The Parallel Quarterly — Issue No. 3
The future is
mostly plumbing.
Parallel is a $120M pre-seed and seed fund for the companies that keep factories, grids, warehouses and labs running. We write first checks of $500k–$3M, decide in ten days, and answer our own email.
Fund III, at a glance
Fund size
$120,000,000
First check
$500k–$3M
Stage
Pre-seed & seed
Decision
Ten days, in writing
Partners
Two
(see Fig. 1)
Reserves
1 : 1
In praise of load-bearing companies.
By Hana Voss & Teo Okafor
Filed September 2026
Every decade, venture capital discovers a new way to arrive early at the same party. Social. Mobile. Crypto. Whatever this year is called. The money moves in a flock, and the flock is loud.
We are not in the flock. We are in the building next door, where someone is trying to get a 1987 controller to talk to a cloud dashboard without setting anything on fire.1The controller is beige, runs ladder logic, and has outlived two owners and a roof. It is, we’d argue, the most important computer in the building.
Here is the thesis, plainly. The next thirty years will be spent rebuilding the physical economy: the grid, the factory, the warehouse, the lab. That work needs software written by people who have stood on a shop floor, hardware designed by people who have read an interconnection queue,2About two terawatts of proposed generation and storage are waiting for permission to plug into the U.S. grid. The median wait is roughly five years. This is a software problem wearing a hard hat. and companies patient enough to sell to buyers who take nine months to say yes.
These companies are hard to fund at the start. They don’t demo well. Their markets look small on a slide and enormous in a spreadsheet. Their founders tend to be forty-one, not twenty-three,3Median founder age at our first check, Funds I and II: 41. Median years in the industry before founding: 14. Median hoodies: not disclosed. and would rather talk about torque than TAM.
That is the opportunity. Not because unfashionable is a virtue — it isn’t — but because fashion sets prices. When everyone wants the same thing, it costs too much. When nobody wants a thing, you can buy it at a sensible price and wait for the world to notice it was load-bearing.
“Let me take it to the Monday meeting” is the most expensive sentence in venture. We don’t say it. There are two of us, we write the first check, and we decide in ten days — yes or no, in writing, with reasons.4Our no’s come with a paragraph. Founders tell us it’s the most useful thing an investor has ever sent them. One had it framed. We are choosing to take that as a compliment. Nobody gets handed to an associate. We are the Monday meeting.
We are patient, but not in the soft sense. We are patient the way a bridge is patient. We expect to hold for ten years, and we intend to be useful for all of them.
If that sounds slow, good. The grid was built slowly, too. It still works.
— H.V. & T.O., Pittsburgh, September 2026
II.
Grid & energy hardware
The grid is a century-old machine with a new job.
Fig. 3
A substation, single-line. The red box is where our founders tend to show up.
Electricity demand is rising for the first time in a generation, and the equipment that moves it was designed for a quieter century. We back sensors, controls and power electronics that a utility can buy, install and — crucially — insure.
What we look for
UL listing on the roadmap. A lineworker on the advisory board.
Grid & Energy
Narrow
All
Manufacturing
Grid & Energy
Logistics
Lab
Fourteen more companies are in stealth. They will tell you themselves, eventually, at great length.
Funds I–III · updated 24 Sep 2026
days
Median, first call to written decision · Fund II · n = 212
The promise is ten. We would rather be early than eloquent.
0
Figures we’re willing to print.
01
Priya Raman
Phaseyard · since 2025
02
Marco DeLuca
Torquewell · since 2021
03
Ruth Adeyemi
Quench · acquired 2024
“
They said no in nine days, with two pages on why. I rebuilt the plan around those two pages. Eleven months later they said yes — in six.
Priya Raman
Co-founder & CEO, Phaseyard
1
“
Hana has been on our shop floor more often than our last three investors combined. She knows where the good coffee is. It’s in quality control.
Marco DeLuca
Founder, Torquewell
2
“
Every investor asked about our TAM. Teo asked about our scrap rate. That was most of the diligence, and it was the right question.
Ruth Adeyemi
Founder, Quench — acquired 2024
3
Ten days, then ten years.
Elapsed
§ 08 — Correspondence · p. 9
Bring us the one they called too heavy.
Hardware in the bill of materials. Nine-month sales cycles. Customers who still fax. If three investors passed because it was “too industrial,” you are in the right inbox. Both partners read every submission.