Prime Movers Lab

Founder and General Partner Dakin Sloss leads the investment team from the firm's Jackson, Wyoming headquarters. The firm augments its decision-making with a network of Venture Partners and Fellows who bring operational experience from government labs, aerospace primes, and advanced manufacturing. Final investment authority rests with the general partnership.

The firm's thesis of funding 'Prime Movers' — inventors tackling fundamental physics and biology challenges — shapes its sourcing. Prime Movers Lab cultivates relationships within university research labs, government grant programs, and deep-tech incubators, channels where traditional venture firms rarely have sustained presence. Its Venture Partner and Fellows network functions as an extended scouting layer inside the institutions where breakthrough science originates.

No. While the firm leads pre-seed and seed rounds, it reserves capital for follow-on investments as portfolio companies progress from laboratory demonstration to commercial deployment. This full-lifecycle approach addresses the long development timelines inherent in hard-science startups, which often require multiple funding rounds before generating revenue.

The firm organizes its investments across six verticals: energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture. This framing encompasses specific technologies including nuclear fusion, space-based manufacturing, advanced materials, synthetic biology, and next-generation mobility systems. The common thread is deep science requiring significant capital to cross from invention to scaled production.

The firm has not publicly disclosed its limited partner base or wealth origin. As a venture capital firm rather than a single-family office, it raises funds from external investors. The specific composition of its LP base — whether endowments, institutions, family offices, or high-net-worth individuals — remains private.

The structural difference is concentration: most deep-tech funds hedge with a substantial allocation to enterprise software or digital health. Prime Movers Lab's portfolio is almost exclusively companies where the core risk is physics or biology, not code. This means the firm's returns are uncorrelated with generalist venture benchmarks and its failure modes are distinct — a regulatory rejection or a fusion milestone missed, rather than a SaaS churn problem.

While the firm does not publicly detail its co-investor relationships, the nature of its portfolio suggests significant interaction with government grant and procurement ecosystems. Deep-science startups frequently access non-dilutive funding from agencies like ARPA-E, DARPA, and NASA. Prime Movers Lab's capital likely complements these sources by funding the commercial translation work that federal grants do not cover.