Eclipse Raises $1.3B Across Two Funds to Back the Next Era of Physical Industries
April 8, 2026 – 8:49 am
Fund VI ($720M) targets early-stage companies in robotics, manufacturing, and energy. Early Growth Fund III ($591M) supports companies scaling toward Series A. Total AUM is now approximately $10 billion.
Eclipse, the Palo Alto-based venture firm that backs companies rebuilding physical industries, has closed $1.3 billion across two funds simultaneously.
Eclipse Fund VI has raised $720 million for early-stage investments, and Early Growth Fund III has raised $591 million to support companies approaching commercial scale. The raise brings Eclipse’s total assets under management to approximately $10 billion.
Eclipse was founded in 2015 by Lior Susan on the thesis that the most consequential companies of the next decade would be built not in software but in physical industries, the systems that move, make, and power the real world. This includes manufacturing, robotics, energy, agriculture, and critical infrastructure: sectors that together account for the majority of global GDP but have historically attracted a fraction of the venture capital that flows into enterprise software.
Susan frames the fund not as a conventional portfolio but as what he calls a connected industrial economy, a network of companies that share infrastructure, customers, talent, and accumulated operational insight to move faster than they could in isolation.
The dual-fund structure reflects the two distinct phases Eclipse backs. Fund VI targets early-stage companies at the point of initial capitalization, writing cheques typically between seed and Series A. Early Growth Fund III bridges the gap between proven product and commercial scale, the stage at which hardware-intensive companies face their most capital-intensive challenges and where execution risk is highest.
Bloomberg reported on the raise, with Susan speaking to the accelerating pace of change in physical industries as artificial intelligence, improved robotics hardware, and renewed US industrial policy combine to compress what were once decade-long development timelines.
Eclipse’s portfolio spans a range of physical industry categories. It backed Cerebras, the AI chip company that built the world’s largest chip to accelerate machine learning workloads, and Redwood Materials, the battery recycling company that raised a $350 million Series E led by Eclipse in October 2025. The firm’s operator-first identity, its partners include former operators from Amazon, Apple, and Samsara, is central to its pitch to founders building hardware-intensive companies: that their investors understand not just how to fund factories but how to run them.
By Cristian Dina