Convective Capital raises an $85 million fund to build disaster resilience

Summary

Fire season kicked off early in California this year, with flames already approaching a former nuclear test site outside of Los Angeles. The rising number of natural disasters in California, and around the world, demand our attention — and, in Silicon Valley, venture investment. Convective Capital, an early-stage venture fund led by Bill Clerico, announced a new $85 million fund Thursday, following up on a $35 million fund raised in 2022. While the first fund was mainly backed by wealthy individuals (including Clerico, a cofounder of WePay who sold the startup to JPMorgan for $300 million in 2017), this latest fund is largely backed by institutions, including insurance companies and asset managers. Convective’s original mission was to develop the idea of “firetech,” investing in firms like Pano, which is building AI-powered cameras to spot fires early; Raine, which builds autonomous aircraft to dump water on fires; Burnbot, a startup creating robots for clearing brush and grasses; and an insurance company, Stand, which helps homeowners harden their homes against flames. With its new fund, Convective is expanding its mandate beyond the threat of wildfire to an evolved thesis focused on resilience to “provide risk management in the physical world.” “There’s $60 trillion of real estate at high risk from disasters, the U.S. spends a trillion dollars a year mitigating and recovering from disasters, we need a new approach to this,” Clerico told TechCrunch. “The silver lining is that it’s gotten so bad that the private markets can now take over — utilities going bankrupt, insurers leaving big markets, these are very large economic events, and those create markets for new solutions and products.” The first four investments from the new fund are in The Lumber Manufactory, a company building timber mills to help make forest management more economical; Drafted, a company using AI to do home design; Voltaire, a Y Combinator-backed firm building drones to inspect power lines; an...