Every sector.Its own team.
Venture capital works best when the people deciding know the industry cold. So every sector we invest in is a vertical, with its own team, two funds and a home in the city where its industry lives. We started with the hardware under AI and industry, where the constraints are physical.
I. Four beliefs
What we believe.
Specialists see first.
A vertical team that knows its buyers, its engineers and its failure modes finds the right company earlier, and helps it further, than a generalist can.
Place matters.
Each vertical is run from the office whose industry fits it best: our headquarters verticals in Dallas, defense and government in Washington, D.C., fintech and health in Atlanta, energy and space in Houston, housing and robotics in Salt Lake City, and quantum and biotech in San Francisco.
Strategic buyers are active.
Large industrial and semiconductor companies buy technology they need. Market examples include Eaton’s acquisitions of Boyd Thermal and Fibrebond, and Vertiv’s acquisition of UtilityInnovation Group. These are market examples only; none is a Dark Ice Ventures investment.
Discipline beats heroics.
Hardware failures are expensive. Graphcore sold for about $400 million after raising about $700 million; Northvolt went bankrupt after raising more than $15 billion. In our hardware verticals, we invest only where the path to first revenue needs less than about $50 million of total funding.
II. Method
How we chose our verticals.
We began with twelve hardware verticals, chosen by comparing every hardware sector on four measures from public-market data: valuation multiples, volatility, revenue growth and capital intensity.
We then added 32 more verticals across AI and software, life sciences, defense and government, energy and climate, real estate technology and consumer markets, and gave each its own team and two funds. The method is described in detail to prospective investors in our confidential materials.
Source: Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern datasets, January 2026
See all 44 verticals
III. Honest about risk
Hardware takes longer and costs more than software. Technical risk is real. We are a new firm, though our co-founder has run funds before, and he is a key person for every fund. We describe these risks fully in each fund’s offering documents.
Where we invest
44 verticals, each with written boundaries.
Two funds for each vertical, one after the other. Each company belongs to one vertical, based on what it makes.
Next chapter
Verticals