Milo
Werner

When Milo Werner joined Tesla in 2007, the company had roughly 200 employees and two prototype cars. Most people in Silicon Valley were still hedging their bets on whether electric vehicles were a real business or an expensive science project. Werner didn't hedge. She moved into the thick of new product introduction - the unglamorous, load-bearing discipline of actually making things - and stayed for eight years.

Her portfolio at Tesla reads like a checklist of the company's formative achievements: the Model S powertrain (battery, drive unit, and everything in between), the dual-motor drivetrain, driver assist systems, and the Model X. These weren't incremental improvements. Each launch required solving supply chain problems that had no precedent, building supplier relationships from scratch, and managing production ramp-ups that other manufacturers had decades to figure out. Werner did them on compressed timelines, at a company that was simultaneously trying not to go bankrupt.

She left Tesla for Fitbit, where she ran New Product Introduction and launched four factories in China simultaneously, transitioning the company to fully automated production - a feat that involves equal parts engineering precision, cross-cultural negotiation, and tolerance for chaos. Then she went to Zola, a solar-battery startup serving distributed energy to over one million families in Sub-Saharan Africa. Three continents, three radically different industrial contexts.

The pivot to venture capital was less a career change than a lateral move into a different kind of leverage. As an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, she used the same toolkit - commercialization strategy, supplier development, sourcing - to support deep tech founders. At Ajax Strategies, she led mid-stage investments in energy, transportation, agriculture, and industrial sectors. In 2018, she walked into MIT's inaugural Tough Tech Summit and found her people.

The Engine - MIT's tough tech venture fund - formally brought Werner on as General Partner in 2022. The mission was deliberately hard: invest in the breakthrough technologies that are too important to ignore but too capital-intensive and long-horizon for conventional VC. Werner's board seats at Atlantic Quantum, Foundation Alloy, Mori, Resonant Link, and TeraDar map the perimeter of what "tough tech" means in practice: quantum computing, advanced materials, food preservation, wireless power, radar sensing.

In July 2024, DCVC recruited her to lead DCVC Climate - the firm's first dedicated climate fund, targeting $300-400 million, launched twelve years after DCVC made its first climate-related investment. The timing matters. The Inflation Reduction Act money that seeded much of the clean manufacturing sector was already being contested. Werner arrived not as a policy optimist but as someone who had built things when the rules kept changing.

Her investment thesis at DCVC Climate goes beyond emissions reduction. She's hunting for companies that can restructure entire value chains - decarbonize cement, steel, chemicals, agriculture - at the level where it actually counts. "Solutions that go beyond emissions reduction to revolutionize value chains," as she puts it. The bar is high and deliberately so.