Venture capital for deep tech deployment. Aerospace | Robotics | Energy
Washington, DC
Joined August 2026
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Level Five VC retweeted
Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼
With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars.
To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials.
The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey.
This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier.
It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️
Level Five VC retweeted
Modern manufacturing robots are far more precise than they look.
A six-axis industrial robot can move a tool through several metres of space and repeatedly bring it back to within a few hundredths of a millimetre. Some precision oriented systems achieve repeatability of around 0.02-0.05 mm.
That precision is one reason mass manufacturing looks the way it does today.
A car body can move through a factory floor while robots weld the same points, drill the same holes and paint complex surfaces with almost identical movements, thousands of times over.
The first industrial robots entered factories in the early 1960s, mostly doing repetitive and dangerous work.
Sixty years later, they can repeat precise movements thousands of times with a consistency that humans simply cannot maintain at industrial scale.
Level Five VC retweeted
Announcing @regentcraft's $240M Series B to bring our Seaglider manufacturing facility online and deliver them to our military and commercial customers. Lets go!!
Could not have asked for better co-leads between Mare Liberum (@lcselby) and AE Ventures, bringing vast experience and connectivity across maritime and aerospace. Its not easy building in either of these sectors, so their backing is amazing validation for the business.
So excited to be partnering with @ereborbank on the financing. @PalmerLuckey and the team are absolutely putting their money where their mouth is on backing the next generation of American industry and defense technologies.
Access to this $120M in debt unlocks significant manufacturing purchases across tooling and equipment to stay on track for first Seagliders out of the factory by end of next year. We have a quarter-million feet of factory floor to fill.
This is a major growth moment for REGENT. To date, we've largely been focused on prototyping. Seagliders are the first new mode of transportation since the helicopter, and its taken a lot of engineering and test to get here.
Now we are focused to getting Seagliders into the hands of our customers, whether it is contested logistics and MEDEVAC missions in the Indo-Pacific, or commuter service to New York or Miami. The growth of the order book over the past year has been amazing.
It's a huge moment for us, but we're keeping our heads down and working. We are on the eve of flying our full-scale, human-safe Viceroy Seaglider prototype. Investors in our Series B got deeply involved in our technology development and testing campaigns and gained conviction in REGENT to unlock this fundraise even before Viceroy has flown.
I must say, it's awesome to see this team - even while celebrating this Series B - remain so locked in on flight.
Thank you to our existing investors who doubled down on us like @_edgegroup / SDF, @GiantStepVC, @LockheedMartin, @caffeinatedcap/@tonsing, @JAL_Official_jp, @mcuban, @foundersfund/@zebulgar, East X, and @Future_Planet.
And excited for all the new support with @DCVC, iGrow, @BalnordVC, @VanderbiltU, and Inceptional.
Massive day for REGENT. Next steps: flight, production, deliveries!
Level Five VC retweeted
Robotics reminds me of building PCs in the 90s.
Also pretty cool how i can buy a serious arm for 1k now.
Level Five VC retweeted
Open-source humanoid for under $5,000! 😳
UC Berkeley released Berkeley Humanoid Lite, an open-source humanoid robot that costs under $5,000 and can be built on a desktop 3D printer.
Every component is either 3D-printable or available on Amazon. There's no need of specialized manufacturing, nor exotic materials.
This breaks the $ 50K-$100K barrier that locked humanoid robotics behind university labs and big companies.
Design uses cycloidal gears, optimal for 3D-printed actuators. They extensively tested the plastic components for durability because 3D-printed parts are weaker than metal.
The tests validated they're reliable enough for research. Check the demos! It plays with Rubik's cubes, writes its name with a marker, walks on two legs, or manipulates blocks.
Zero-shot sim-to-real transfer using reinforcement learning.
Everything is open, including hardware designs, code, and even training frameworks.
