We ask the same four things of every founder we back. Do they feel the customer's pain in their bones? Can they ship faster than the market moves? Is the prize tens of billions in annual revenue, not hundreds of millions? And the one most founders fumble: why now? Why not a year ago, why not a year from now?

Those four still hold. In this class, we added a fifth.

The fifth filter

The application layer is getting cheaper to build every week. Wrappers get cloned in a weekend. So we hunted for moats that get harder over time, not easier. Frontier hardware. Regulated payment rails. Years of domain experience built into the product. Work the next model release cannot copy.

We concentrated in segments where this is structural. Energy. Defense. Semiconductors. Frontier AI infrastructure. Deep fintech payment rails in regulated markets. The model is not the product in any of these companies.

The class

AnalogCraft — AI-driven chip design that compresses semiconductor timelines from months to weeks. The CEO has spent 20+ years designing high-performance chips, from fiber-optic comms at Maxim to DNA-sequencing chips at Roche. The CTO has taken multiple semiconductor products from definition to high-volume production. CEO: Alex Gilman

Arcticar — An intelligent energy platform for the cold chain — replacing diesel with automated electric cooling and batteries. The CEO previously founded an electric truck company that raised $200M and went public. The co-founder and CFO has served as CFO of three $500M+ deep tech companies and has led 3 IPO processes. CEO: Jim Castelaz

BuiltBlock — On-demand workspaces that automate workflows and dashboards for B2B customer-facing teams. The CEO and co-founder are Datadog alums and customer-team lifers. CEO: Henry Cook

Chain — Charge, collect, and move money for solopreneurs — directly inside WhatsApp. Two seasoned founders who built and launched products inside three fintech unicorns in Mexico (the co-founder previously designed financial products for millions of users at Stori and Kueski). CEO: Melina Cruz Villafaña

Papr — Graph-native retrieval that helps agents ship 15× more work per token, with policy and audit built in. The CEO built the AI action layer at Apple shipped to over a billion devices. His co-founder and brother built commerce infrastructure at Shopify and runs r/RAG, a 70,000-engineer community. Ranked #1 on Stanford's STaRK retrieval benchmark (92% accuracy vs. 58% baseline). CEO: Shawkat Kabbara

Power Dime — The end-to-end digital platform for data center energy procurement — months to weeks. The CEO has 19 years in energy and led power procurement for AWS data centers across EMEA, plus was on the Shell New Energies founding team. The CFO comes from 15 years in investment banking with ~$3B in closed transactions, and the Strategy lead is a former McKinsey Associate Partner who led 30+ climate and energy-transition programs. CEO: Harleen Sindhu

Qluu — Autonomous, hardware-agnostic AI that protects critical infrastructure by intercepting drone and missile threats. The CEO is a former transportation hardware designer with one prior exit. The CTO is ex-FBI counter-intelligence with two prior exits, and the CSO is a Lt. Colonel in Army Special Forces with 30 years in defense. CEO: Arkadiy Okhman

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