Howard Yuh is a plasma physicist turned founder who is trying to break China's grip on magnesium by pulling the metal out of the ocean. As CEO and cofounder of Tidal Metals, the New Jersey deeptech he spun out of his earlier desalination venture GreenBlu, he uses an adsorption temperature-swing vapor pump - a trick borrowed from fusion research - to extract magnesium salt from seawater with only electricity, no mining, and no waste. The company raised $8.5M in seed funding led by DCVC in 2024 and won the World Economic Forum's Sustainable Mining Challenge the same year.
Rachel Slaybaugh is a General Partner at DCVC, the deep tech venture firm, where she leads climate, sustainability, and energy investments. A nuclear engineer by training - she once operated a reactor as an undergrad at Penn State - she spent eight years as a tenured Associate Professor at UC Berkeley, ran the Cyclotron Road accelerator division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and served as a Program Director at the U.S. Department of Energy's ARPA-E, where she created the nuclear fission program and helped fund over 30 companies. She co-founded the Good Energy Collective and the Nuclear Innovation Bootcamp, and now backs companies like Fervo Energy, Brimstone, Radiant Industries, Zap Energy, Fourth Power, and Equilibrium Energy at DCVC.
Zephyr Fusion is building the first in-orbit fusion power source - a compact, megawatt-class reactor designed to run in the vacuum of space. Founded by two physicists who met in grad school operating a spherical tokamak, the San Diego-based startup uses a levitated dipole magnetic confinement approach with high-temperature superconductors. Their bet: space makes fusion easier, not harder. With launch costs down 10x and mass-produced HTS tapes providing 10x more field per kilogram, Zephyr Fusion aims to power the industrial revolution that humanity is about to have off-planet.