Democratizing robotics and lowering the entry point is probably my favourite sentence :)
🔗 Here's the project page (build it!!!): lite.berkeley-humanoid.org/
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♻ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com
Level Five VC retweeted
Sometimes it’s cool to remember that the sun is a giant fusion reactor floating in space 100 million miles away and earth is orbiting around it just fast enough to not fall in and burn up, and this gave life a chance to get started and become smart and go about our lives and take all this for granted
Level Five VC retweeted
This is a plan for Phase 2 of the National Security Renaissance: Project Alexander. It proposes a national security asset class to accelerate the effective and efficient deployment of capital into technologies vital to the nation's security. 🇺🇸
Our Congress, Treasury Department, and private citizenry have the power today to enact critical reforms that will have an immediate and transformational impact on American innovation.
All feedback welcome! 🧵1/14
Level Five VC retweeted
There are No Startup Ideas; Only Requests for Startups
sovereigntygaps.com/
Level Five VC retweeted
We carved this. Proved it could be done.
And I’m going to keep posting it until someone commissions a new building that’s as grand.
Level Five VC retweeted
Hard things I learned in scaling a manufacturing business that I wasn’t fully prepared for:
- as the company gets bigger, using slack to communicate across all shifts and factories in different states sucks. You gotta try harder than slack. Things can get taken the wrong way (gotta use lots of emojis) and important messages get lost. Phone calls and travel are so much better but you gotta put in the effort
- with 600 employees you don’t know everyone, but you still feel like they are your kids in a way. When someone loses a family member, or they have a sick kid, or they get into a motorcycle accident, I worry about them like they are my own kid. I can’t imagine how this is going to work at 6,000 employees.
- entropy is real. We are fighting laws of thermodynamics lol. Everything wants to dissolve into disorder and chaos. Gotta fight it 24/7
- it’s easy to make negative assumptions. I see front office teams grow and I’m thinking “really? It’s a full time job just to do xyz??!” But then I sit with them and realize at scale, yes…it’s a full time job to do things that took us 20 minutes a week in the old days
- many vendors and salespeople don’t give you the time of day when you’re small or starting out. Then you get to a certain size and they are begging for your business, offering discounts, and giving you access to crazy deals. If you survive the valley of death it’s nice on the other side
- safety and compliance becomes a big deal. When it’s just 5 of you, safety is implied and everyone kinda gets it because everyone has “done it” before. With a larger population, you have to worry about so much more. Some people are brand new to manufacturing and don’t have the instincts that come with working with machines for years and years
- the larger the company grows, the more you have to lose. hundreds of families count on me for a paycheck, so the stakes are really high. Easy to lose sleep when things go sideways for a little bit.
- when you first start, things seem to cost a couple thousand $. Then after a while it’s $10k. Then $100k. Then you get comfortable with $1M or more and your concept of money is wildly skewed. Every quote you get is some batshit crazy amount of money but apparently that’s how much things cost
- mistakes can cost many millions of dollars at scale. You can still take risks, but the downside starts to get bigger
- you can’t be everywhere all the time, so you gotta have great people that would make the same decisions you would make if you’re not in the room. Or ideally they make an even better decision. Great leaders allow companies to grow. Build them early
Level Five VC retweeted
Terafab will need 2-3 GW of power by 2033.
It just so happens Aalo is building a 1M sqft nuclear reactor factory within 100 miles, which is aiming to reach 1 GW / yr of hardware output by the end of 2030.
Level Five VC retweeted
I was a bricklayer.
It was how I paid the bills when I first moved to America. Even the biggest title in bodybuilding, Mr. Olympia, only paid a thousand dollars back then.
It makes me proud that in March, the winner of our Arnold Classic and our Arnold Classic UK took home more than a million dollars. He can focus on bodybuilding.
But in our day, that wasn’t an option. Some guys were teachers. Some sold insurance. Franco and I laid bricks.
We put an ad in the paper and sold ourselves as European craftsmen. We figured if people heard the accents, they would picture old-world masonry instead of two bodybuilders with a wheelbarrow.
It worked.
