HCVC

HCVC (Hardware Club Venture Capital) is the first community-based venture capital firm for hardtech startups, founded in 2015 by Alexis Houssou on the thesis that hardware founders all face the same manufacturing, supply chain, and distribution bottlenecks — and can overcome them through a shared network rather than in isolation. The firm operates offices in Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo and manages $130 million in AUM across two funds: Fund 1 ($50 million, 2018) and Fund 2 ($75 million, 2023). General Partners are Alexis Houssou, Jerry Yang, and Aymerik Renard, with former Renault F1 team principal Cyril Abiteboul serving as Venture Partner since 2021. HCVC invests at pre-seed and seed in hardtech startups building at the intersection of hardware and software, deploying checks from €250K to €2.5 million with a target of up to 40 portfolio companies per fund over five years. The firm leads rounds. Sectors include climate, defense, aerospace, enterprise robotics, consumer hardware, and deep science. The Hardware Club community connects 600 companies across 50 countries. Notable portfolio companies include Cowboy (electric bikes, exited December 2025), Renaissance Fusion (nuclear fusion), Dyna Robotics (which raised a $120 million Series A from Nvidia and Amazon in 2025), Chiral (next-generation nanomaterial chips, $12 million seed), Navier ($5.6 million for an AI engineering platform founded by SpaceX and Tesla alumni), Span (electrical panels), Caper (smart shopping carts), Automata (lab robotics), Radia (wind energy), and Augmenta (autonomous construction equipment). HCVC's community model creates compounding advantages for founders: access to peer knowledge on scaling hardware businesses, shared supply chain relationships, and co-investment opportunities within the 600-company network — benefits that compound over time and are unavailable to hardtech founders working through traditional VC channels.