Lighter, Cheaper, Faster—MetaVC Looks for Metamaterials Startups

Good day. MetaVC, a venture fund that launched in 2021 to back startups commercializing metamaterials, a budding area of materials science, has closed its debut fund with $62 million to invest in hard-tech startups.

Good day. MetaVC, a venture fund that launched in 2021 to back startups commercializing metamaterials, a budding area of materials science, has closed its debut fund with $62 million to invest in hard-tech startups.

The fund is backed by limited partners—including Bill Gates and Corning Inc.—hoping that some of the world’s big technical challenges can be solved through the use of metamaterials, manmade materials expected to improve the performance and reduce the size and weight of devices such as lenses and sensors.

MetaVC was founded by managing partners Conrad Burke and Chris Alliegro. Mr. Burke said MetaVC closed its fund just above a $60 million target, after looking to raise as much as $100 million as an original stretch goal.

While its portfolio companies span industries from healthcare to communications, they are all developing products that are smaller, cheaper, faster and use less energy than what’s currently available, Mr. Burke said.

Neurophos, a startup backed by MetaVC, is building optical processors that could be a hundred times as fast and energy efficient than today’s semiconductor-based processors. Such progress is likely to prove useful as large-language models used in artificial-intelligence algorithms strain available resources of computing power and energy.

The venture fund's portfolio also includes Lumotive, which develops sensors for anti-collision systems and consumer electronics; satellite company Mangata Networks; and flat-optical lens technology developer Imagia.

MetaVC has just six limited partners, in addition to its managing partners. LPs include materials company Corning, Mr. Gates’s firm Gates Frontier, Japanese conglomerate JSR Corp., and Nathan Myhrvold, formerly chief technology officer at Microsoft and founder of intellectual-property firm Intellectual Ventures. There are two MetaVC LPs that weren’t named. Messrs. Alliegro and Burke were previously executives at Invention Science Fund, a startup incubator at Intellectual Ventures.

Since MetaVC formed, fundraising for startups has gotten tougher. Mr. Burke said that when he was chief executive of Innovalight, a solar-energy company he founded that was later sold to DuPont, he also had to navigate a difficult market.

“It was cash management, pivoting where required, being nimble and listening to the market. And both Chris and I implore this type of thinking in our portfolio,” Mr. Burke said.