The phone rang. And then we had to go out and actually do the job, which was the part nobody could fake. Luckily, Franco knew what he was doing.
The work was simple. Mix the mortar. Set the brick. Tap it level. Scrape the edge. Then do it again. And again. Nobody claps for you. There is no crowd, no music, no trophy. There is just the next brick sitting there waiting for you.
You can still find some of the walls we built in Venice.
That’s where my lesson today comes from.
One brick doesn’t look like anything. Ten bricks don’t look like anything. A hundred bricks, you’re starting to see something, but it doesn’t impress anyone.
You just keep laying bricks until the job is done.
And you know what happens after four or five hours on a wall?
You are so damn tired, or you feel so great that you stop measuring.
You are not standing back every ten minutes asking how far from finished it is. You are covered in mortar, your hands are raw, you’re schvitzing, and you are happy. The work took the question away from you.
That is the part nobody tells you about hard work: It doesn’t just build the wall. It terminates the voice that keeps asking when the wall will be done.
Level Five VC retweeted
A $5B fund just bought a metals distributor that scaled to billions of revenue since 1948 with ZERO outside capital.
1/ lindsay goldberg is taking a majority stake in alro steel. founded 1948. 80 locations, 16 states, 50,000 customers. closes end of october. JPM ran the deal.
2/ the buyer closed fund vi in january. $4.9b against a $4b target. 40% larger than the last fund. over 85% of existing lps re-upped. $24b raised since 2001, $17b deployed, $26b returned.
3/ 66 platforms and 350+ add-ons across those funds. about five bolt-ons per platform. alro is not as much the as it is the platform..
4/ they have run this in metals before. klockner in 2005, public by 2006, fully out in 2007. vdm metals in 2015, sold to acerinox for 532m euro. stelco out of creditor protection in 2017, public that november.
5/ and it is not just them. ryerson and olympic steel closed their merger in february. russel metals bought seven kloeckner branches. wynnchurch rolled american metals supply into ems in may.
6/ every one of these deals is buying the same thing. branches closer to the customer. in this industry that is what a shorter lead time is made of.
7/ there is more than one way to shorten a lead time. this one costs billions
Level Five VC retweeted
Today, we announced a watershed deal to acquire three companies from @Boeing, @WiskAero , @Insitu_Inc, and @skygridai, in exchange for Boeing taking a strategic equity stake in @flyarcher and collaborating with us. After closing, our product portfolio will span piloted air taxis, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in Groups 2 through 5, purpose-built AI for aviation, and the vertical technology stack for autonomous flight.
The mission is even bigger now. It’s time to build.
archer.com/news/archer-to-sh…
Level Five VC retweeted
step one of a self-replicating von neumann economy is to mass produce high-end tooling on demand in days not months
A high-end injection mold can cost $400,000-$500,000, with dozens of cavities, hydraulic slides, lifters, ejectors, valve gates and hot runners packed inside hardened H13 or S136 steel.
Some molds carry 128 cavities, producing 128 parts per cycle, while precision machining can hold tolerances around ±0.005 mm. Cooling circuits circulate water through channels inside the steel, with temperature control around 1-2°C, cycle after cycle.
These aren't designed for a few thousand parts. High-end production tooling can be engineered for 1-2 million+ shots, operating through repeated injection pressure, heating, cooling and mechanical movement without losing much alignment.
The industrial ecosystem required to make them is enormous, CNC machining, EDM, grinding, polishing, heat treatment, metrology, mold flow simulation, thermal management and hot-runner engineering all have to work together.
And China has become the centre of gravity for this industry. China represented nearly 17.8% of the global injection molding market, while some industry estimate puts Chinese manufacturers at roughly 68% of global plastic injection mold supply.
These are the machines that make the machines.
For any country trying to build a serious manufacturing base, the ability to produce tooling this precise and complex is fundamental. These molds sit at the core of thousands of factories, determining how cheaply, quickly and reliably everything from cars to medical devices can be manufactured at scale.