Focus Area
Energy
The physical layer underneath everything else the fund invests in. Load is growing faster than the systems that carry it, and the binding constraint has moved off generation and onto interconnection, storage, cooling and control — which is where the engineering, and the investable business, now sits.
What we back.
- Grid intelligence and power electronics
- Forecasting, state estimation, dispatch, protection and grid-forming conversion for a network whose edge is increasingly inverter-based — the control problem that arrives as a system loses its rotating inertia.
- Storage and conversion
- Cells, packs, thermal management and the power conversion around them, including chemistries and thermal approaches chosen for duration and cycle life rather than energy density.
- Cooling and heat rejection
- Direct-to-chip and immersion cooling, and industrial heat rejection engineered for high ambient temperatures and scarce water, where the conventional answer is marginal and the failure is expensive.
- Industrial efficiency and electrification
- Process heat, waste-heat recovery, and the metering and controls that make a site legible before anyone tries to optimise it. Unglamorous, measurable, and bought out of an operating budget.
Why now
Why this sector, in this corridor, now.
Compute demand has turned into a power procurement problem. Interconnection queues, equipment lead times and grid upgrade schedules now set the pace of projects that have nothing to do with energy, so value accrues to whoever can shorten a connection, firm a variable resource, or reject heat more cheaply than the incumbent method. Those are engineering answers with a price attached, which makes them assessable.
The Gulf and the American Southwest are solving the same physics on comparable timelines: extreme heat, water scarcity, an abundant solar resource and fast-growing industrial and data-centre load. A system engineered for one desert grid has a materially shorter path into the other than into a temperate market — the qualification conditions, the failure modes and the operating envelope already match.
What we look for
What a company in this area has to show.
The five criteria in thethesisapply to every opportunity. These are the questions this area adds on top of them.
A cost curve, not a technology claim
Installed cost per unit of capacity or of energy delivered, with the bill of materials and the manufacturing route that reaches it. Energy buyers compare against an incumbent whose price they already know to the decimal.
A pilot with a meter behind it
Measured performance on a customer's site, in their conditions, over a period long enough to include the seasons and the maintenance. Bench figures do not transfer to a plant.
Honest about the sales cycle
Utilities, contractors and industrial operators qualify slowly, and buy against standards, warranty terms and service obligations that a software commercial plan does not contemplate. A team that has not priced the warranty has not priced the product.
A supply chain the plan can survive
Lead times, qualified second sources, and a clear view on where units get built — the manufacturing answer often decides whether the corridor helps this company or complicates it.
Across the corridor
Why the corridor matters here.
Energy is the area where the corridor is most physical and therefore most useful. Regional utilities, industrial operators and new load centres are procuring at scale and can put a qualified system into a trial on a shorter timeline than a US operator's own process usually allows, which produces the operating evidence a company needs to sell anywhere. The region also has manufacturing capacity, industrial land and a tolerance for capital intensity that a venture round on its own cannot match, so the factory question and the customer question can be answered in the same place. Both directions are conditional on the same thing: hardware that has already run somewhere real, in heat, for long enough to be believed.
What that support consists of in practice is set out underCapital + Capability, and how the two markets are covered underPlatform.
Next
Building in Energy?
Founders in the United States and the GCC can submit an opportunity for review, or read the five areas together.