Every year, U.S. utilities spend $6 to $8 billion managing the trees along their power lines. When that work falls behind, it can lead to power outages and catastrophic wildfires. On this week's episode of Inevitable, we're joined by Fiona Spruill, CEO of Overstory. Overstory is an MCJ portfolio company helping utilities cut outages and reduce wildfire risk with satellite imagery, aerial data, and AI. New episode with host Cody Simms. Link below.
MCJ
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
Boston, MA 27,538 followers
We back founders rewriting industries for the future.
About us
MCJ is an early-stage fund for the energy and industry transition and the inevitable impacts of climate change. We discover and invest in startups rewriting industries to be cleaner, more profitable, and more resilient. We strengthen our investments through the MCJ Collective — a vetted member network that connects talented tech and industrial leaders with our portfolio and with one another. Our media platform, including the Inevitable podcast, spotlights key perspectives critical to our portfolio and the transition at large, reaching tens of thousands of professionals multiple times per week.
- Website
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http://mcj.vc
External link for MCJ
- Industry
- Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
- Company size
- 2-10 employees
- Headquarters
- Boston, MA
- Type
- Partnership
- Founded
- 2019
Locations
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Primary
Get directions
Boston, MA 02113, US
Employees at MCJ
Updates
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In January of this year, we sat down with Kurt Terrani, CEO of Standard Nuclear, to learn more about their process for manufacturing TRISO fuel for advanced nuclear reactors. We proceeded to invest in the company shortly after the recording. The company achieved an IPO on the NYSE last month under the ticker STDN. 🎧 Listen to the full conversation linked below.
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What if the cost of electrifying your home wasn't yours to carry? This is the problem that SPAN set out to solve. "You're renting us a small amount of physical space in your yard. In exchange, we are providing you the free upfront value of the SPAN panel and the battery, plus ongoing value by giving you a discounted energy and internet bill." In this episode of Inevitable, Arch Rao breaks down: • How SPAN turns unused home electrical capacity into new value • How SPAN Edge shifts electrification costs onto utilities • How XFRA is putting that same capacity to work for AI compute Note: SPAN is an MCJ portfolio company. Listen to the latest episode with host Cody Simms at the link below.
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Congrats to Zach Dell, Justin Lopas, and the entire Base Power Company team on the launch of Base Core, a ~40 kWh system roughly 3x the capacity of a typical home battery, built entirely at Base Factory 1 in Austin. We invested in Base two years ago. Watching them scale across Texas and now Illinois, without losing sight of the customer experience, has been remarkable. Looking forward to what's ahead.
Today, we're launching Base Core, our own battery designed & built in Texas, and announcing our $1B Series D to bring it to homes across the country. Three years ago, we started Base with a belief that batteries were the unlock to energy abundance. We saw battery storage as the foundation of a modern energy system, and believed we could win the market with vertical integration, technology, and relentless execution (what we now call Base Pace). So we set out to build a network of distributed batteries to deliver affordable, reliable electricity to homeowners and utilities. While the job is far from finished, the launch of Base Core is the most meaningful step in that plan. We’ve spent the last few years learning hard lessons about building a distributed battery fleet, going from 1 install per day in June of ‘24 to 100 installs per day in June of ‘26. These lessons - how the battery is shipped, installed, used, and monitored - informed the design of Core. Now, Core will be the foundation of the company's next phase of growth. Base Core is a first-of-its-kind home battery. At ~40 kWh it is 3x the size of most home batteries, providing up to 36 hours of backup for the average home. In the event of multi-day outage, Core is equipped with a (first of its kind) generator port - pull out a small portable generator and charge the battery back up to keep your home running as long as you need. When an outage does happen, the backup is seamless - most members won't even notice the grid went down. It's built to withstand Texas summers, Chicago Winters, and everything in between. And finally, it’s manufactured by our team in Austin, at Base Factory 1, right across the street from our HQ. This new capital will bring Core to more homes and to accelerate our ambition beyond batteries. The round is co-led by Ribbit, Addition, Valor, and JP Morgan, with participation from new major investors D1, Sands, Coatue, Layer Global, and Energy Impact Partners. All of Base’s major existing investors are re-investing, including Thrive, Altimeter, Lightspeed, a16z, CapitalG, Trust, and more. This brings our valuation to $13B. Electricity is the largest and most essential industry in the world, and it does not have a defining technology company. The company that delivers the most affordable, reliable power will be one of the largest and most impactful companies in the world. We intend to build it. If you'd like to join us, reach out. Onwards. https://lnkd.in/g57sTXTh
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Reliable Power 🤝 AI Infrastructure Two MCJ portfolio companies, Aalo Atomics and Crusoe, are teaming up to pair Aalo's modular nuclear reactors with Crusoe's data centers, one of the earliest efforts to bring nuclear power directly to AI infrastructure.
