The Fund That Bets on People Who Read Physics Papers for Fun

Most venture capitalists sell a version of the same story: find software, watch it scale, ride the margins. Innovation Endeavors sells the opposite. The Palo Alto firm, co-founded in 2010 by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, spends its time in the parts of the economy that resist software - the refineries, the cell cultures, the machine shops, the launchpads - and bets that they are about to change faster than anyone expects.

The firm calls the change the "Super Evolution." The name sounds grand, but the idea underneath it is specific. Three long technology curves, the partners argue, are crossing at the same moment: data has become cheap and everywhere, computation has become nearly free, and engineering itself - through robotics, 3D printing, and gene editing - has become programmable. When all three cross, a startup can re-architect a century-old industry in months rather than decades. Innovation Endeavors exists to fund the founders doing exactly that.

01What the firm actually does

Innovation Endeavors is an early-stage venture capital firm. In plain terms, it raises money from limited partners - institutions, endowments, family offices - and invests it as seed and Series A equity in young companies, aiming to return the capital many times over when those companies are acquired or go public. It earns a management fee on the money it holds and a share of the gains it produces.

That structure is ordinary. The selection is not. Where a generalist fund might spread dozens of small checks across consumer apps and business software, Innovation Endeavors concentrates on hard, science-heavy companies that most investors find too slow, too capital-hungry, or too technical to underwrite. Fund V, at $630 million, is meant to back only 30 to 35 companies. That is a deliberately narrow aperture - conviction over volume.

02The three forces behind the thesis

Strip away the branding and the Super Evolution is a claim about tools. Each of these forces was, until recently, a bottleneck. Together, they are becoming a launchpad.

03Where it invests

When Innovation Endeavors closed Fund V, it organized its focus into three buckets. The categories are worth reading closely, because they explain why the same firm can hold a lending platform, a metal-forming robotics company, and an antibody discovery lab without contradiction.

04Who it backs

The firm's customer, in a sense, is a person: the technical founder. Often that founder has just left a PhD program, a national lab, or a research group, and is trying to turn a result on a lab bench into a company. Partner Scott Brady has put the case for backing fresh talent bluntly - by his reckoning, if you finished your doctorate more than five years ago, you are probably no longer current in the fastest-moving technical fields.

That belief shapes how the firm sources deals. It also produced one of its more unusual habits: Curiosity Camp, an invite-only, title-free gathering in the Santa Cruz mountains where physicists, rocket scientists, computational biologists, founders, and policymakers pick sessions by which idea sounds most interesting rather than who is speaking. It is a recruiting tool disguised as a retreat, and a fair summary of the firm's taste.

05The track record

Innovation Endeavors is not new, and the portfolio shows it. The firm was an early investor in SoFi and Uber, the rocket company Astra, the delivery platform Slice, and the synthetic biology company Zymergen. Across fifteen years it has backed more than 150 companies, over two dozen of which have reached unicorn valuations.

Fund III and IV figures are approximate, drawn from third-party reporting. Fund V is confirmed.

06How it differs from the alternatives

Innovation Endeavors competes with a small set of firms that also chase hard technology - Lux Capital, DCVC, The Engine, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and 8VC among them. What separates it is less a single tactic than a posture: a willingness to underwrite the long, uncertain gap that deep-tech founders call the "valley of death," the stretch between a scientific breakthrough and a business that can stand on its own. Generalist funds tend to avoid that gap. Innovation Endeavors built its model around crossing it.

The firm's own logo is a quiet tell. It is a ring of radiating lines meant to read as a gear, a motor, or a propeller - something mathematical and stable that is also, always, in motion. That is roughly the kind of company it wants to fund.

07The road so far

08Where it fits in the market

Zoom out and Innovation Endeavors occupies a particular seat: an early-stage, science-first fund large enough to lead rounds and patient enough to wait out physical timelines, but focused enough to stay expert in the fields it plays in. It is not trying to be the biggest venture firm, or the fastest. It is trying to be the one technical founders call first when their company is too weird, too hard, and too early for everyone else - and it has fifteen years of results arguing the seat is worth holding.

09Questions people ask