Aidan Madigan-Curtis, partner at Eclipse Ventures, discusses what makes technologies in logistics and transportation worthy of serious investment today.

Eclipse Ventures, a $2.7 billion venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California, invests in the intersection of digital transformation and physical industries, often with a focus on logistics and transportation. Many of its executives come from the worlds of technology and supply chain.

“We wanted to come together to actually fund some of the most promising new technologies that could really move the needle on some of the biggest challenges we think the world sees today,” Madigan Curtis says. Among those challenges she sees are deglobalization and the efficient re-shoring of manufacturing, decarbonization, transitioning to a more renewable energy basis, and addressing the aging U.S. infrastructure. 

As Madigan-Curtis phrases it, she and her colleagues have all “stubbed our toes on broken aspects of supply chain.” They are keen to leverage their backgrounds to determine what problems need to be solved. “From there, we have a pretty rigorous approach to asking, what is the economic nature of that problem? Are we really sure that someone is willing to pay you for a solution today? How does that market work today? Who are the key players? What are the fundamental metrics that matter?”

As an example, Eclipse is exploring whether there’s an investible solution to medium- and long-duration energy storage. 

“We're very fundamentals-driven,” Madigan Curtis says. “We go and find the problem, analyze it, then put it out to the world. We'd love to meet entrepreneurs who already have a business that are solving these problems. And sometimes, if we can't find the right one out there, we'll even build it ourselves.”