eric-schmidt
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The Fund That Bets on People Who Read Physics Papers for Fun
Eric Schmidt's Palo Alto firm has spent fifteen years funding PhDs who want to rebuild the physical world - from SoFi and Uber to gene editors and metal-bending robots. Its bet: the boring industries are about to move fast.
Will Roper
Will Roper is a physicist-turned-defense-strategist who now runs Istari Digital, a Cambridge, Massachusetts startup trying to build an 'engineering metaverse' where machines from satellites to medicines can be designed, tested and certified entirely in software. Before founding Istari in 2022, he was the 13th Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, steering a roughly $40-60 billion annual portfolio, and earlier the founding director of the Pentagon's Strategic Capabilities Office, where he turned a $50 million budget into a $1.5 billion-plus prototype machine that produced drone swarms, hypervelocity guns and fighter-jet AI co-pilots. A Rhodes Scholar with an Oxford doctorate in string theory, he names his ventures after Tolkien wizards and argues America must learn to make hardware behave like software before its rivals do.
Relativity Space
Relativity Space is an American aerospace company building rockets in a radically different way - by 3D printing the bulk of each vehicle with its proprietary Stargate metal printers and autonomous robotics. Founded in 2015, it became the first company to launch a largely 3D-printed rocket (Terran 1) in 2023, and is now focused on Terran R, a medium-to-heavy-lift, fully reusable launch vehicle aimed at the commercial and government markets. Under CEO Eric Schmidt, who took the helm in 2025, the company is also exploring orbital infrastructure for AI and high-performance computing.