Field Note

I’ve been on the road a lot these past few weeks—at Stanford, in New York for Fervo’s IPO at Nasdaq, and back in the Bay Area with Bill and CEOs across the Breakthrough Energy portfolio. Different rooms, different conversations, but I kept seeing the same thing: the next era of energy and industry will be won by founders who can turn great technology into great companies—and by the partners who are building the commercial engine behind them.

At Stanford’s Sustainability Forum, I stressed a point I make lot: we have to make the right thing make money. That’s the whole ballgame, and it’s where BE is spending its time. When better products win with customers, capital follows, supply chains form, and new industries start to move. Fervo’s IPO showed how powerful that can be. And in the Bay Area, sitting with founders working through the hard parts of scale, the energy (pun intended) was impossible to miss. We’re not waiting for the future to arrive. We’re building it with people who are ready to lead.

Portfolio Updates

• Aetherflux is now Cowboy Space Corporation. The company raised a $275M Series B to build a rocket and orbital data center system powered by solar energy.

• Antora unveiled Project Big Stone, a 5 GWh multi-day thermal battery project delivering round-the-clock energy to POET, the world’s largest producer of biofuels.

• Boston Metal raised $75M to scale its critical metals business and accelerate commercial deployment of its Molten Oxide Electrolysis platform.

• Type One Energy launched the UK Infinity Fusion Consortium with Tokamak Energy and AECOM to advance one of the first private-sector-led commercial fusion plants in the UK.

The Current

Gas prices averaging more than $4 per gallon in all 50 states have brought home the impact of geopolitical tension and fragility of our global energy systems. Though the near-term disruption is about fuels, minerals, fertilizer, and other goods that move through global supply chains, the larger signal is about vulnerability: how much of our economy still depends heavily on goods like liquid fuels that are exposed to chokepoints, price spikes, and shocks far outside the control of people and businesses.

We need better systems. Electrified transport, domestically sourced lower-carbon fuels, clean fertilizer, firm clean power, stronger grids, and storage can reduce exposure to volatile trade markets while strengthening affordability and resilience across the physical economy.

Bottom line: Price spikes show what fragile energy systems cost. More flexible energy and transportation systems can make reliability, security, and affordability less vulnerable to global shocks.

System Upgrade

I grew up in a farming community and trained in physics, so I'm drawn to entrepreneurial spirit grounded in systems thinking. At BE, I focus on the enormous, foundational industries modern civilization runs on, and where most global emissions come from. I’m optimistic because remarkable teams are working on these opportunities, and many of these constraints aren’t fixed laws of nature—they’re specific to the incumbent technological pathways. Agriculture, cement, and steel are difficult sectors to decarbonize because emissions are tied to the underlying chemistry of today’s production processes.

The opportunity is to redesign those systems rather than optimize around the edges. Pivot Bio, Brimstone, Boston Metal, and others in our portfolio are rethinking nutrient delivery, cementitious and critical material production, and metals refining. Cleaner systems win when they become economically and strategically superior to the incumbents they replace: lower cost structures, more resilient supply chains, superior performance, or access to entirely new resource bases. The Climate Tech Map is useful because it makes visible just how many foundational systems are still open to reinvention.

Fresh Energy

New signals shaping the energy landscape.