Michelle Volz

Founder and Managing Partner, Pax VC

Backing the physical world at zero-to-one. Defense, energy, manufacturing, and the rest of the hard stuff.

Michelle spent her last chapter at a big firm and came away with a specific complaint.

There's an inverse relationship between fund size and how useful you actually are at the earliest stage. If a fund has hundreds of millions committed to one company, it's going to look after that company first. Rational, but it means the founder who needs a real partner at zero-to-one isn't getting one.

Pax is her answer to that.

The other drift she won't ignore is venture's decade on B2B SaaS. Her read is that software is now eating software, optimization stacked on optimization, and the user often isn't a person at all anymore. So Pax goes at defense, energy, manufacturing, aerospace, robotics, logistics, security and construction. Huge chunks of GDP, heavily regulated, operationally miserable, which is exactly why most funds stay away.

She'd rather back a great team in a grueling non-consensus market than an average one in a hot market. Her line is that hard markets select for missionaries. She calls where this leads Pax Technica.

Stage

Pre-seed, Seed

Sectors

Climate and energy, Defense and aerospace, Deep tech and frontier

Geography

North America

Fund size

$50,000,000