Voyager Ventures, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm, has announced the successful close of its second flagship fund, securing $275 million to invest in companies developing transformative technologies across energy, industrials, and climate tech sectors. The announcement, made on January 28, 2026, brings the firm’s total assets under management to $475 million across three funds and marks a significant milestone in the evolution of climate technology investment.
Founded in 2021 by Sierra Peterson and Sarah Sclarsic, Voyager Ventures has built its reputation by investing in early-stage climate technology companies that are advancing global decarbonization solutions across mobility, energy, materials, food, the built environment, analytics, industrial systems, and carbon removal. With offices in San Francisco, New York, and London, the firm positions itself to partner with founders across North America and Europe who are building what it describes as “foundational to future abundance.”
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A Strategic Pivot Toward Industrial Modernization
With Fund II, Voyager Ventures is sharpening its focus on technologies that modernize what the firm calls “the base layer of the economy”—the fundamental systems that enable economic activity to function. This encompasses energy production and distribution, advanced manufacturing, critical materials, physical AI, and computer infrastructure. The investment thesis recognizes that the global economy’s underlying infrastructure, much of it built decades ago on outdated technologies and processes, must be fundamentally upgraded to support continued technological progress and economic growth.
“We launched Voyager in 2021 to invest early in the foundational technology companies for durable economic growth,” said Sarah Sclarsic, co-founder and general partner at Voyager Ventures. “Today we’re seeing the market validate demand and scale for energy, critical materials, advanced manufacturing, AI for optimizing physical systems, among other technologies that are drivers of the global economy.”
The timing of this fund raise reflects broader trends in climate technology investment. According to Sightline Climate’s 2025 analysis, climate tech venture and growth investment totaled $40.5 billion in 2025, representing an 8% increase from 2024. The energy sector specifically attracted $14.4 billion, its strongest level in three years, driven largely by surging demand for power from artificial intelligence and data centers.
Three Technological Forces Reshaping the Economy
In announcing Fund II, Voyager Ventures identified three technological forces that are fundamentally “rewriting the economics of cost, reliability, and quality of life” and creating compelling investment opportunities:
First, energy systems are being reshaped by distributed, renewable generation and storage technologies. The transition from centralized, fossil fuel-based power generation to more flexible, distributed renewable systems requires massive infrastructure investment and creates opportunities for companies developing next-generation energy technologies. As investors surveyed by TechCrunch noted, the grid has emerged as the primary battleground for value creation in climate tech, with interconnection queues and permitting backlogs representing major growth barriers that innovative companies can address.
Second, the cost of computation continues to drop while its power increases exponentially. This trend has accelerated dramatically with the rise of artificial intelligence, creating unprecedented demand for computing power and the energy infrastructure to support it. Data center energy consumption is forecast to peak in 2026, according to NetZero analysis, as hyperscalers race to build facilities capable of supporting AI workloads.
Third, AI-enabled control is optimizing machines and systems at scale, enabling a new era of precision and efficiency in industrial operations. This encompasses everything from real-time factory intelligence that improves energy efficiency and manufacturing yields to AI-based design tools that speed product development and industrial process optimization.
Investment Focus Areas and Initial Deployments
Fund II will invest across six main thematic areas, each addressing critical components of the future industrial economy:
Energy and Efficiency focuses on technologies that generate, store, and use energy more efficiently, expanding capacity while strengthening resilience and reducing cost. This sector has seen particularly robust activity, with venture deal counts in clean energy reaching a record 382 in 2024 according to Silicon Valley Bank analysis.
Materials Production targets technologies enabling core materials to be produced with speed, precision, and greater efficiency at domestic scale. The emphasis on domestic production reflects growing recognition that supply chain resilience and local manufacturing capabilities have become strategic imperatives, particularly for critical minerals essential to semiconductors and battery manufacturing.
Software and AI encompasses companies layering intelligence onto the physical world, unlocking gains in efficiency, uptime, and operational precision across energy, logistics, and manufacturing. This category has seen particularly strong activity in Europe, where Voyager partner Matthew Blain notes that sophisticated software solutions have emerged from the continent’s complex and heavily regulated energy markets.
Mobility targets companies delivering high-performance transportation solutions. The global electric vehicle market continues to expand rapidly, though investors are increasingly focused on cost efficiency and market demand rather than environmental credentials alone.
Built Environment invests in technologies that optimize how long-lived facilities and assets are designed, built, and operated. This sector, while representing 9% of UK climate tech firms, has historically received only 4.5% of investment, suggesting significant room for growth.
