Building a Future of Abundance with ReGen Ventures’ Tom McQuillen

Tom McQuillen is a partner at ReGen Ventures, a deep tech venture fund backing founders building foundational technologies to power a future of abundance.

What’s your journey to becoming a deep tech investor at ReGen?

I grew up in Melbourne and studied computer science at university, paying my way through school by working as an outdoor guide. I took people into the Australian bush to help them camp, navigate, and survive in the outback. I started my career after the global financial crisis in consulting. I learned a lot but absolutely hated it. I felt so far away from actually delivering anything tangible that it drove me crazy.

So I moved to Central America and ran a nonprofit ecotourism business focused on climate in Nicaragua. That was my real education: running hostels and tour groups with a big staff, learning everything about management and people. Then I worked at a few startups in food waste and participatory research. That’s where I really caught the bug. I went back to grad school at Oxford where I started investing, then joined ReGen about five years ago.

What does “building a future of abundance” mean for ReGen’s investment strategy?

We don’t invest in anything with a green premium or incremental improvements. We’re looking for aliens creating wild technology that really does change the world. Practically, that means investing across intelligence, robotics, matter, and energy — the fundamental parts of the stack.

A lot of climate dialogue historically has been about tradeoffs and sacrifice: drive this car to save a bit of the planet, take shorter hot showers, eat worse food. We don’t think that’s an effective strategy at scale. The only way to tackle this realistically is to find solutions that are better, cheaper, faster, and bring people joy.

Tesla is a great example of what a regenerative company could look like. We had the Prius for 20 years. It was electric, it was cheap, Leonardo DiCaprio had one, but it sucked. No one wanted to be seen in one. Tesla didn’t come along saying, “Here’s this awesome car that’s really good for the planet.” They said this is the fastest four-door machine on Earth. They made it faster, they made it cool, they put in the touchscreen that’s now in every car. They built something that was better — something that improved people’s lives and did stuff that couldn’t be done before.

You’ve written about “robo fauna” and “programmable matter.” What opportunities are you seeing at the intersection of robotics and nature?

There’s a huge focus on humanoid robots right now, which makes sense because the world is built for the human form factor. But what we get excited about is thinking: where can robots be 10 times stronger, 10 times faster, 100 times cooler than what a human can do?

I met this company recently whose founder worked at NASA and took inspiration from how geckos walk. Geckos have this incredible grip strength relative to their weight: it’s off the charts compared to any other animal. He studied that to solve a problem in space where you can’t use vacuum grippers, and now his machines are currently in use on the International Space Station. He’s starting a startup using that gripping technology for better dexterity with robot fingers.

The programmable matter thesis goes beyond just robotics. We’ve been constrained by shoehorning the best materials we found in the natural world into a purpose. Take food as an example. We didn’t choose the animals we eat today based on what’s tastiest or most nutritious or helps us thrive. We chose them based on how easy they were to domesticate. Cows, chickens, pigs, sheep, goats: that’s what was easy to breed and pen.

Imagine if that constraint was gone. What if we could create materials and textiles from the ground up? What if we could create metals and alloys that we can program with atomic precision? These are the kind of things that are like the next frontier. Breathable metals, wetsuits made of Kevlar that prevent shark bites. In the same way we engineer software, we could engineer biology or chemistry.

The concept of “regeneration” usually appears in biotech contexts. How does ReGen think about it more broadly?

It’s not a specific thing.  It’s a mindset of optimism and abundance. In the climate context, so much of what we do is about mitigation, elimination, and harm minimization. Regeneration is completely different. It’s asking: what if you could make things better than they were before?

Most people think we messed up the planet and we’re trying to save it. But what if you could improve it? What if you dreamed of doing more than just trying to stop the bleed? It’s really a mindset. And venture capital used to have a meaning: it’s supposed to be hard and exciting and point toward that potential future.

It may sound grandiose, but I think it generates better returns. Companies on these missions with that kind of ambition attract the best talent, interest, followers, press, investors, customers. Elon Musk has proved it with SpaceX and Tesla. RJ has proved it with Rivian. These missions give you a real advantage in terms of eyeballs, talent and retention.

What belief do you hold about deep tech investing that’s not widely shared?

We invest globally, which people don’t believe can be done well. Particularly in deep tech, genius is really widely distributed. If you’re at the true frontier, there should only be a handful of people in the world working on what you’re interested in. It makes no sense to have arbitrary geographic restrictions. Why restrict yourself to one or two of the top five companies in the world based on the area code your phone number starts with? We’re in a world of Zoom. We’re talking right now on video from New York to Byron Bay.

Second, I don’t think investors are generally very helpful. One of the hardest challenges a founder has is how they evolve multiple times a year. Their company grows from five to 25 to 75 to 200 people. We concentrate just on that: connecting founders with the best coaches in the world. We bring in talent from special forces, professional sports, and the arts who are used to working with the top 0.1 percent. We get them to apply that knowledge to founders. That’s where we spend our time instead of just introducing you to another recruiter.

When evaluating deep tech investments at the pre-seed stage, what are you looking for?

We look for aliens. People who are super spiky, polymaths with evidence of deep, crazy, weird obsessions and passions. Anything with civilization-level impact is going to have execution risk and scaling risk. Yes, it’s very important to do the table stakes diligence on engineering and feasibility. But ultimately, we spend most of our time thinking about this: Are these founders who can change the world? Can they run through brick walls? Can they deal with the inevitable challenges of trying to change things when most people believe it’s not possible?

How do you define deep tech?

I don’t know if we have a definition. It’s like you know it when you see it. It’s usually systemic rather than incremental. Deep tech for us can be software or hardware: there’s plenty of people working on really interesting AI models, foundational tech and synthetic biology that we would consider deep tech.

Obviously there’s a significant engineering challenge or scientific challenge, but really it probably comes down to: are you doing something that will change entire systems, upend markets? You could probably build an agent that cuts dentist waiting times by 17 percent or something. We would consider that incremental rather than deep tech.

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