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.

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.

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.

The fund invests primarily in Japanese and Asian start-ups in the fields of environment and energy, information and communications, medical and healthcare, mobility, advanced materials, software (including AI), aerospace and defense, semiconductors, and nuclear fusion. Kyocera will collaborate with VC firm Global Brain Corporation (CEO: Yasuhiko Yurimoto, hereinafter, Global Brain) to develop venture capital strategies supported by Global Brain's investment platform, networks, and knowledge base.

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Toyota Ventures is Toyota’s first standalone early-stage venture capital firm. Through the Toyota Ventures Frontier Fund, we invest in artificial intelligence, autonomy, mobility, robotics, cloud technology, smart cities, digital health, fintech, energy, and materials. As part of Toyota’s ongoing efforts to accelerate carbon dioxide reduction, we also invest in startups that are creating scalable solutions for carbon neutrality, as part of the Toyota Ventures Climate Fund. We are on a mission to explore what’s next by helping early-stage startups bring disruptive technologies and business models to market quickly. As we pursue this goal, we are committed to finding and funding the best entrepreneurs from around the world. We value different approaches and points of view, and believe diversity drives innovation. How we work Leveraging the deep technical expertise and global resources of Toyota, our team offers Toyota Ventures portfolio companies strategic support and operational guidance in business development, product, fundraising, marketing, executive coaching, and other areas. We are also dedicated to embracing and promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts within our portfolio and the larger VC industry through efforts like the Diversity VC Standard. The entrepreneurs who partner with us receive much more than money. Their success is our success, and we support them at every step of their journey - while giving them the freedom and flexibility they need to experiment and grow their businesses. We look for both financial returns and strategic value, and firmly believe that financial returns must precede strategic value. We look for innovators who have the courage, humility, and tenacity to tackle important challenges we have yet to solve. It’s the same spirit of innovation that inspired Toyota founder Kiichiro Toyoda and his team to devote themselves to transforming Toyota from a loom maker to an automotive manufacturer in the 1930’s. And it is this same vision that continues to drive Toyota today. If you are the founder of an early-stage company developing solutions in other areas we invest in and you’re looking for funding, you are also invited to complete our online pitch form. For those who are seeking growth-stage capital, we encourage you to visit our colleagues at Woven Capital, the growth-stage investment fund of Woven Planet.