Carbon Management encompasses technologies that capture, reuse, and remove carbon from the atmosphere. While this sector saw some contraction in early-stage funding during 2025, it remains essential for meeting long-term climate goals.
Fund II has already begun deploying capital, with initial investments disclosed in ENAPI, Leeta Materials, Electroflow Technologies, and Astro Mechanica. These early investments join an existing portfolio that includes companies such as Allie, Anthro Energy, and Arbor Energy, among others.
The Founders’ Deep Climate Expertise
The credibility behind Voyager’s investment thesis stems from the founders’ extensive hands-on experience building, operating, and financing climate technology companies. Together, Sclarsic and Peterson bring more than 30 years of combined experience across energy, advanced materials, mobility, and carbon markets.
Sarah Sclarsic’s background uniquely positions her to evaluate transformative technology companies. She co-founded Getaround, the car-sharing platform that achieved unicorn status, demonstrating her ability to build and scale consumer-facing technology businesses. She also served as founding business director of Modern Meadow, the world’s first company producing bio-fabricated leather, giving her deep expertise in advanced materials and biotechnology. Sclarsic pursued her passion for carbon removal by enrolling in MIT’s PhD program in 2018 to research bioengineering strategies for atmospheric carbon dioxide removal, completing her Master’s thesis just three months before launching Voyager. She currently serves as a technical advisor to Frontier, the $1 billion fund dedicated to purchasing carbon removal.
Sierra Peterson has been structuring markets, financial products, and investments for climate stabilization since 2005, bringing extensive expertise in energy, policy, and financing. She previously led corporate development teams at climate-focused financial technology companies responsible for more than $3 billion in sustainability investment. Her career includes designing carbon markets at the International Energy Agency and shaping energy and industrial policy in the Obama White House Office of Energy and Climate Change. This combination of policy expertise and operational experience gives Peterson unique insights into how government programs, market mechanisms, and private investment can align to accelerate climate solutions.
Market Context: Climate Tech’s Maturing Investment Landscape
Voyager’s Fund II emerges against a backdrop of significant evolution in climate technology investment. The sector has moved decisively from the speculative enthusiasm of 2020-2021 toward what industry observers characterize as “disciplined pragmatism” focused on execution over experimentation.
According to Sightline Climate data, total climate investors across all stages fell 11% in 2025, while deal activity dropped 18% to 1,545 transactions—the lowest level since 2020. However, this contraction reflects a maturing market rather than fundamental weakness. Early-stage activity, particularly at Seed and Series A stages, has declined as investors finish placing bets in crowded sectors and shift capital toward more seasoned companies that demonstrate clear paths to category leadership.
Energy investments bucked the overall trend, growing to $14.4 billion even as deal count fell 16%. This apparent contradiction—rising capital deployed through fewer deals—indicates that successful companies are raising larger rounds and achieving higher valuations as they demonstrate traction and scale. The trend aligns with what 12 investors surveyed by TechCrunch describe as a consensus that is “grudgingly bullish”: capital is flowing, cost curves continue to drop, and infrastructure requirements are becoming clearer.
Physical AI and the Industrial Revolution 2.0
One of the most significant investment themes captured by Fund II is the convergence of artificial intelligence with physical systems—what industry leaders are calling the emergence of “physical AI” or industrial AI. This represents far more than incremental automation; it signals a fundamental transformation in how industrial systems are designed, operated, and optimized.
As NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang articulated in announcing an expanded partnership with Siemens, “Generative AI and accelerated computing have ignited a new industrial revolution, transforming digital twins from passive simulations into the active intelligence of the physical world.” This partnership aims to build the world’s first fully AI-driven, adaptive manufacturing sites globally, starting in 2026 with Siemens’ Electronics Factory in Erlangen, Germany.
The practical implications are already visible in early deployments. PepsiCo, working with Siemens’ Digital Twin Composer technology, has created high-fidelity 3D digital twins of select U.S. manufacturing and warehouse facilities. By recreating every machine, conveyor, pallet route, and operator path with physics-level accuracy, PepsiCo enables AI agents to simulate, test, and refine system changes—identifying up to 90% of potential issues before any physical modifications occur. Initial deployments have delivered a 20% increase in throughput, faster design cycles, and nearly 100% design validation.
This pattern of AI-driven optimization extends across industrial operations. According to a Research & Development World analysis, manufacturers are achieving dramatic efficiency gains through closed-loop systems that sense, decide, and act autonomously. BASF reported a 7,200-fold scheduling-time compression in a proof of concept, from 10 hours to 5 seconds. These aren’t marginal improvements—they represent step-function changes in industrial productivity.
