kept dropping rather than because anyone felt good about it. General partner Victoria Beasley makes a similar case, saying the difference today is not a better story but real movement in cost curves and the speed at which founders can build and deploy. The thesis also leans hard on AI, which is fitting given Schroepfer's old job overseeing Meta's data center expansion. The reasoning goes that the computing boom is starving the grid, and that the firms solving power generation, storage, grid upgrades and critical minerals stand to benefit most from that demand. Schroepfer has argued that owning your own power supply will become a genuine edge for energy hungry businesses, which puts clean energy startups in an unusually strong position rather than a charitable one. The portfolio backs up the pitch. Gigascale has already worked with more than 25 early-stage teams and counts names like Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which has pulled in huge sums from investors including Nvidia, Google and Bill Gates, and Form Energy, whose long duration iron-air batteries recently tied into a Google data center project. Other bets include Heron Power in grid infrastructure and Panthalassa, which is working on floating energy systems meant to power computing at sea. This second fund, and its first to bring in institutional money, is meant to support founders from the first cheque through actual deployment, the stage where deep tech companies tend to stall. For the Middle East, the logic Gigascale is selling already looks familiar. Gulf states have spent years pairing sovereign capital with clean power, and the same AI driven hunger for electricity is showing up there, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE building data center capacity alongside massive solar programs and exploring nuclear. The idea that energy itself becomes the competitive asset fits neatly with how the region is positioning, treating cheap, abundant power as the foundation for the next wave of computing rather than a side concern.