James Mercer

I spent the first decade of my career as an aerospace engineer - building propulsion systems at JPL and scaling engineering teams at Orbital Dynamics. Somewhere between debugging flight software and reviewing pitch decks on nights and weekends, I realized the capital allocation side of deep tech was where I could have the most leverage.

The gap I kept seeing was this: brilliant technical founders with real breakthroughs were getting funded by people who didn't understand the science behind the product. That mismatch leads to bad board advice, wrong timelines, and companies that die before the technology matures.

We invest in teams where the technical moat is real, the founding team can explain the physics, and the market is large enough to justify the patience deep tech demands. I do my own technical diligence. I read the papers. I understand the failure modes.