BlueYard Capital 2025: Strides Towards Utopia, Holding the Line against Oblivion
American architect Buckminster Fuller once wrote, “Whether it is to be utopia or oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race right up to the final moment.” It’s the line that opens our manifesto. And so, at year’s end, it only makes sense to ask the question: where are we in this civilizational relay race? Firmly, we believe, in the handoff zone — where runners lock stride, momentum compounds, and the pace picks up anew.
In 2025, the companies we backed early surpassed significant milestones and raised more than $1B in follow-on capital over the last 12 months, to succeed on their respective missions to drive us towards utopia and to hold the line against oblivion. Just a few examples:
- Castelion, which we backed at seed, raised a $100m Series A, followed by a $350M Series B. The company also secured major government contracts for hypersonic missile systems designed to defend democracies around the world.
- Marvel Fusion raised a $120M Series B and secured a further $150M project financing form the Department of Energy to build a fusion demonstrator at the University of Colorado.
- Chemify raised a $60m Series B to unlock the potential that resides at the intersection of compute and chemistry, and has become a partner of choice for top 10 pharma companies for molecule innovation.
- Corintis raised a $50M Series A/A+ and partnered with Microsoft in addition to many of the hyperscalers, validating microfluidic cooling as critical infrastructure for next-generation compute.
- Two further $50m+ rounds are currently unannounced, and 13 more sub $30m rounds closed in 2025.
- Privy grew explosively to 100 million accounts and was acquired by Stripe to upgrade our legacy financial infrastructure.
In 2025 we welcomed 13 new companies to the portfolio — all on the core mission of propelling humanity through this moment: e.g. a new silicon compiler to design faster chips, AI models for the steel industry to make production more viable in the West, a new resilient p2p protocol that can pierce firewalls, a solid rocket motor company to feed a massive need and disrupt a legacy an oligopoly market, AI models to create novel integrated systems, etc. New investments include Aerska, Alterego, Boundless, CHOMP, Dost, Eigenblue, Foresight Data Machines, ManexAI, Miren, Number0, and ZeroPhase.
The founders in our portfolio share a common thread: they’re working on technologies urgently needed to keep us from unravelling. The underlying infrastructure — physical, biological, digital — that everything else depends on. When a technology looks too hard or too strange for others to touch, that’s usually when we start paying attention or decide to double down.
Building the Network for What’s Next
We talk a lot about being fluent in weirdness and volatility. This past year, we formalized what we’d been doing informally for years: creating spaces where founders and operators who share that fluency can find one another and compare notes.
We continued our Risk Club dinner series — intimate gatherings designed to debate the key risks of our time and how we might treat volatility as opportunity. The motto for those dinners is Semper Audentes. Always daring. In 2026, we have big plans for this series and how to bring it to more of you.
We also hosted Climbing Hard AI Peaks at Lake Tegernsee in the Bavarian Alps, convening 100 founders, builders, and investors working on AI’s hardest frontiers. No stages, no panels, just conversations during walks in the mountains about chips, data centers, productisation, and the societal implications of increasingly capable AI systems.
The most challenging times produce the most innovative technologies. When systems break down, when old infrastructure fails, when certainties dissolve, breakthrough solutions emerge. The question isn’t whether we’ll face more volatility. We will. The question is whether we’re building the networks that give founders what they need to build the technologies that get us all through it.
To that end, we also welcomed Mike Wax as General Partner. As founder and CEO of Forto, Mike built digital freight infrastructure from idea to more than 1,200 people across 18 countries, raising over $500M along the way. He has backed more than 75 startups as an angel and brings hard-won founder experience to support the next generation of companies.
The Relay Runs On
We’re not yet in the final stretch of Fuller’s relay race. We’re still firmly in the middle, where the race can be won or lost based on execution, where the baton must pass cleanly from one breakthrough to the next.
Looking ahead to 2026, we see the physical constraints becoming more acute. AI scaling will increasingly run into limits: heat, energy, infrastructure. Defense will continue shifting from large legacy primes to teams reinventing the supply chain from first principles. AI will encounter harder and harder last-mile problems in essential industries, and the teams that can translate raw capability into working systems will win.
We’ll keep backing the n-of-1 founders globally, who see these problems clearly and choose to move toward them anyway. The ones who know the road (in this case, the racetrack) ahead doesn’t exist yet, but that it’s imperative we keep running.
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