Eclipse raises $1.3B across two funds to back manufacturing and robotics startups

Eclipse Capital has raised $1.3 billion across two funds — $720 million in Eclipse Fund VI and $591 million in Early Growth Fund III — to invest in startups focused on physical AI, robotics, automation, and advanced manufacturing. The funds were raised primarily from U.S. university endowments and foundations, with Eclipse partner Greg Reichow, a former Tesla executive, leading the effort. The firm, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, now manages $10 billion in total assets and plans to deploy capital through its Venture Equity incubation program, spinouts from larger companies, and traditional seed through Series C rounds. Notable recent investments include a $220 million round in VulcanForms, a digital metal additive manufacturing platform, and backing for autonomous aircraft developer Reliable Robotics.

This capital raise sits squarely within the reshoring and supply chain resilience wave that has accelerated since 2024, particularly in U.S. defense and industrial policy circles. Eclipse is not an AM-specific fund, but its focus on physical industries and its investment in VulcanForms — a company developing high-throughput metal additive manufacturing for domestic production — signals a structural bet on AM as a tool for onshoring, not just prototyping. The fund structure also reflects a shift away from the SPAC-era hype cycle (Pattern P1) toward patient, long-duration capital: Reichow explicitly stated the firm is not looking to flip companies in two to three years. This aligns with the aerospace qualification grind (Pattern P4) and the broader industrial AM reality that scaling production requires years of capital and customer qualification, not quarterly narrative resets.

For the AM industry, the practical signal is that large pools of institutional capital are now willing to back hardware-heavy, long-cycle manufacturing startups — a category that was largely abandoned after the 2022 SPAC collapse. The key execution risk for Eclipse is whether its incubation model can produce companies that achieve the production scale and qualification depth needed to compete with established Asian contract manufacturers. The VulcanForms investment is a useful test case: the company must demonstrate that its digital metal AM platform can deliver cost-competitive, qualified production volumes for defense or aerospace customers, not just technical capability. For AM founders, this fund validates that capital is available for companies that can show a credible path to U.S.-based serial production, but the bar for technical de-risking and customer lock-in remains high.