KdT Ventures

KdT Ventures

KdT Ventures was co-founded in 2015 by Cain McClary and Mack Kolarich, who left white-shoe law and finance careers to build a venture franchise purpose-built for frontier science. Rather than emerging from a traditional tech or life-sciences silo, the firm was constructed around a thesis that software-enabled tools — AI, robotics, cloud computing — would not just disrupt enterprise IT but would reengineer how atoms, molecules, and cells are manipulated at industrial scale. This has placed KdT at the center of a funding arc often labeled 'deep tech' but more precisely defined by the firm as the digitization of the physical world. The firm targets pre-seed and seed-stage companies clustered at the intersection of computation and chemistry, biology, and advanced manufacturing. KdT has backed startups building programmable biology platforms for drug discovery and specialty chemical synthesis, AI-driven materials design tools, and industrial robotics systems for laboratory automation. Confirmed portfolio companies include Solugen, which uses enzymatic pathways to produce carbon-negative chemicals (per Pitchbook-disclosed round data, 2017–2021), and Asimov, a synthetic biology CAD platform that programs living cells for therapeutic and industrial applications. The portfolio also historically included Zymergen, a molecular manufacturing pioneer that KdT backed early, which later went public via SPAC in 2021. KdT invests primarily across North America, with a concentration in biotech hubs like Boston, the Bay Area, and emerging innovation clusters in the Southeast. KdT raised its first institutional fund in 2017 and has since scaled to multiple vintages, though the firm does not publicly disclose total AUM or fund sizes. The firm operates from a single headquarters in Austin, Texas, anchoring itself in a city that has become a gravitational center for deep-tech talent and non-traditional venture capital. KdT distinguishes its platform with an in-house science team — rare for a seed-stage firm — that provides portfolio companies with wet-lab and computational modeling support, acting not merely as a capital source but as a technical co-builder. The firm maintains a network of corporate partners and academic collaborators that feed its sourcing pipeline, which relies heavily on relationships inside university spinout ecosystems and government research institutions. KdT's structural differentiator is its positioning as a pure-play frontier-science firm operating at the earliest stages, a space historically underserved by venture firms who lack the scientific fluency to diligence and support companies building in atom-level domains. Unlike multi-stage firms that treat science investing as a satellite strategy, KdT has no diversified software or consumer portfolio — the entire partnership is organized around evaluating scientific risk. This gives KdT a narrow but defensible lane in a venture market where most seed-stage capital flows to SaaS. As the policy tailwinds from the CHIPS Act and growing biomanufacturing national-security concerns accelerate capital into bioeconomy infrastructure, KdT enters its second decade with a portfolio architecture few early-stage firms can replicate.