It takes only a skim of Eclipse’s latest investments to see the place this enterprise agency’s pursuits lie — and the place it’s headed.
The Palo Alto-based VC, which noticed its median deal measurement explode over the previous a number of years, has poured an growing sum of money into the “bodily world.” Its offers embrace electrical boat developer Arc, buzzy battery recycling and materials agency Redwood Materials, self-driving building car startup Bedrock Robotics, autonomous car tech firm Wayve, and industrial robotics lab Mind Robotics.
With $1.3 billion in fresh capital — which is cut up between a $591 million early-stage incubation fund and yet one more oriented towards progress startups — Eclipse is zeroing in on what companion Jiten Behl describes as the subsequent massive technological period.
“Over the past twenty years, we’ve seen a number of waves of innovation,” Behl stated, itemizing the web, cellular cloud, and social media eras. “That is the primary time the place stuff goes to maneuver from our screens into the bodily world; we’re going to see superior ranges of intelligence, together with precise actions, by way of fixing issues in the actual, bodily world.”
AI and the bodily world have collided; the ubiquity of the time period “bodily AI” is only one sign. Behl stated this period is being propelled by a confluence of expertise, technological developments, demand, and coverage. And, after all, capital.
“We’ve got a pleasant battle chest to go and make a severe dent out there and assist the businesses in the suitable means throughout the life cycle,” he stated.
Eclipse isn’t breaking new floor by investing in bodily AI. It’s, in any case, the subsequent shiny new factor to spend money on. How Eclipse picks startups is value noting. The VC is trying to make investments throughout all bodily sectors, together with transportation, vitality, infrastructure, compute, and protection. The attention-grabbing half, as Behl described it, is a technique to construct an internet, or ecosystem of startups in overlapping fields that may doubtless grow to be companions as they scale.
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“Scale is so necessary, and for those who can put it collectively in a means the place corporations companion early on to construct scale, to construct proof factors, it simply then allows them to go after the subsequent set of demand,” Behl stated, explaining that portfolio corporations will companion with one another straight, however hopefully, additionally work with one another’s companions.
In some circumstances, these startups might be incubated inside the confines of Eclipse. Behl stated Eclipse plans to construct corporations from this new fund. And whereas he wouldn’t give too many hints, he did affirm that course of has already began.
“We’re undoubtedly engaged on a few actually cool concepts,” he stated, noting that Eclipse is especially curious about startups that work throughout enterprises.
“The following perception is like, how do you join these sectors? How do you construct scale throughout sectors? And the way do you employ the information throughout sectors to construct that moat?” he posed, including information can be used to coach smarter AI fashions to profit a broader group. “That’s type of the overall thesis that we’ve been engaged on.”
