To Our Investors & Partners,
2025 was an exceptional year for DTX Ventures. In 12 months, we raised over $50 million, invested in 16 companies, and made significant progress toward the goals Cam and I set when we started this firm.
Most of our LPs are from between the coasts. This choice was deliberate. Aside from our friends at Palantir and Anduril, our investor base is concentrated in places where people built generational wealth by actually making things. Our LPs are people who started real businesses, understand hard problems, and care deeply about American sovereignty.
We started raising Fund I around the thesis that the founders building for defense, critical infrastructure, and American manufacturing are better than ever, yet dramatically underserved by venture capital. The big coastal funds have spent the last decade chasing software multiples and network effects. When a founder shows up with a reactor design or a domestic battery supply chain, their diligence frameworks don't apply. The deal gets passed.
We've watched this pattern repeat for years. Good founders with real solutions, building things the country actually needs, getting polite rejections from firms that don't understand the business, and, more importantly, why these companies matter for our country.
We are working to fix this exact problem, and we're proud to partner with you to do it.
Before getting into Fund I progress, here's our read on the broader market and the developments most relevant to what we're building.
BLUF: 2025 made it clear that investing in U.S. sovereignty is structural, not thematic.
Everyone saw what happened with AI valuations and equity returns. The S&P 500 rose 18% in dollar terms but fell 28% in gold terms. The dollar itself declined 39% against gold and 12% against the euro. Paper gains driven by AI hype cycles are masking the decreasing value created by Western technology companies.
We've entered a different kind of market, defined by aggressive fiscal stimulus, tariff-based protectionism, and proactive government (and major financial institution) support for strategic industries. These shifts are structural.
Consider the actions between the U.S. and Venezuela. We're watching a transition from treaty-based multilateralism to unilateral, power-driven international relations. Look at the second-order effects already visible: higher military spending, increased sanctions risk, supply chain weaponization, and reduced foreign demand for U.S. financial assets. In a world where the largest companies in America could lose key component supply overnight, domestic capability and secure infrastructure are becoming the limits on American economic growth and, potentially, military strength.
Our conviction has deepened that we need to invest in companies solving strategic constraints that determine how America wins on the global economic stage over the next 30 years.
Dan Wang wrote an excellent piece that captures many of our first-principle beliefs about how the U.S. needs to innovate to keep pace with China. Energy sits at the center. As the AI competition progresses, raw power production capacity matters as much as breakthroughs in models or access to compute (i.e., chips). Wang puts it directly: "superintelligence will demand a superload of power."
The CCP is building solar, coal, and nuclear capacity to ensure its data centers have unrestrained power access. The U.S. has done significant work in building data centers, but hasn't prepared for the bottlenecks behind them.
Nuclear's resurgence in 2025 clearly illustrates that the market is waking up to this shift. The tech has been around for decades, so why now? Well, in the AI era, power is a strategic constraint.
Many of us have seen this chart (source), which shows U.S. electrical generation capacity barely budging since 2000, while China grew from one-third of U.S. levels to more than 2.5x today. American AI and manufacturing leadership require American dominance in power generation.
This need for energy is why we backed Valar. Nuclear companies have spent decades trying to invent technically "perfect" reactors. Valar is building a standardized reactor explicitly designed for mass manufacture. To be clear, we don’t think a single company will win the entire nuclear market, but we believe the fastest company will cement itself as a major player in the decades to come.
Wang also touches on something we've believed from the start: industrial strength is a product of ecosystems. Infrastructure, process knowledge, and dense supplier networks compound over time. If you stop making things, you eventually stop knowing how to improve the things you invent. A new generation of builders has to emerge and be well-funded to stop this vicious cycle.