Eclipse Ventures Hits $2.5 Billion Windfall as ‘Physical World’ Thesis Pays Off
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A decade-long gamble on hardware
When Lior Susan founded Eclipse Ventures in 2015, the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley was simple: software is king. The era of Enterprise SaaS had created a gold rush of scalable, low-overhead businesses, leaving those interested in the ‘physical world’—the messy intersection of atoms and bits—largely ignored. Susan recalls the early years of the firm as a lonely endeavor, fighting against a tide of investors who viewed hardware as too risky and too slow.
That perspective has shifted dramatically. This week, Eclipse saw that conviction translate into a massive financial victory. The firm’s early bet on Cerebras Systems, starting with a $6.5 million Series A investment in 2016, has culminated in a total return of $2.5 billion following the semiconductor company’s public debut. With total investments in Cerebras reaching $147 million, the firm realized a 17-fold return at an IPO price of $185 per share.
The erosion of the software moat
For Susan, the Cerebras windfall isn’t an isolated stroke of luck, but a validation of a broader thesis: that the vast majority of global GDP is tied to physical infrastructure, and the real value in the next era of tech lies in digitizing it. This shift is happening just as the traditional software ‘moat’ is beginning to evaporate.
The rise of generative AI has fundamentally changed how software is built. Susan notes that we have entered an era of ‘vibe coding,’ where AI agents—powered by models from OpenAI or Anthropic—can rapidly prototype and deploy bespoke software tools. When code becomes a commodity that can be generated on the fly, the competitive advantage of a pure software company diminishes.
“What you cannot do with ‘vibe code’ is manufacture wafers,” Susan noted during a recent StrictlyVC event in San Francisco. The physical requirements—clean rooms, silicon, and complex machinery—create a barrier to entry that software simply cannot replicate. This reality is reflected in the public markets, where hardware-centric giants like TSMC and Micron have recently seen their shares hit all-time highs.
Scaling the physical portfolio
The momentum is extending beyond semiconductors into robotics, defense, and energy. The sheer scale of capital flowing into Eclipse’s portfolio companies illustrates the trend. In the first eight years of its existence, Eclipse’s portfolio raised less than $4 billion in total. Last year alone, those same companies raised nearly $15 billion from outside backers, with another $4.5 billion pouring in during the first quarter of 2026.
This late-stage surge is being driven by a series of high-profile deals in which Eclipse served as the Series A investor, proving the firm’s ability to spot winners early in the hardware cycle. Recent highlights include:
- Wayve: $1.2 billion for AI-driven automotive autonomy.
- True Anomaly: $650 million for space-based defense and surveillance.
- Bedrock Robotics: $270 million for industrial automation.
- Oxide Computer: $200 million for cloud-native hardware.
The alignment of forces
While AI is the most visible catalyst—providing the ‘brains’ for robotics and the demand for chips—Susan argues that the current boom is the result of a rare alignment of five critical forces: technology, capital, customer demand, talent, and policy.
The U.S. government has played a pivotal role through subsidies and regulatory shifts designed to bring manufacturing back onshore. This geopolitical push, combined with a migration of elite engineering talent from SaaS back to hard-tech, has created a fertile environment for builders. According to Susan, this convergence is reminiscent of the industrial era of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, creating what she describes as the best possible moment to build companies that touch the real world.
