Athelas

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

We invest across the private deep tech value chain through specialist early-stage managers and selected later-stage co-investments and directs. That structure reflects our view that deep tech is too technical, too manager-dependent, and too strategically important to approach through a single style of exposure. It also reflects something learned through repeated cycles of conviction and revision: that the risk of any single fund — its vintage, its manager, its moment — is best held within a deliberately constructed portfolio of specialists who see deals that generalists cannot reach and build relationships that outlast any single cycle.

Athelas stems from a deep conviction that capital is not only a claim on financial outcomes. It is a selection and coordination system that channels talent, labour, time, and scarce resources into the construction of a more capable civilisation.

In that sense, capital is bound with complexity itself. It is one of the mechanisms by which civilisation learns to do difficult things better, faster, and at greater scale: to turn knowledge into industry, science into systems, and invention into durable power. It rewards not motion, but effective construction. Not ideas alone, but execution under constraint.

Athelas takes its name from the Kingsfoil of Middle-earth: a herb of unremarkable appearance, dismissed by most, yet possessed of extraordinary restorative power — but only in capable hands.

The challenges of our time are real. The technologies to meet them exist, or are being built. What remains is the question of whose hands they pass through, and whether capital finds its way to those who can actually use it.

We care about the technologies that increase real capability: compute, defence, aerospace, biology, energy, materials, and advanced industry. They are the foundations of industrial power, strategic autonomy, resilience, and long-term civilisational strength.

A civilisation endures by its ability to solve hard problems in the real world: to generate power, secure itself, manufacture at scale, extend knowledge, and defend the conditions under which freedom and prosperity remain possible.

We back technologies that preserve open societies, expand human agency, and strengthen the industrial and scientific foundations of the future. These are fundamental to human flourishing.

The world is becoming more adversarial, not less. In such a world, capital cannot remain innocent or on the sidelines. It will either reinforce strength or subsidise weakness.

Athelas exists to obtain the best possible future state of humanity, and will help build the capabilities that allow free and productive societies to endure.

Deep tech is too important to approach through a single style of exposure.

The private deep tech value chain does not behave like a single asset class. Early-stage funds carry frontier technical risk — the technology may not work, the timelines are long, and the founders are scientists who may not yet be builders of institutions. Late-stage co-investments carry de-risked scale risk — the technology works, but the path to exit and the quality of access determine the return.

Athelas is constructed to hold both. The early-stage sleeve captures the performance differential that specialist, emerging managers consistently demonstrate over generalist incumbents. The later-stage sleeve exists to solve the DPI problem that defines deep tech as an asset class: by investing alongside proven late-stage companies approaching exit, we bring returns forward without compromising the portfolio's orientation toward the frontier.

The result is a structure that reflects the actual shape of how deep tech value is created — not a simplified version of it.

Early-Stage Deeptech Funds

Specialist, emerging managers investing at the frontier. Selected for depth of network, quality of deal access, and alignment of conviction with the Athelas thesis.

  • Transatlantic: Europe and United States

  • Sub-$150m fund size run by emerging managers

  • Specialist by domain, not by stage

  • Deep relationships with fund managers

Late-Stage Co-Investments

Selected positions in late-stage deeptech companies where the technology is proven, the path to liquidity is visible, and access is sourced through established and trusted relationships.

  • Sourced via manager network and direct relationships

  • Companies approaching IPO or acquisition

  • Designed to accelerate DPI

  • Compute, Defense, Aerospace, Biology, Energy, Quantum, Materials