Joe Fath left investment firm T. Rowe Price to join Eclipse, a venture capital firm that invests in physical assets and industries.

"I'm a strong believer in this thesis based on what I'm seeing — and it's a big reason I left T. Rowe to come to Eclipse," Fath said.

Eclipse's investment focus areas include general-purpose robotics, defense technology, next-generation manufacturing, semiconductors and next-generation compute, energy and batteries, and autonomy. The firm's portfolio companies include Wayve, Anduril, True Anomaly, Redwood Materials, Mytra, Mind, Matter, BotCo, Cerebras, Oxide, and Tenstorrent.

"In physical industries — manufacturing, logistics, energy, defense — AI is a powerful complement. It makes things faster, cheaper, less capital-intensive, and ultimately drives better returns. But it's not a full replacement in the way it will be across large parts of the service economy," Fath said.

At T. Rowe Price, Fath had worked alongside Henry Ellenbogen and often joined tech startup deals at later stages through large-cap growth funds. Henry Ellenbogen pioneered tech startup investing at T. Rowe Price.

Eclipse is also exploring investment or building opportunities in areas such as fusion, water, space, world model builders, workforce development for the skilled trades, and neuromorphic computing.

Historically, software and internet businesses needed far less capital to reach escape velocity compared to capital-intensive models. Investors tended to shy away from capital-intensive business models because it was hard to gauge when or if they would reach escape velocity.