Christopher Le is managing partner at Actuate Ventures, a deep tech venture firm focused on space technology and providing “co-founders in a box” support to early-stage startups.
What led you to Actuate Ventures?
I’m born and raised in Seattle. I have a background founding multiple startups. As my friend Jonathan Blanco would say, you’ve got to know how to get punched in the face and get back up. After taking a break from startup land, I went to Blue Origin, where I got to live the childhood dream of doing space things and see behind the curtain on really inspiring space technologies. There’s no greater canvas for inspiration than the stars. It’s literally rocket science. Even if kids growing up don’t end up in space, they shoot for it and discover something else along the way. How many kids say “I want to go to Mars” and then discover “Oh, there are earthquakes on Mars. How do earthquakes work?” That gets them on a path of discovery you don’t normally see with purely Earthbound pursuits.
After my time at Blue Origin, I wanted to go back into the startup world and figure out how to support startups, having been on that side of the fence. The natural evolution was to become a specialist VC. I found there were a dime a dozen consulting groups and miniature incubators doing projects here and there, but how do you really scale that? Venture is the mechanism my partners and I saw for achieving scale. You can raise a fund from LPs and distribute that to startups, because at the end of the day, many of these startups need money more than they need your expertise in one specific thing.
A weekly dispatch featuring exclusive interviews with deep tech founders & a roundup of the most important deep tech news.
How does Actuate Ventures differentiate itself in the deep tech venture landscape?
We think of ourselves as doing more than writing a check. We’re essentially co-founders in a box. Deep tech is probably the hardest space to find expertise because you’re literally dealing with founders who are one-of-one in the world. Someone might say, “This is my postdoc. I discovered this new radical way to do something that no one has ever done. If I die, this dies with me.” I can’t really support them on the science or direct engineering part, but I can help with the things they’re probably not good at like raising money, building the company, interfacing with vendors, and so on.
We still have internal pursuits to build our own things through our hybrid venture studio model, but there’s also the standard venture side. We have other initiatives we’re kicking off, especially in the Seattle area, to build innovation hubs and support the industry. At the end of the day, even if our investments don’t kick off, we’re still here for the industry because I see deep tech as the most impactful field with advancement of humanity at its core. AI and GPT wrappers are cool, but they consume 3 percent of the Earth’s energy. Do I need another GPT wrapper? I just received an email from a founder in Seattle whose company does earthquake prediction with relatively high accuracy and resolution that has never existed before. You’re going to tell me some AI startup is going to stumble into that? No, it’s real hard science.
What’s Actuate Venture’s investment thesis?
We’re currently working towards a fund, though we’re not deploying from that just yet. The partners and I have been deploying our own capital. We’ve made a couple of investments this year with more on the way. Our typical check size has a sweet spot around $500,000. We’ll go lower if it’s strategic, and we try to be first check in the door for really early-stage startups. We target pre-seed and seed, with some Series A sprinkled in.
We’re a small firm and we don’t shy away from the fact that we can’t support $7 million burn tests that you’d expect from a launch service provider. But here in Seattle, we’re the satellite manufacturing capital of the world. 90 percent of the world’s satellites expected to be launched this year are produced in Redmond, Washington. So we’re looking at much more pragmatic, tangible, and commercializable plays. We want folks who aren’t looking at a 15- to 20-year horizon but are actually looking at having a demonstrator within a year.
How do you evaluate deep tech opportunities differently than traditional VCs?
Our internal thesis is that we can pick companies with the promise and potential to break free of the step function you typically find in deep tech. We believe you can marry the best of Silicon Valley with the best of traditional deep tech. So we steer away from a lot of the Department of Defense and government military contracts where you’re essentially locked into the valley of death. Meaning that you flatline for a long time and then suddenly your technology hits and you get a $100 million contract, and your valuation jumps like an Olympic pole vaulter.
Take Charter Space, which we invested in a couple months ago. They’re a software play. I think of them as the system of record management for space. They want to eventually become like Mercury, the banking platform, because their founder understands insurance, underwriting, and all these other mechanisms. But right now it’s a software play. You look at Mercury. Yes, they’re banking, but it’s an amazing platform. You can marry that with Silicon Valley modeling.
Or look at StarCloud, formerly Lumen Orbit. They’re building data centers in space. But they’re not selling data centers, they’re selling an AWS-like service that’s approachable and understandable. Yes, there’s the cost of the satellite, but when you lock into it, it’s easy modeling. We’re looking for folks who have the presence and demeanor to figure out how to ladder up into revenue and growth rather than shooting for massive step functions.
How does your experience at Blue Origin inform your approach to investing?
Blue was very open internally in terms of hiring diverse talent and I don’t mean DEI diverse, but hiring people from all sorts of industries who had never touched aerospace. They brought with them a wealth of knowledge that many in traditional aerospace lacked. I interviewed a gentleman doing HVAC systems who came from a refrigerator manufacturing plant. He walked around saying, “This is embarrassing. These techniques and systems are 20 years out of date. I started in the industry with this. We don’t use this anymore.” So refrigerator manufacturers were more advanced than rocket companies in some ways.
There was still a lot of old aerospace thinking. People would walk up to me at Blue Origin where I was doing product and UX and ask, “What’s UX? I’ve never heard that term.” I stopped having those conversations over a decade ago in software! But everyone was inquisitive, which was different from Silicon Valley where people can be high on their ego. When you introduce better solutions in aerospace, people would put their books down and say “Tell me more.”
I want to foster that with startups. You don’t have to have a traditional background to get into space tech or deep tech. The quintessential example is the former CTO of Groupon who now has a hypersonics company. You have to have a problem and a drive to solve it. Unlike software companies where I see fly-by-night operators interested in money and valuation, you cannot get away with that in our field. If you don’t care about the problem in a way that keeps you up at night, you cannot succeed.
What value do you provide beyond capital?
There’s this joke in the VC industry where VCs write checks and then their associates chase down updates from portfolio companies. Our founders are messaging us all the time. They’re asking: “How do you do X? Can you help us find this particular talent? Intel had layoffs. We need a CTO for chip fab.” We’re essentially therapists without being licensed as therapists.
We foster a culture where companies provide us not just updates but actual tangible communication. I want them to think of us as partners and co-founders. One founder messaged me: “We got a demo tomorrow. I’m flying out, only sleeping on the plane. We need a deck.” I said, “Okay, I’m just watching the news right now. I’ll help you with your deck.” And they won the contract.
It’s little things that add up. Yes, you can think of a VC’s time as valuable, but a doctor’s time is valuable too, and they’re not charging $500 an hour to wash your car. If they have free time and want to help, they will. I see our value-add as filling in all those gaps that startups have until they become a full-fledged mature machine that can slot in all the marketing people, sales people, and so on.
What areas of space tech excite you most right now?
Two things really fascinate me. First is satellite tracking since we lose a surprising amount of satellites. AstroForge lost one the other month for a deep space mission because one of the ground stations they contracted was just offline. These systems should be hyper-automated. When I need a data center, I spin it up with one click and it’s flawless. I don’t have to think about backup situations or secondary vendors. I want to get space operations to that stage.
The other area is in-space manufacturing and providing platforms for true manufacturing of spacecraft in space. These dry dock systems are very fascinating to me. If I were to leave Actuate and stay in space, those are the two areas that are top of mind.
How do you define deep tech?
Out of the lab and into the hands.