Matter Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley fund that invests in early-stage HardTech, has completed its second fund at $450 million. The fund was announced on September 16, 2026 by Los Altos, California-based Matter Venture Partners, which increased its first fund from $300 million it raised between 2023 and 2024.
Fund II will invest in early-stage companies in the areas of semiconductors, robotics, and Physical AI, AI infrastructure, quantum computing, enabling manufacturing, the building blocks of energy, and AI for science. The firm states that its differentiated approach is rooted in providing founders with hands-on operational support as they overcome business and technical obstacles related to manufacturing scale, supply chains and commercialization, rather than simply investing capital. Matter is positioning itself to solve hardware shortages that are surfacing as AI increases demand for faster chips, more data center capacity and dependable physical systems.
The venture was founded in 2023 by Wen Hsieh, Haomiao Huang and Mel Tang. Hsieh was a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins and ran the firm’s HardTech practice for 17 years. Huang, a repeat entrepreneur and engineer, had also previously invested with Hsieh at Kleiner Perkins. Tang has an operator background as a former CFO of Ring and Demand Media. “The operator view is central to how we work with founders at Matter, ” Tang said in a statement. Hsieh has highlighted the need for specialized networks spanning manufacturing, talent, and global partnerships to scale HardTech companies.
Fund II’s strategic limited partner network consists of ASML, Development Bank of Japan, Kleiner Perkins, Nitto Denko, Quanta Computer, Resonac, Sojitz, and TSMC. As industrial and technology partners of Matter, these members will work with portfolio companies as customers, co-investors, manufacturing partners and suppliers. Matter maintains a portfolio of industrial and technological relationships throughout the US Taiwan Japan Europe Singapore, Middle East, South Korea and Mexico to help production and market development for portfolio companies.
The fund’s first portfolio already has a handful of exciting results that support the thesis. Portfolio company Q.ai was acquired by Apple in January 2026. Rhoda AI closed a $450 million Series An in March 2026 to expand the deployment of robotic intelligence in the real world. Other investments include Ambiq, an ultra-low-power processor family optimized for wearables (URA Garmin etc.) that went public in July 2025; Eridu, on network switching to dramatically improve GPU utilization and energy efficiency of AI data centers; Path Robotics building Physical AI for heavy manufacturing; ChipAgents; and Volta.
The fund’s closing demonstrates increased appetite from investors around the hardware layer of the AI boom. “If AI is going to eat the world, hardware will be its teeth, ” Founding Partner Haomiao Huang said. With the additional $450 million raised in the fund’s fold as well as a broadened set of industrial collaborators, Matter Venture Partners will keep its focus on early-stage startups working to address complex technical challenges within the space where software, AI and physical systems collide.
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