Caterpillar Ventures

Eclipse is a team of operators and investors building companies that transform physical industries critical to people’s lives. What Moves Us The world is at a critical inflection point. Our society has never been so technically advanced, yet so unprepared for the challenges we face. But where others see challenges, we see potential for opportunity. The demand on physical industries now outweighs the capability of the infrastructure upon which they were built. We must harness the power of digitization to redefine physical industries across all sectors. It’s time to build the new digital economy, one that’s characterized by precision, not waste; resiliency, not vulnerability; strength, not fragility. At Eclipse, we see a future paved with innovation, growth, and the rapid improvement of both people’s lives and the planet we inhabit - an Industrial Evolution. Essential industries and critical infrastructures are ripe for transformation. We want to work with founders who have the vision, grit, and determination to change our collective future. Let’s get to work. How We Invest Eclipse backs talented entrepreneurs rebuilding the world’s physical industries. Our team of former operators has experience at all stages of company growth, from startup to IPO and beyond. While our investments typically span the stages from ideation to early growth, our knowledge and expertise allows us to think creatively and pursue ideas outside this mandate. Venture Equity Venture Equity gives founders the opportunity to partner with us from Day Zero and build new businesses from the ground up. We provide patient capital to support executives and principal engineers at an inflection point in their careers looking to build solutions to some of the world's most important problems. We’ve developed a playbook to rapidly validate, refine, and build new ventures in order to catalyze innovation and accelerate them to scale. Venture Equity provides support for idea generation, thesis development, and access to scientific and business expertise, investors, and our world-class network. Early-Stage Early-Stage investing spans the journey from seed round to initial viability and early customer base. Since Eclipse’s inception, we’ve invested in Early-Stage companies poised to potentially generate scalable value for physical industries. We partner with founders creating what we believe are industry-changing products, services, and experiences. Our Early-Stage team has the deep operational experience and technical expertise to provide investment, mentorship, and strategic, hands-on guidance, supporting entrepreneurs as they build their businesses from the early days through to viability and market fit. Early Growth The Early Growth team partners with startups with what we have evaluated to be a proven technological value proposition that are entering their go-to-market stage. Early Growth partners with companies that have gone from Zero to One and are plotting a course to go from One to Ten. As a team of operators, we have built and scaled successful companies in physical industries and have the methodology, the domain expertise, and the connections to help promising startups aim to transition into high-performance, high-quality, generational companies that will shape the future.

Cybernetix Ventures is a venture capital firm leading the way for investment into early-stage robotics, automation, and AI startups. Headquartered in Boston, the world’s epicenter for robotics innovation, Cybernetix connects its portfolio to the national and global robotics ecosystems, bringing unparalleled expertise to companies poised to make major impacts in sectors including advanced manufacturing, logistics/warehousing, architecture, engineering and construction and healthcare/medical devices. The fund will also invest in key robotics-enabling software companies in AI/machine learning, cloud robotics, cybersecurity, autonomy, and sensors/edge computing.

Shell Ventures works with startups and companies from their early stages to their scale and growth phases. We make minority investments that help to develop new technologies and disruptive business models that work to accelerate the energy and mobility transformation. Investing in venture funds and incubators is also critical to expanding our scanning capabilities, making introductions to great companies and potential investment opportunities. Investment domains Our investment focus is a mix of power, mobility, emission management, resources and digital: Power: We look for models that support commercial and industrial customers, help residential customers better manage their personal energy use, and commercial opportunities to bring power to remote communities. We invest in renewable power generation, which includes wind and solar, innovations in distributed energy solutions and novel storage solutions for renewable energy. Mobility: We invest across the transport industry in technologies and business models that are revolutionising the way we move the world’s growing number of people and goods, while balancing efforts to reduce CO2 and local emissions. Emission management: We invest in startups that help companies decarbonize across sectors. We look for emissions management solutions, negative emission -- both engineered carbon capture and nature-based solutions -- and innovations that empower the carbon market. Resources: We look for technologies or companies that create value to Shell’s core business. We invest in solutions that can help improve efficiency, make our operations safer and bring value to our customers. Digital: We are looking at new ways to analyse and interpret data, connect customers with new business models for mobility and energy services, and optimise technologies in the decentralisation of energy systems. How we support our portfolio companies Shell Ventures is more than a route for capital: we specialise in deployment and scaling-up, and have a team dedicated to implementation and deployment. We can offer companies access to technical and scientific expertise, research and development facilities, and can assist with field trial pilots to further develop and demonstrate concepts. We also provide unique access to a global customer base and to an extensive supplier and contractor network. Our investment strategy is to be a significant minority investor – a typical initial investment is $2-5m, with a total of $15-22m over the lifecycle of an investment. We will lead or follow funding rounds, which means we actively form syndicates with other venture capital funds and corporate venturing teams. Maintaining excellent relationships with leading venture capital firms is paramount to our success, as they are an important source of high-quality deals. We continually build and activate our network to create the best opportunities for our portfolio companies.