Crusoe and Aalo Atomics form strategic partnership with goal of deploying first nuclear-powered AI factory. DENVER, Colorado and AUSTIN, Texas, July 30, 2026 – Crusoe, the industry’s first vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider, and Aalo Atomics, the company building fully modular nuclear plants (XMRs) to power modern AI data centers, today announce a strategic partnership focused on developing and deploying the first nuclear-powered AI Factory data center designed to validate nuclear power’s effectiveness with AI workloads. “The next generation of AI infrastructure demands power that is reliable, abundant,clean and at scale, and Aalo’s nuclear reactors are built to meet that need,” said Cully Cavness, Co-Founder, President and Chief Strategy Officer, Crusoe. “One of Crusoe’s core values is to ‘bend the arc of energy toward sustainability,’ and within that value we embrace the principle of using Crusoe’s market position to support and accelerate energy innovation. In line with our core values, we look forward to Aalo and Crusoe jointly demonstrating to the industry the first AI data center powered by a small modular nuclear reactor." Aalo will initially power a Crusoe Spark ™ modular data center, running Crusoe Cloud, in 2027 at Idaho National Laboratory as a proof of concept. Looking forward, Aalo and Crusoe intend to deploy Aalo Pods, Aalo’s 50 MWe XMR power plants at Crusoe data centers, by the end of 2029. “As one of only four companies to reach criticality by President Trump’s deadline for companies in the DOE Reactor Pilot Program, we are now well positioned for not only the full power operation of our 10 MWe Aalo-X reactor, but also the deployment of the Aalo Pod to power commercial data centers,” said Matt Loszak, CEO, Aalo Atomics. “We are now the only nuclear technology company to design and build a nuclear reactor fueled to produce 10MW of electricity– an achievement that positions Aalo as the premier power provider for the modern data center.” Aalo has already begun work on its second nuclear reactor, testing a commercial-scale system that will produce electricity and power for an on-site Crusoe Spark modular data center. About Crusoe As the AI factory company, Crusoe is on a mission to accelerate the abundance of energy and intelligence. The company provides a reliable, scalable, cost-effective, energy-first solution for AI infrastructure. By harnessing large-scale energy sources, building AI-optimized data centers, and delivering a powerful AI cloud platform, Crusoe empowers its customers and partners to build the future faster. About Aalo Atomics Aalo Atomics designs and builds factory-manufactured nuclear power plants for data centers, industry, and cities. AI infrastructure requires firm, high-density power on timelines the existing grid cannot support. The Aalo Pod delivers it as a complete modular power plant, mass-manufactured in a factory and sited directly at the load.
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In this episode of Inevitable, Cody Simms sits down with Noah S., Co-founder and CEO of TerraFirma, a company determined to fix the physical infrastructure bottlenecks holding us back here on Earth. Rather than selling tools to construction companies, TerraFirma builds its own software and technology to solve its own problems on the job site. #InevitablePodcast #MCJ #Construction #Robotics #ConstructionTech #Automation #Infrastructure
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From first criticality to first factories, here's what MCJ portfolio companies accomplished recently: • Standard Nuclear made its NYSE debut ($STDN). They produce advanced nuclear fuel for small modular reactors and microreactors, scaling domestic capacity to bolster U.S. energy security. • Aalo Atomics achieved criticality with the fastest reactor build in 80 years, going from groundbreaking to sustained chain reaction in under 8 months. This surpasses the President's goal of three criticalities by July 4th. Aalo is now expanding into a 1M sq ft factory to mass-produce its reactors. • Moment Energy opened Megafactory 1, the world's largest second-life EV battery facility. They repurpose retired EV batteries into commercial-scale energy storage, targeting 1 GWh of annual battery storage production by 2030. • Base Power Company is bringing whole-home backup to Austin, TX in partnership with Austin Energy. It kicks in automatically during outages, powering homes for up to 36 hours, while supporting the grid at peak demand with no impact to residents' bills. • Verse raised a $54M Series B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, launching Dispatch Intelligence to automate on-site energy storage in real time and expanding Aria from portfolio management into real-time power delivery. • Fourier partnered with Payal Industrial Parks to bring hydrogen-powered energy to India. They’re generating hydrogen on-site to skip the transport and storage logistics of conventional supply and supporting India's renewable energy ambitions. #MCJ #ClimateTech #ClimateInvesting #MicroReactors #TRISOFuel #NuclearEnergy #HydrogenEnergy #EnergyStorage #EVBattery
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The Hoover Dam was built in four years. The Empire State Building in thirteen months. Over time, construction speed disappeared as companies subcontracted more and more of the work. Today, construction is one of the largest industries in the economy, but it’s also the least modernized. Most of the tools built for construction haven't been reliable enough for a real job site. So what does it actually take to make construction faster, safer, and cheaper? Our next guest has an answer. In this episode of Inevitable, Noah S., Co-founder and CEO of TerraFirma, breaks down: • Why construction lost its speed advantage • 5x the infrastructure, 20-40% higher pay with the same workforce • Why people still run the job site, commanding robots instead of levers Listen to the episode with host Cody Simms in the link below. #InevitablePodcast #MCJ #Construction #Robotics #ConstructionTech #Automation #Infrastructure
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This week's Inevitable episode has gone nuclear. Blue Energy, led by Co-founder and CEO Jake Jurewicz, is developing nuclear power plants that use proven light-water reactor technology, built using large-scale modular construction in shipyards and fab yards, then transported to site. The company has a patented gas-to-nuclear approach, allowing plants to begin generating power on gas turbines before the reactor comes online. This approach has received a topical report approval from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Blue Energy is partnered with GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy on its BWRX-300 reactor for its first announced project, located in Victoria, Texas, alongside a data center development from Crusoe (an MCJ portfolio company). The company has raised $380M in financing, led by VXI Capital, with backing from Engine Ventures, At One Ventures, and Tamarack Global. Full conversation at the link below.
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Standard Nuclear ($STDN) made its NYSE debut. 🎉 They're building the domestic nuclear fuel supply chain America needs, manufacturing TRISO fuel for advanced reactors. MCJ is proud to be an investor. Our relationship with CEO Kurt Terrani started on the Inevitable podcast and led to our participation in their Series A. Congratulations to Kurt and the entire Standard Nuclear team on this milestone. Listen to the Inevitable podcast with Kurt at the link below.
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