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The Energy-Compute Nexus Driving Investment
Perhaps no factor has more profoundly reshaped the climate tech investment landscape than the explosive growth in energy demand from artificial intelligence and data centers. The scale of this demand is staggering: some proposed hyperscale facilities require a gigawatt or more of power—equivalent to the output of an entire conventional nuclear power plant, according to MIT Technology Review, dedicated to serving a single data center.
This demand surge is creating acute constraints across the energy system. U.S. transformer supply deficits are projected to hit 30% in 2026, with lead times extending to three to six years, according to Institutional Investor analysis. These represent structural capacity constraints creating guaranteed revenue pipelines for electrical equipment manufacturers well into 2028.
The energy bottleneck is driving innovation in multiple directions. Utilities are placing orders years in advance, while hyperscalers are investing directly into power generation. Alphabet’s Intersect acquisition is expected to generate 10.8 gigawatts by 2028. Natural gas peaker plants are being kept online as data center demand strains the grid, creating tension with decarbonization goals but highlighting the immediate scale of the challenge.
Investors are responding by backing technologies that can deploy quickly to meet this demand. Long-duration energy storage is graduating from one-off pilots to repeatable deployments, while hybrid strategies mixing grid power, batteries, and demand management help data centers hit aggressive timelines. Many investors point to “bring your own generation” projects and siting facilities near retired coal or nuclear plants to reuse transmission infrastructure and shave years from interconnection schedules.
Critical Materials and Supply Chain Sovereignty
The transition to electrified, AI-enabled industrial systems creates acute dependencies on materials where China currently dominates global supply chains. Beyond copper in power transmission, the buildout demands rare earth elements for permanent magnets in robotic actuators and electric vehicle motors, lithium and advanced battery materials for portable AI systems, and processed materials like refined graphite and cobalt where Western capacity barely exists.
This strategic vulnerability has elevated critical materials and supply chain resilience to urgent priorities for both governments and corporations. The U.S. Department of Energy has announced significant funding to advance domestic production of critical minerals, while the proposed CIRCLE Act could offer a 30% tax credit for recycling and reuse facilities. These policy supports create favorable conditions for companies developing domestic processing capabilities and circular economy solutions.
The investment opportunity extends beyond mining and refining. Innovative recycling technologies, substitution materials, and more efficient utilization methods all address supply constraints while reducing environmental impact. Copper recycling, battery component manufacturing, and lithium refining projects are maturing with federal support as supply chain security becomes a strategic priority equivalent to military readiness.
Advanced Manufacturing Renaissance
A central thesis underlying Voyager’s Fund II is the conviction that advanced manufacturing capabilities represent a strategic imperative for economic competitiveness and national security. The convergence of electrification, precision control, and AI-enabled optimization is enabling what the firm describes as completely new manufacturing possibilities.
As Voyager articulated in its investment thesis, electrification represents a structural upgrade to industrial systems. Legacy combustion-based systems that burn hydrocarbon fuels involve continuous extraction, transport, storage, ignition, and exhaust, losing substantial energy throughout these processes. In contrast, electric systems are efficient, precise, and programmable: energy can be instantaneously monitored, dispatched, and traded. The control inherent in advanced manufacturing enables production of entirely new materials and machines with unprecedented precision and efficiency.
Real-time orchestration of sensors monitoring temperatures, pressure, tolerances, and timing integrates millions of data points, enabling AI to instantaneously optimize electrified manufacturing equipment. According to Deloitte’s 2025 Smart Manufacturing Survey, 29% of surveyed manufacturers now report using AI and machine learning at the facility or network level—a figure that will likely expand rapidly as early adopters demonstrate tangible returns.
Industrial heat pumps and thermal storage systems for steam and process heat are becoming cheaper to operate than gas boilers in many regions, especially where waste heat is available and electricity prices are favorable. These technologies represent the kind of performance-based displacement of legacy systems that Voyager seeks to fund—solutions that win on economics and reliability rather than requiring subsidies or mandates.
Emerging Technology Frontiers
Several specific technology areas stand out as particularly promising within Voyager’s investment framework:
Grid orchestration and flexibility solutions have become critical as distributed renewable generation and variable loads stress existing infrastructure. Software companies developing tools for utilities to interconnect more rapidly, plan smarter, and operate more flexibly are attracting significant investor attention. Europe has been particularly strong in this area, with complex and heavily regulated energy markets creating fertile ground for sophisticated software solutions.
Next-generation nuclear and advanced geothermal are emerging as critical enablers of firm, dispatchable, carbon-free baseload power. Investors surveyed by TechCrunch highlighted technologies supporting increasing baseload power as major focus areas. Compact modular reactor designs and breakthrough geothermal drilling technologies promise to break the cost and timeline constraints that have hampered nuclear expansion in recent decades.
