A single glance at Eclipse’s investment portfolio is enough to trace the outline of its ambitions—and the direction in which this Palo Alto venture firm is moving with increasing momentum.
In only a few short years, Eclipse’s average deal size has ballooned, a sign of the firm’s growing confidence and appetite. Their money flows not into abstract software kingdoms but into the knots and bolts of the tangible world. Their bets read like a blueprint for a new industrial revolution: Arc, building silent electric boats that seem to glide through water as if by sorcery; Redwood Materials, with its relentless drive to mine value from the heaps of spent batteries and reimagine the future of materials; Bedrock Robotics, promising fleets of construction vehicles that navigate and toil without human hands at the wheel; Wayve, advancing the cause of autonomous driving; and Mind Robotics, which sounds half like a sci-fi daydream and half like a practical force, determined to bring robotic intelligence into the manufacturing halls of today.
None of this is unintentional. With a fresh $1.3 billion to deploy—split between a $591 million early-stage fund and a pot earmarked for scaling later-stage startups—Eclipse is staking its claim at what partner Jiten Behl believes is the dawn of technology’s next great leap.
“We’ve already witnessed so many waves,” Behl reflects. The internet, the surge of mobile devices, the explosion of social media—each changed life in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. “Now, for the first time, technology isn’t just living inside our screens. It’s crossing over. Intelligence and action are finally colliding to tackle the physical problems that have waited for answers.”
You don’t have to look far to see how quickly the phrase “physical AI” is cropping up everywhere—a sign that a new cycle has begun. According to Behl, this shift has been set in motion by a lucky alignment: immense pools of talent, breakthroughs in hardware and software, a marketplace hungry for solutions, new government policies, and, as ever, the vital spark—money.
Eclipse’s warchest gives it the power not just to show up but to muscle its way to the front of the crowd. “We’re in a position to make a real impact,” Behl says, “and we want to do it right, supporting founders all the way through the journey.”
Of course, Eclipse is far from the only investor seduced by physical AI. But there’s something distinctive in how they approach their search for the next breakout. The firm isn’t laser-focused on a single sector; it’s spreading risk and weaving connections across transportation, energy, infrastructure, compute, and even defense. The plan isn’t simply to back isolated winners—it’s to build an ecosystem. Startups that overlap, intersect, and, ideally, join forces as their ambitions scale.
“Scale is the magic word,” Behl reflects. “If our companies partner early on, they’re not just validating tech—they’re learning to work together, compounding their ability to capture new markets.”
Sometimes, that means building companies outright. Behl admits Eclipse is already hard at work incubating new startups from within. Most details stay under wraps, but the gears are clearly in motion.
“We’re exploring some truly exciting ideas,” is all he’ll say. What excites the team most? Startups that aren’t content with a single industry, but instead reach across boundaries—enterprise tools that tie old silos together.
“How do you create connections between sectors?” Behl muses. “How do you build scale that isn’t boxed in by traditional limits? And then, how can shared data become the deep moat that defends your ecosystem, training better AI for everyone involved?”
For Eclipse, the future doesn’t belong to startups that build in isolation. It’s reserved for those who create bridges—between hardware and software, between industries, between partners who’d once have seen each other as mere competitors. In this vision, intelligence isn’t abstract code, but a force that reshapes factories, roads, power grids, and the very substance of daily life.
Eclipse is betting big—and betting that the next technological era isn’t waiting inside an app, but just outside the door, ready to turn the physical world on its head.
