The Fund Betting That the Hard Problems Are Made of Atoms, Not Apps

There is a version of venture capital that runs on pattern-matching. Find a founder with a good deck, a growing chart and a familiar business model, then race a dozen other funds to write the same check. Valhalla Ventures built its house on the opposite instinct. The firm's founders looked at the wall of software rounds and decided the interesting money was somewhere less crowded: in companies making physical things, and in games nobody else would fund.

Founded in 2020 by Devan Malhotra, Rohan Pujara and Matthew King, Valhalla Ventures is an early-stage firm split cleanly down the middle. One half chases deeptech - materials science, biology, energy, space. The other chases gaming - the new and underfunded corners of it. In 2023 the firm made that thesis official by launching Fund I, a $66 million vehicle aimed almost entirely at seed-stage companies. It is a small fund with an unusually wide aperture, and the reasoning behind it is stated plainly on the firm's own site: it partners with visionaries building enduring moats.

01 / THE THESISWhy atoms beat apps

The clearest statement of what Valhalla believes comes from Pujara, who leads the deeptech practice. "If you look at the biggest problems we face today, they are not solved by incrementally better software, but rather by breakthroughs in physical technology," he has said. It is a compact argument with real consequences. A fund that believes this cannot simply chase the next productivity app. It has to be comfortable with hardware timelines, regulatory friction, lab work and capital intensity - the things that scare generalist investors away.

That discomfort is the point. If breakthroughs in physical technology are harder to fund, they are also harder to copy. A software feature can be cloned in a quarter. A new cathode chemistry, a satellite bus, or an in-space refueling system cannot. Valhalla's phrase "enduring moats" is really shorthand for this: the firm is trying to buy defensibility that comes from physics rather than from a head start.

02 / THE STRUCTURETwo theses, one small fund

Most funds pick a lane. Valhalla runs a barbell. On one end sits deeptech, led by Pujara, an engineering-minded operator focused on physical technology and space systems. On the other sits gaming, led by Malhotra, who concentrates on novel and underfunded gaming mediums with an emphasis on social play. The two categories rarely share a conference. Putting them in the same fund is a deliberate bet that both are mispriced for the same reason - other investors find them too slow or too risky to underwrite.

The firm also did not arrive at a fund the way most emerging managers do. Before Fund I, Valhalla spent roughly two years running special-purpose vehicles - about $27 million deployed across eight early companies. That SPV period functioned as a track record and a proof of taste. By the time institutional money arrived, the partners could point to real positions rather than a thesis on a slide.

03 / THE PORTFOLIOA holdings list that reads like science fiction

The best way to understand a fund is to read what it actually owns. Valhalla's portfolio is a tour through problems you can drop on your foot - and a few you would rather not.

Teal = deeptech · Orange = gaming. Selected positions from public reporting.

Set them next to each other and the range is almost comic: a company reinventing the handgun around a fingerprint sensor, a startup trying to make energy in orbit, a solar utility wiring African villages, and a studio convinced the next billion-dollar franchise starts as a board game. What ties them together is not a sector. It is a shape - founders attempting something physically hard, early enough that a first check actually matters.

04 / THE MODELFirst money, from inception

Valhalla is built to be early. The firm invests from company inception through the seed round, with checks reported up to roughly $8 to $10 million. That places it before most of the market and often before there is much to underwrite beyond a team and a hard idea. It is the riskiest seat in venture, and also the one where a single check can shape a company's entire trajectory.

The economics are the standard venture arrangement - fees on committed capital, carried interest on gains - but the strategy underneath is not standard at all. Concentrated positions in capital-intensive companies mean fewer bets and longer horizons. There is no spraying of small checks across a hundred SaaS startups here. The fund is designed to hold ~15 core positions and stand behind them, which is why the "enduring moats" language is more than marketing. When you only get a handful of shots, each one had better be hard to knock over.

The customers, in the end, are two audiences at once. The obvious one is the founder - the physicist, the aerospace engineer, the game designer who needs conviction capital before there is a product to demo. The quieter one is the limited partner writing into the fund, who is buying access to a slice of the market that index-style venture largely skips. Both are betting on the same thing: that Valhalla's taste in hard, early companies compounds into returns the crowded middle of venture cannot produce.

It is worth being clear about the risk. Deeptech companies fail expensively and slowly. A satellite program or a new drug can consume years and still not reach the market. Games are their own kind of lottery, where a single hit can carry a portfolio and most releases never find an audience. Valhalla's answer is not to pretend the risk away but to price it in from the start - to be early enough, and concentrated enough, that the handful of wins can matter at fund scale. That is the trade a first-check deeptech fund signs up for.

05 / THE MARKETWhere it fits

In the venture landscape, Valhalla sits at an unusual intersection. On deeptech it shares air with firms like Lux Capital, Founders Fund and DCVC - larger, older shops that have spent years arguing hard tech deserves venture returns. On gaming it overlaps with specialists like Bitkraft, Makers Fund and Griffin Gaming Partners. What almost no one else does is run both theses inside one small, first-check fund. That is the whole positioning: not the biggest deeptech investor, not the biggest gaming investor, but one of the few willing to be early in both.

06 / THE PEOPLEWho is behind it

The firm is small - around 11 people - and the two general partners carry the theses personally. Pujara, based on the deeptech side, frames his work around physical breakthroughs and space systems. Malhotra owns gaming and its case that social, novel formats are structurally underfunded. Their pitch to founders leans on a specific nostalgia: a return to venture's hands-on, high-conviction era, when investors worked shoulder to shoulder with unusual people building unusual things. In 2024, that approach earned a place on Forbes' 30 Under 30 for venture capital.

For a founder, the practical read is straightforward. If you are building something capital-intensive and hard - a satellite, a new material, an ambitious game - and you need a believer at the very start rather than a follower at Series B, Valhalla is the kind of fund built to say yes early. The name is a Norse joke with a serious point: it is a hall for bold attempts, including the ones that do not survive the fight.