Starship Ventures

Starship Ventures

Starship Ventures was formed by Sean Hoge and Hugo Peterson, with Peterson joining in 2022 and leading the firm's operations and capital formation. Together they raised over $30 million for the debut fund (per the firm, 2022), constructing a partnership around the idea that venture capital can deliberately back the hardware, biology, and compute platforms that compound across decades. The team operates from San Francisco with partners extending into Europe and Asia. The firm deploys capital at the earliest stages—seed and start-up—across a deliberately broad spectrum of frontier engineering. Portfolio companies span satellite-based energy delivery (Reflect Orbital), autonomous subterranean logistics (Pipedream Labs), cloud-seeding weather modification (Rainmaker), kinetic space launch (Longshot), electric heavy construction platforms (Lumina), unmanned seaplane cargo freight (Poseidon), and advanced food-packaging materials (Klura Labs). Geographic reach extends from Hawthorne, California and the UK to Japan, where the firm sources deals through on-the-ground partners. This posture deliberately mixes atoms-heavy physical infrastructure with software-defined coordination layers. Beyond Hoge and Peterson, the firm has assembled a network of named advisors and allies that includes David Holz (founder and CEO of MidJourney), Georges Elhedery (former head of private equity at Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, recognized as one of the 100 most influential people of the decade in private equity), and Bharat Mediratta (former Google search lead, now a fellow at Coinbase). Peter Sayn-Wittgenstein unlocks East Asia from Japan through his community platform TeamFirst, while Nick von Westenholz sources UK and European deals. The firm has disclosed over $30M in total capital raised and operates a single pooled venture fund without adjacent philanthropic or real-asset vehicles. Starship's structural differentiation is its commitment to pre-parity infrastructure—technologies that must be built before a broader market can exist. Rather than financing enterprise SaaS that rides existing platforms, the firm underwrites the enabling layer itself: the mirrors in orbit, the underground delivery tubes, the weather modification drones. This is venture capital with the posture of an industrial research lab, where the LP proposition is that civilization-scale returns require owning the physical primitives before the application layer matures.