The Recruiter and the Rocket Scientist Funding America's Hard Tech

In venture capital, the pitch is usually about money. Embedded Ventures built its firm on a quieter, more awkward observation: most early-stage investors backing hardware founders cannot actually evaluate the hardware. A finance degree does not tell you whether a rocket engine will hold pressure, whether a manufacturing process will scale, or whether a defense system does what its founder claims. So in 2020, two people who did understand those things - a technical recruiter and an aerospace engineer - started a fund to fill the gap.

The recruiter is Jenna Bryant, who moved to Los Angeles to act, landed roles on shows including "Sleepy Hollow" and "The Detour," and then found she was unusually good at something else entirely: finding the exact engineer a young startup needed. She staffed early teams at companies like Snap and Tinder, and became a known quantity for hard-to-fill technical roles. The engineer is Jordan Noone, co-founder and founding CTO of Relativity Space, the company that set out to 3D-print rockets. Together they run Embedded Ventures as co-founders and general partners.

Backing the companies built out of atoms, not just code

Embedded Ventures is an early-stage, deep-tech venture firm based in Los Angeles. It invests at the pre-seed and seed stages in what it calls three lanes: digital engineering, advanced manufacturing, and space infrastructure. The connective tissue across all three is dual-use technology - products that serve commercial markets and national-security markets at the same time. That is why a firm this young shows up next to names like Anduril and Skyryse on cap tables.

The firm describes its own posture bluntly. "Quality deep-tech deals are network-based and often missed by newcomers," reads its thesis - a claim that doubles as a description of Bryant's entire career. Sourcing rare engineers and sourcing rare hardware startups turn out to be the same skill: knowing the small world where these people already work, before the wider market notices.

Two audiences: founders who build, and LPs who wait

Embedded Ventures has two sets of customers, and they want opposite things on opposite timelines. The first are the founders - engineers building rockets, robots, factories, and defense systems who need capital plus something rarer: an investor who understands the physics and will not panic at a ten-year development curve. The second are the limited partners who fund the firm and accept that deep-tech returns arrive slowly, if they arrive at all. Managing the gap between those two clocks is the actual job.

The founders point out a structural quirk that most software investors never think about: hard-tech startups need physical infrastructure they cannot buy off the shelf. Launch pads, test stands, clean rooms, machine shops - the kind of thing usually owned by large corporations or governments. Capital alone does not unlock them. That insight shaped how the firm operates, and it shaped its most-cited move.

The Space Force signed first

In October 2021, roughly a year after launching, Embedded Ventures signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement - a CRADA - with the U.S. Space Force, through the service's SpaceWERX arm. It was the first formal agreement of its kind between the Space Force and a venture capital firm. In practice, a CRADA is a framework for the two sides to share information and align private investment with national-security space priorities. In signalling terms, it did something a slide deck cannot: it told founders that this fund had a direct line into the customer many of them most wanted to reach.

Operator-investors, not spreadsheet tourists

Plenty of firms now advertise "deep tech" and "American dynamism." Embedded's differentiation is who is doing the evaluating. Noone was the first student and youngest person cleared by the FAA to fly a rocket to space, and later co-founded Relativity Space and the CAD-software company Zoo (formerly KittyCAD). The wider bench includes Mandy Vaughn, an operating partner with a background running a Space Force launch enterprise, and Bill Cramsie as partner. The pitch to a hardware founder is not "we have capital." It is "we have built the thing you are building, and we can tell whether yours works."

The firm frames this as being the "skunkworks of deep tech venture capital" - a reference to the secretive engineering labs where hard problems get solved out of public view. It also leans into a diversity argument: venture leadership has barely changed in fifty years even as diverse teams keep outperforming, and Embedded treats the founders that incumbents overlook as an underpriced market rather than a talking point.

The team of roughly sixteen is deliberately distributed - Los Angeles and Long Beach, but also Nashville and Minneapolis - and blends aerospace engineering, government, communications and recruiting backgrounds rather than a uniform finance pedigree. That mix is the point. Bryant has described using her own outsider instinct, what she calls a productive form of impostor syndrome, as a tool to "zoom out at any moment and identify what legacy processes need to be updated." In a business built on pattern-matching, hiring people who match different patterns is itself a strategy.

One fund, invest-and-incubate under one roof

The core product is Fund I, a $100 million vehicle first announced in January 2023 and closed in 2024, writing early-stage checks into the three focus sectors. Around it sits the firm's operating model: rather than treating diligence as a checkbox, Embedded positions technical evaluation and hands-on company-building as the service itself. "Leading with expertise, we invest and incubate all in one place," is how the firm puts it. The CRADA functions as a third product line - a structured relationship that founders in defense and space value on its own.

A defense-and-space greatest-hits list

The firm's portfolio reads like a map of where dual-use technology is heading. Among the roughly dozen companies it has backed:

Relative bar lengths are illustrative, not financial figures. Also in the portfolio: Observable Space, Persona AI and USPC.

The bet that best captures the firm's timeline is Skyryse, an aviation company working on making flight simpler and safer to automate. It reached unicorn status in 2026 - about four years after Embedded Ventures first invested. That lag is the entire deep-tech thesis in one data point: the wins are large, but they are slow, and a fund built for software-speed exits would have given up long before.

Where it fits

Structurally, Embedded Ventures makes money the way venture firms do: management fees to run the fund and carried interest on the upside when portfolio companies exit. What differentiates it is positioning, not mechanics. It sits in the increasingly crowded deep-tech and defense-tech lane alongside firms like Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice, 8VC and Shield Capital - but it competes on technical credibility and network rather than fund size. In a category where being able to read a founder's actual work is scarce, that is a defensible place to stand.

A short timeline of a young firm

Embedded Ventures is still early in its own arc. But the wager it made - that competence, not just capital, is the scarce input in hard tech - has aged well as space, defense, and manufacturing moved from the fringe of venture to its center. The firm that got the Space Force to sign first is now one of the more legible answers to a question the whole industry is asking: who, exactly, is qualified to fund the physical future.