Eclipse Ventures, the firm founded by Lior Susan, just watched its portfolio company Cerebras Systems complete a $2.5 billion IPO, validating a decade-long bet on physical-world technology infrastructure. Ten years ago, Susan was an outlier, backing companies that married hardware and software at a time when pure software plays dominated VC attention and dollars.
The Cerebras outcome is not the story. The story is the thesis underneath it: that the most defensible technology companies are built at the intersection of atoms and bits, manufacturing, robotics, semiconductors, and industrial systems. Eclipse has quietly assembled a portfolio around this conviction while most Sand Hill Road money chased SaaS multiples. The fund now sits at the center of a supply chain reshoring moment and an AI hardware arms race it saw coming before both were headlines.
Read the full piece for Susan's account of what it felt like to pitch physical-world investing to LPs who wanted nothing to do with it, how Eclipse evaluates companies that require capital-intensive scaling, and why the firm believes the next decade of value creation runs through factories, not just data centers.
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