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Will Wells
AI Founder turned Climate & Deeptech VC
Will Wells is an AI Founder who transitioned into a climate and deep tech Venture Capitalist.
His previous venture, Hummingbird Technologies, an AI platform for measuring Regenerative Agriculture from space, was acquired by Agreena in 2022.
Currently, he is a VC at firstminute capital, an early stage fund supported by 130 unicorn founders, focusing on climate and deep tech investments.
Apart from his VC role, Will advises and serves on the Boards of over 10 startups and climate initiatives, including DEFRA, while also engaging in angel investments.
Will Wells holds an MBA from INSEAD, an MA (Hons) in English Literature from The University of Edinburgh, and another MA (Hons) from University of Toronto's Trinity College. His academic achievements also include 4 A grades at A Levels from Radley College and studies at Summer Fields Oxford.
He has been associated with various organizations in advisory, investment, and partner roles such as montamo, Thaleron, Beams, Dayhoff Labs, Norrsken VC, Glowb, Verse Inc., Volare Solutions, Agreena, Kapu, Tenet, firstminute capital, Automata, Phaidra, alcemy, Safi, VitroLabs Inc, Infraspeak, and Airly. Prior to his venture into VC, he was the Founder & CEO of Beetle Labs.
Highlights
10 ways I've been exploring how to play the $2tn data centre boom💥: which of my #s below gives the best VC return from Q4 2024 onwards (i.e. you can’t go back in time and invest in NVIDIA at $10/share in 2021 😎)?
What have I missed? 🕵️♀️
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Al and automation 🤖software for data centre management itself (think Phaidra, the ex-Google DeepMind cooling team);
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Resilience through standalone 🪫 energy sources: energy is >50% of data centre costs > enter SMRs ☢️ from Last Energy, or 100 hour storage from Form Energy, or just move to Canada for the hydro 🌊 win, as Eric Schmidt told me in August (pictured). Surely Octopus Energy has something cooking here? ;
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Neo compute 💻 solutions: specialised chips 🍟 (Etched), optical processors (Akhetonics), better hardware for Al inference (Fractile or Groq);
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Decarbonisation through cooling🧊, although lots to choose from: liquid players (e.g. Submer) vs the air brigade vs direct to chip upstarts vs silicon microfluidics (Corintis)... and now, new hyperscaler units with embedded cooling, e.g. @NVIDIA's Blackwell machine (pictured);
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Compute-as-a-service👾, such as CoreWeave, Lambda or Crusoe, which can be in the cloud or be energy efficient (i.e. onsite next to renewables ☀️💨) - Verse also helps big tech access renewable assets - or Foundry’s open source, multi-cloud application platform-as-a-service;
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Al Infrastructure layer: lots of dev ops type options here, such synthetic data (MOSTLY AI) compression (ZeroPoint Technologies), on the ML Ops/data side (DataRobot);
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Defence orientated🚔, off grid solutions like Armada, or even those in space, such as Ramon.Space 🛰️, cybersecurity, such as CalypsoAI , or maybe a sovereignty bet 🇪🇺 like evroc;
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Adjacent picks and shovels 🪓plays: data centre services, e.g. ops or design, and anything within a typical iOS ecosystem layer - am yet to find many
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YOLO🚁🛩️ part A: do a "Thrive" and quadruple down on the foundational model layer (i.e. bet 20% of the fund on OpenAI, kudos to Joshua Kushner and team here);
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YOLO🚁🛩️ part B: team up with an infra PE player like KKR, raise $10bn and build the next Equinix or Digital Realty;
I remain obsessed with the future of compute, and what this means for AI and the next wave of founders building at the frontier - please get in touch if you want to chat GPUs, racks and servers, or are thinking about how to solve an energy or compute problem in this space. And a prize 🏆 for the boldest new YOLO idea!
cc Lightspeed frontier tech team Paul Murphy Raviraj Jain Connor Love Taggart Bonham
cc kindred frontier tech allies Brent Hoberman Agate S. Freimane Spencer Crawley Adriana Vitagliano
Pic 1: A nuclear mega data centre cluster future? Pic 2: NVIDIA Blackwell launch: for how many years will they stay dominant? Pic 3: Eric Schmidt dazzling us at Charlie March's Goodwood tech summit
#datacentres #compute #frontiertech #climatetech #AI #nuclear #spacetech #defencetech #resilience #deeptech
Musk 12 years ago on batteries. This is the right way to assess deep tech investment opportunities.