We look for companies in Italy and selectively abroad. 5 KEY SECTORS Founded in 2016, today Indaco Venture Partners SGR is the largest independent Italian venture capital asset management company, with a strong specialization in companies that innovate in electronics, robotics and new materials, medtech, biotech – pharma and digital. EXPERIENCE The investment team managers have an extensive experience in venture investing in Italy and abroad and have executed a high number of successful exits, including IPOs and transactions with corporate partners.

Matterwave Ventures is a European VC backing hardware and software companies in the Industrial Tech space, empowering them to become global leaders. Our expertise in this space is unmatched. We’ve been investors in this sector for two decades, bringing determination, grit, and experience to the board rooms. Our academic training and hands-on practical industry experience help us to fully understand technologies and open doors. Matterwave has backed companies ranging from component, module and systems hardware companies with embedded software to application and infrastructure software suppliers for industrial verticals. Our technology focus lies in Frontier Technologies, Industrial Automation & Digitalization and in Energy, Resource Efficiency and Industrial Decarbonization. Investments out of our current portfolio of 35 companies include EFFECT Photonics, bigrep, Dyemansion, Synfioo/P44, Ninox, Sensolus, Threedy, Innatera, LiveEO, fruitcore Robotics, Equal1 and Codasip. Initial investments range from EUR 1-4m and we can increase our total investment to EUR 10m over the life cycle of a company.

Our portfolio boasts over 300 active patents covering world-changing innovations. We back the teams we believe are best able to deploy revolutionary technologies. We have board representation at over 80% of our portfolio companies. We're committed to working alongside our founders to commercialize scientific discovery. Our portfolio companies have collectively raised over two billion dollars. We invest across the life cycle of a company from pre-seed to pre-IPO. Our Name The name, Fine Structure Ventures®, is perhaps most meaningful to the scientist-entrepreneurs we partner with. In physics, the fine-structure constant, commonly denoted by α (the Greek letter alpha), is named for the spacing between the spectral lines in the fine structure of the hydrogen atom. It is a dimensionless, fundamental physical constant which describes the interaction between elementary charged particles, such as electrons, and an electromagnetic field. If the value of alpha were much different from the one we know, it would impact whether nuclear fusion within stars produces carbon or whether atoms can form stable molecules–both of which are critical for life. The fine structure constant is moreover the single best predicted constant in all of physics. Quantum electrodynamics, a field founded by Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, and Freeman Dyson, predict its value from first principles, and the associated experiments match to 11 digits. At Fine Structure Ventures, we are also making predictions to realize alpha, used in this context to represent excess return on investment. We take a first principles approach, looking for technologies that, if realized at scale, would have obvious, dramatic, global impact. While we only aspire to the brilliance of Dyson or Feynman, we nevertheless seek unprecedented accuracy in our evaluation of investment opportunities. A Rich Legacy Fine Structure Ventures is rooted in one of America’s great entrepreneurial success stories. Fidelity Investments was founded in 1946 and grew from a single mutual fund into one of the largest asset management firms in the world, with over $2 trillion under management. For the last fifty years, our independent venture capital group has had the privilege of backing other great entrepreneurs as they built ground-breaking companies, including Atari and MCI in the early days. A Focused Team of Specialists Although we are backed by a resourceful global platform, we are a small team passionate about the impact science can make and singularly focused on the success of the entrepreneurs we are privileged to work with. We bring together decades of experience in investments, operations, entrepreneurship, and in scientific research.