The Roda Group

Dan Miller and Roger Strauch serve as Managing Directors, personally involved in sourcing, diligence, and portfolio-company boards. Both have engineering backgrounds and founded the firm together in 1997. There is no external investment committee; decisions run through the two principals.

Tesla. Roda participated in the company's 2004 Series A round, which Elon Musk co-led. At the time, the bet on an unproven electric-vehicle startup was deeply contrarian, and the position became one of the most consequential early-stage venture investments in the clean-energy transition (per public record, 2004).

The firm targets early-stage companies, concentrating on seed and Series A rounds. The strategy favors capital-efficient engineering startups where hard science — materials, electrochemistry, advanced manufacturing — creates a defensible barrier before software-centric competitors arrive.

It is structured as a private equity firm — specifically a venture capital partnership — not a family office. Dan Miller and Roger Strauch are the managing directors, raising discrete funds for institutional and individual limited partners rather than stewarding a single family's capital.

The portfolio concentrates on cleantech, energy storage, advanced materials, and AI-driven industrial systems. Historical and known active areas include batteries, thermoelectrics, electrification, and water technology — all categories where deep engineering rather than pure software defines the competitive moat.

Yes. The firm's most famous co-investment was the Tesla Series A round, which included multiple institutional and angel participants. Roda typically leads or co-leads early-stage rounds, working alongside other deep-tech and cleantech-focused investors rather than operating an isolated direct-investment silo.

The firm is headquartered in Berkeley, California, not on Sand Hill Road, giving it proximity to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California's materials-science and engineering departments. That physical location has historically provided early visibility into lab-spinout companies, particularly in advanced materials, batteries, and energy technologies, before they reached wider venture networks.