Sodium-ion batteries represent an important breakthrough in energy storage. MIT Technology Review highlighted sodium-ion technology as one of three climate technologies breaking through in 2026. Chinese manufacturer CATL announced it started manufacturing these batteries at scale in 2025, offering a cheaper, safer, and more abundant alternative to lithium-based systems for both electric vehicles and grid storage.
Industrial robotics and physical AI are transitioning from experimental deployments to functional production systems. Qualcomm’s announcement at CES 2026 of a next-generation robotics architecture designed to move physical AI from labs to real-world industrial environments exemplifies this trend. The focus is shifting from humanoid forms to specialized robots designed for specific tasks—an approach that improves both affordability and reliability.
Investment Strategy and Value Creation
Voyager’s approach extends well beyond providing capital. The firm’s founders emphasize their ability to support portfolio companies through operational challenges because they have built climate tech companies themselves across transportation, alternative protein, renewable energy, materials, and water sectors.
For founders, this translates to hands-on support with product strategy, team building, customer acquisition, and navigating opportunities specific to climate tech companies. This includes working with government decarbonization programs and accessing funding under initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act, which is expected to catalyze $1 trillion in decarbonization investment. The firm’s collective 40+ years of climate work provides a deep network of fellow founders, executives, venture funders, and strategic partners.
To date, Voyager has made 19 investments and set an ambitious goal of sequestering or averting emissions of 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent over the tenure of each fund. This emissions impact target reflects the firm’s dual mandate: generating strong financial returns for investors while making material contributions to global climate stabilization.
Fund II will typically write checks between $5 million and $8 million in Seed through Series A rounds, leading or co-leading investments. The strategy focuses on companies with proven technology readiness, clear paths to market adoption, and founders capable of building world-class teams and operations. In a market where defensible unit economics have become paramount, Voyager prioritizes companies whose technologies deliver superior performance independent of subsidies or mandates.
Looking Ahead: Execution Over Experimentation
The broader climate tech investment landscape entering 2026 reflects a decisive shift that aligns closely with Voyager’s investment philosophy. As one industry analysis framed it, if 2026 produces a salient theme in climate tech, it will be “a functional balance between innovation and execution, and greater harmony between global ambition and local grounding.”
The companies most likely to succeed are those that combine clean energy innovation with reliable, scalable, and economically viable infrastructure. Green premiums have largely disappeared in mature renewable technologies thanks to aggressive cost competition from Asian manufacturers, particularly in solar, wind, batteries, and electric vehicles. Future sustainable technology will rely on cutting costs and operating at scale rather than depending on environmental consciousness to drive adoption.
This creates natural opportunities for large enterprises to acquire promising climate tech companies to meet sustainability mandates. As one Emerald Technology Ventures partner observed, “Corporate venture teams that ghosted startups in 2025 will rediscover the joys of ‘open innovation’ because it’s still the fastest, cheapest way to hit those ESG targets they publicly softened but still matter internally.”
For Voyager Ventures and its portfolio companies, the market conditions entering 2026 present both challenges and opportunities. Capital availability for proven companies with strong execution continues to grow, while speculative ventures face increasingly difficult fundraising environments. The firms that demonstrate they can deliver superior performance at competitive costs while building resilient supply chains and addressing real market needs will command investor attention and resources.
Conclusion: Building Infrastructure for Long-Term Prosperity
Voyager’s $275 million Fund II represents more than just another venture capital fund raise in the climate tech sector. It reflects a sophisticated understanding of the fundamental infrastructure upgrades required to support continued economic growth and technological progress in an era of climate change, resource constraints, and geopolitical fragmentation.
“We are investing in technology companies that create systemic stability in an increasingly volatile world,” said Sierra Peterson. “The economy of the past was built on finite fuels and brittle processes that will continue to hamper prosperity until we transcend them. We’re investing in technology that simply performs better.”
This focus on superior performance rather than environmental virtue represents the maturation of climate tech as an investment category. The most compelling opportunities exist where new technologies deliver better economics, greater reliability, and enhanced capabilities compared to incumbent systems—not where they require subsidies, mandates, or consumer sacrifice to achieve adoption.
The technological forces that Voyager has identified—the transformation of energy systems, the advancing power of computation, and the optimization of physical systems through AI—are reshaping foundational industries worth trillions of dollars. The companies that successfully navigate this transformation will build the infrastructure supporting economic prosperity for decades to come. With Fund II, Voyager Ventures is positioning itself to back the founders building that future.
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By: Montel Kamau
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5th February, 2026
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