The VC That Shows Up With Wrenches

The pitch that hardware founders hear most often, and trust least, is that a venture firm will be "hands-on." In practice that usually means a monthly call and an introduction or two. FP Solutions, a small firm based in Orange, California, built itself around a more literal version of the phrase. When it backs a company, it does not just wire money and wait for updates. It sends people - mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, process and automation specialists, supply-chain managers - into the business to help design, build, and scale the physical product.

That model is a deliberate response to a hard truth about hardware. A software startup can turn capital into progress almost immediately; a hardware startup often needs a factory, a supply chain, and a manufacturing process before it can turn capital into anything at all. FP Solutions, founded in 2022, argues that the missing ingredient in most early hardware companies is not money but manufacturing know-how. So it staffs itself with the know-how and lends it out.

Three sectors, one thesis

The firm concentrates on three areas: space, energy, and automation. They look unrelated until you notice what they share. Each is a large, under-served market where the winners will be decided less by clever code than by whether a company can actually build a complex physical thing, at volume, without going broke. That is the problem FP Solutions organizes itself to solve.

The company frames its own mission plainly: "Unlocking the potential of companies around the world." What sits behind that line is a three-part filter that any prospective investment has to pass. The startup has to be scalable. It has to have a clear path to profitability within roughly three years. And it has to promise a measurable, positive impact on the planet. Miss one and the conversation tends to end.

The three-year profitability test is the unusual one. Plenty of deep-tech investors accept long, cash-hungry timelines as the cost of ambition. FP Solutions pushes the other way, screening for companies that can reach a sustainable business quickly. It is a discipline that flows naturally from the founders' backgrounds, where shipping product and controlling cost were daily concerns rather than distant ideals.

The planetary-impact clause does a quieter kind of work. It keeps the firm inside sectors where the physical product and the environmental case tend to move together - cleaner power, more efficient manufacturing, materials that could not be made any other way. That overlap is not accidental. It is how a firm covering something as far-flung as orbital semiconductors and something as grounded as home energy management can still describe a single, coherent portfolio.

The people behind the wrenches

FP Solutions was started by operators, not financiers. Founding partner KC McCreery is a manufacturing executive whose résumé includes Director of Manufacturing at Tesla, a senior manufacturing role at a battery maker, and production leadership at Subaru. His stated approach blends Japanese lean methodology with startup speed - a combination that shows up in how the firm talks about waste, throughput, and process.

His counterpart, founding partner Lewis Hong, brings the aerospace side. Hong worked at SpaceX and, by the firm's account, helped build what it describes as the world's first rocket factory, along with a high-density battery pack pilot plant and, in a detail that says something about range, a fast-casual food franchise. He holds a mechanical engineering degree from Stanford and an MBA from Oxford. Between the two founders, the firm's pitch to a hardware founder is straightforward: we have built the thing you are trying to build.

That talent pool extends past the two partners. FP Solutions draws on a recruiting network built from founders and operators at Tesla and SpaceX, and connects its companies to hiring and business networks that stretch from Silicon Valley to the Greater Bay Area in China. For a young hardware company, access to engineers who have already scaled production somewhere hard can matter as much as the funding itself.

How the engagement works

The relationship starts before the money does, through what the firm calls the ARIS Program. Rather than opening with a term sheet, FP Solutions runs a deeper assessment of the company to establish objectives, deliverables, and a roadmap. The idea is to understand the actual engineering and operational gaps first, then structure the investment and the support around them. Capital is treated as one input among several, not the whole relationship.

Once engaged, the firm can deploy a spread of disciplines: automation and controls engineering, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, process engineering, industrial engineering, data and software engineering, supply-chain specialists, and project management. In effect, a portfolio company gets access to a shared engineering department it could not afford to hire on its own at that stage. FP Solutions describes the arrangement as being "the co-founding team that early-stage companies need to scale."

The portfolio, in plain terms

FP Solutions' investments trace the three-sector map cleanly. In energy, it has backed Base Power, its most recent disclosed deal from April 2025, and BOLDR, which aims to help households cut energy use and turn the home into a connected distributed energy resource on a greener grid. In building materials, Fiber Global is where the firm applies its manufacturing expertise to accelerate hardware in a legacy industry.

In space, the roster gets more exotic. Impulse Space, founded by a former SpaceX CTO, builds orbital mobility systems to deliver payloads from low Earth orbit outward to higher orbits. Stealth Space Company is trying to make a new class of materials by using the vacuum and microgravity of space, starting with next-generation semiconductor wafers. There is also ATDev among the firm's disclosed names. It is a compact portfolio by design - a firm this size wins on depth of involvement, not breadth of bets.

What sets it apart

Plenty of firms invest in hard tech. What distinguishes FP Solutions is where it places its effort. A traditional venture investor concentrates on selecting the right companies and then supporting them mostly through capital, network, and counsel. FP Solutions treats the building itself as part of the job. Its competitors for a founder's attention are the operator-heavy funds and studios - the Eclipse Ventures and Construct Capitals of the world - rather than generalist software investors who tend to steer clear of factories and supply chains entirely.

The risk in the model is obvious, and worth naming. A firm that embeds engineers cannot embed them everywhere. With around a dozen people, FP Solutions can only run so many deep engagements at once, which caps how many companies it can truly serve the way it promises. The upside is the mirror image: for the handful of founders it does take on, the help is unusually concrete, and the incentives are genuinely shared. As the firm puts it, its model does not work unless the companies do.

Where it fits

FP Solutions sits at a point the venture industry has been drifting toward for years - the blurring line between an investor and an operating partner. Across hard tech, the firms getting attention are the ones that bring more than money: manufacturing experience, engineering benches, supply-chain relationships. FP Solutions is a small, sharply focused expression of that shift, aimed squarely at the physical industries where those advantages count most. It is not trying to be the biggest name in venture. It is trying to be the most useful phone call a hardware founder makes when the prototype works and the factory does not exist yet.

For founders in space, energy, and automation, the proposition is easy to understand and hard to find: a backer that has built rocket factories and battery plants, screens for real businesses rather than open-ended experiments, and will roll up its sleeves alongside you. Whether that translates into a landmark fund is still an open question - the firm is young and its bets are long. But the bet on itself is coherent. In a category where the hardest part is making the thing, FP Solutions decided the most valuable investor is the one who knows how.