Transitions First wants your invention on the factory floor

Consider the distance between a kilogram and a ton. On paper, it is a matter of multiplication. Inside a young industrial company, it can mean different equipment, a different building, a new financing problem and a customer who wants evidence that the whole thing will work on Tuesday. Transitions First has chosen to make that distance its business.

The San Francisco venture fund backs industrial deep-tech founders and helps connect them with corporations. Its chosen territory includes manufacturing, materials and food production. These are businesses where a promising experiment must eventually meet a purchasing department. The interesting question is what happens at that meeting.

01 / The factory arrives on a skid

Start with Resynergi. In January 2024, Transitions First and Lummus Technology co-led a $6.4 million Series B for the California plastics-recycling company. Marianne Abib-Pech, the fund’s managing partner and a former global CFO of Shell Aviation, joined its board. The announcement described a technology business preparing to increase production and strengthen its executive team.

Resynergi uses microwave-assisted pyrolysis to turn selected waste plastics into liquid hydrocarbons. Its pitch includes the size of the equipment: a modular system that can be placed near existing waste collection. In an interview that month, chief executive Brian Bauer described a five-ton-per-day model on a 40-foot skid. The logistics matter. Moving discarded plastic around costs money before the chemistry has earned a cent.

Lummus brought a corporate participant with process-technology expertise into the financing. By February 2025, Resynergi announced an $18 million extension led by Taranis, with Transitions First and Lummus participating again. The stated purpose included commissioning its first commercial-scale site. The two announcements show the work moving from scaling equipment toward commercial deployment. They do not, by themselves, establish plant profitability.

There is a useful discipline here for anyone building physical technology: describe the next industrial milestone precisely. A financing round has a job to do. In this case, the public announcements identify production expansion, management capacity and a commercial site. The money follows a sequence of practical tasks.

02 / Put the buyer in the room

That combination of capital and industrial access appears elsewhere in the firm’s history. In March 2023, BCG announced a strategic collaboration with Blue Bear Ventures - Transitions First. The stated aim was to stimulate collaboration between corporations and deep-tech startups in manufacturing, food and health. Corporate relationships were part of the proposed mechanism for bringing scientific businesses into use.

The managing partners have backgrounds suited to that translation. Abib-Pech brings industrial finance experience; Alic Chen is an engineer whose work spans advanced materials, manufacturing and health. Chairman Patrick Scaglia adds a history in technology leadership. A founder may need help explaining technical risk to a financier and commercial risk to an industrial buyer. Those conversations require different vocabularies.

The firm sits between specialist early-stage venture investing and corporate technology adoption. Founders receive investment and commercialization support; corporations are potential partners in getting the technology into production. Its operating proposition is hands-on venture backing. For a founder comparing funding options, the relevant question is whether this investor understands the customer’s qualification process and the equipment that must be financed.

03 / Shrimp, yeast and a payment card

Agriloops makes the argument edible. The French portfolio company combines shrimp farming with vegetable production through aquaponics. Its website now offers French shrimp for sale. The idea connects production methods with proximity to the customer. A food supply chain becomes something that can be redesigned at the level of the farm.

Ruby Bio takes a different route into industrial production. It uses naturally occurring yeast to turn low-cost sugar into higher-value molecules. Its platform targets ingredients and materials for applications including home care and industry. For Transitions First, this belongs to the search for alternatives to petrochemical feedstocks: biological manufacturing evaluated through the products it can supply.

Then there is Cypris Materials. In August 2024, CPI Card Group and Cypris were recognized in a sustainability awards program for structural-color ink used in payment-card designs. The application is pleasingly ordinary. A materials invention has reached something people carry in a wallet. That makes the commercialization story easier to grasp than a diagram of a molecule.

These examples illuminate the fund’s interests without making every portfolio entry interchangeable. Its website explicitly separates a Legacy category from other holdings. Historical breadth should be read with that distinction in mind. A portfolio can contain several generations of investment activity.

04 / The clock on the factory wall

In a September 2026 interview on The Purse Podcast, Abib-Pech explained the depth of the exercise: “You underwrite an entire system.” She discussed location, footprint, asset strategy and the specialist expertise needed when a company has to build a factory. She also described industrial value creation as advancing through steps, with engineering and customer qualification shaping the timetable.

“You underwrite an entire system.”

Marianne Abib-Pech / The Purse Podcast / September 2026

The implication is practical. Before planning the next raise, identify the buyer, the installation requirement and the cost path. Ask which production milestone will remove a real objection. A compelling laboratory result still needs an economic route into an existing operation. Capital can pay for equipment; it cannot make an unsuitable process fit a customer’s business.

This approach depends on patient industrial partners, credible production economics and founders willing to adapt. Without those conditions, introductions and financing have limited reach. The part worth copying is the habit of treating adoption as an engineering problem from the beginning. Somewhere between the kilogram and the ton, someone has to decide that Tuesday’s production can depend on you.