Matter Venture Partners Closes $450 Million Fund II
Startups / analysis
Matter Venture Partners Closes $450 Million Fund II
The hardtech fund is 50% larger than Matter's 2023 debut and adds ASML and TSMC as named strategic limited partners.
Matter Venture Partners closed its second fund at $450 million on Sept. 16, 2026, a figure 50% larger than the $300 million it raised for its debut fund, which TechCrunch reported as closed in 2023 and announced in March 2024. Founding Managing Partner Wen Hsieh spent 17 years at Kleiner Perkins running its HardTech practice before starting Matter in 2023 with Haomiao Huang, a repeat entrepreneur, and Mel Tang, a former chief financial officer at Ring and Demand Media, according to Matter's own announcement.
Announced and closed are the same event here: Matter said Fund II is fully closed, not a target the firm is still raising toward.
Fund II adds ASML and TSMC as named strategic backers
Fund I's limited partners included Kleiner Perkins, TSMC, family offices and the fund's own founders, TechCrunch reported in 2024. Fund II names a longer list of strategic limited partners: ASML, the Development Bank of Japan, Kleiner Perkins, Nitto Denko, Quanta Computer, Resonac, Sojitz and TSMC, spanning lithography equipment, contract chipmaking, precision materials and development finance. "HardTech is global from day one," Hsieh said in the announcement, echoing a line he gave TechCrunch in 2024: "The world has realized that most if not many of the foundational technologies and trends of our society today are built on hard tech."
The pitch rests on three outcomes investors can check
Matter points to three portfolio outcomes to justify the larger fund: Apple's acquisition of portfolio company Q.ai in January 2026, Ambiq's initial public offering in July 2025, and a shipbuilding agreement between portfolio company Path Robotics and Huntington Ingalls Industries. None of the three carried a disclosed dollar figure in the Fund II announcement. A fourth portfolio company, Rhoda AI, raised a $450 million Series A in March 2026, coincidentally the same number as Fund II's entire size, though Matter did not say how much of that round it supplied itself. Founding Partner Haomiao Huang put the firm's thesis this way: "If AI is going to eat the world, hardware will be its teeth."
Fund I's strategy targeted large seed rounds through Series B, and by the time TechCrunch wrote about it in March 2024, Matter had made six investments toward that 15-to-20 company target. Matter's Fund II announcement does not update that count, so it is not clear how many companies Fund I ultimately backed or how many Fund II expects to add over its own investment period.
What Fund I actually returned is still unknown
The comparison that matters is not the jump from $300 million to $450 million, but what the first fund proved before the second one closed. TechCrunch's 2024 reporting described Fund I as "significantly oversubscribed" and aimed at a portfolio of 15 to 20 companies, with six investments made at the time of that report. Matter's Fund II announcement does not say how many of those slots were eventually filled, what Fund I's internal rate of return looks like, or how much capital limited partners have gotten back through distributions. A 50% larger fund is evidence that Matter's limited partners, several of them strategic operating companies rather than financial investors, wanted more exposure to its deal flow. It is not, on its own, evidence that Fund I's financial returns justified the increase.
Six categories, two new ones since 2023
Fund I organized its thesis around six categories: semiconductors, robotization, generative AI, manufacturing on-shoring, energy building blocks and life science automation, per TechCrunch. Fund II's announced scope adds quantum computing and AI for scientific research to that list, tracking a broadening of the hardtech label that has pulled robotics and quantum funding into the same pitch decks across the sector in 2026, including XPeng's robotics unit, which raised over $900 million for its IRON humanoid at a $6.3 billion valuation the same week Matter closed its fund. Euclyd, a Dutch chipmaker that raised a Series A from Samsung this month, shows the same pattern from the other side of the table: strategic industrial investors buying access to hardtech deal flow rather than betting on financial returns alone.
What would change the read
If Matter discloses Fund I's distributions to paid-in capital, or Apple names a price for Q.ai, the case for the increase gets easier to check independently. Mel Tang described the firm's approach as operator-led: "The operator perspective is at the heart of how we work with founders at Matter." Until Fund I's numbers surface, the $450 million figure says more about who wanted access to that approach than about what the approach has delivered.
- Fund I (closed 2023)300 $M
- Fund II (closed 2026)450 $M
Source: TechCrunch (Fund I, reported March 2024) and Business Wire (Fund II, Sept. 16, 2026)
| Portfolio company | Outcome | When |
|---|---|---|
| Q.ai | Acquired by Apple | January 2026 |
| Ambiq | Initial public offering | July 2025 |
| Rhoda AI | $450 million Series A | March 2026 |
| Path Robotics | Shipbuilding deal with Huntington Ingalls Industries | Undated |
Sources
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