New deep tech fund Wave Function Ventures raises $15 million

Summary

When Jamie Gull graduated from Stanford University in 2007 with a master’s degree in aeronautics, there was one place he wanted to go next: the desert. The Mojave desert, to be specific. A company called Scaled Composites had spent years developing experimental aircraft out on that arid land, and Gull wanted in. He could have tried to get a more traditional aerospace job, but Gull was worried he’d “work five years on a latch” — a common joke about those bigger, slow-moving companies. But at Scaled Composites? “I knew I would build something, and I would do it quickly, and I would be a college graduate who would own an actual outcome,” he said. Two years later, Gull jumped to SpaceX, where he helped make the Falcon 9 rocket reusable — a major milestone in that company’s history, and the foundation on which it has built an enormously valuable business. Now, Gull is gearing up for a new challenge: launching an early-stage deep tech fund called Wave Function Ventures. Just last week, he closed Wave Function’s first fund of $15.1 million, and he’s already off and running. Gull has made nine investments in startups that span industries like nuclear energy (Deep Fission), humanoid robotics (Persona AI), and, of course, aerospace (Airship Industries). He told TechCrunch he expects to do about 25 seed or pre-seed investments out of this fund. (Gull declined to name the anchor LP, and said the rest of the fund was filled by high net worth individuals, with support from other funds and “large family offices.”) Wave Function’s emergence comes at a time when deep tech funding is on the rise, buoyed in part by the increased attention on fields like aerospace and defense. It’s enough of a trend that earlier this year, a new Silicon Valley-based deep tech fund called Leitmotif broke cover with $300 million in capital from the Volkswagen Group, part of a bid to lift up hardware and manufacturing startups in the United States and Europe. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 27-29...