RBV June 2026 Update: 23,000+ Members | Website Upgrade | Expert Matching Engine | New Investments
23,000+ Members - Website Upgrade - Expert Matching Engine - New Investments
Dear Red Bear Ventures Community:
Hope everyone has had a terrific spring and is gearing up for a fun summer!
Some exciting news since our last update:
23,000+ Members
We are thrilled to announce that we beat our goal of reaching 20,000 members by reunion weekend, and we are now well on our way to our next goal of having 50,000 members by the end of the year. Please refer a friend to help us hit this goal!
Website Upgrade
We recently upgraded our website to better reflect what we’re building at RBV: an expert-led investment network anchored by the Cornell community. Please take a look!
Launch of Expert Matching Engine
We also just launched our matching engine which connects founders with members of of the RBV community who can be helpful - as advisors, investors, independent board members, and more. If you’re a founder and would like to try it out, shoot us an email at hello@redbear.vc.
New Investments
Kelvin and Mason Street Training have closed and Soctera should be wrapped up within the next few weeks.
If you have not dug into Soctera yet, please do - they have made significant progress in the past 60 days - see the detailed update under our signature below. This is worth a close look even if you are not familiar with semiconductors. We’ll send one Last Call email a week before wires are due.
Thanks again for all of your support!
Dan and Gus
Soctera Update
Lead investors are: Anorak Ventures (Anduril, Flock Safety, Oculus) and Mana Ventures (SpaceX, Figure AI, Canva)
9Yards Capital (Anduril, Robinhood, Coinbase) and Multiball Capital also joined the round. 9Yards typically invests in growth-stage companies, but made this a strategic seed investment to get on the cap table early. Multiball is led by Matt Kozlov, a Bain and Harvard alum who spent a decade as Managing Director of Techstars Space (U.S. Space Force and NASA/JPL).
Commercial progress: Soctera recently achieved a major yield breakthrough at the foundry. Wafer yield on the production line jumped from 20% to 90%. This is a significant de-risking milestone and dramatically improves the path to cost-effective, scalable production.
NSF Validation: Soctera just received a new Technology Enhancement for Commercial Partnerships award from the National Science Foundation, bringing total non-dilutive funding to $3.8M.
Industry recognition: Soctera's latest scientific paper — reporting record continuous output power for aluminum nitride buffer HEMTs — was featured on the cover of IEEE Electron Device Letters. Independent scientific validation of this kind is exceptionally rare for a company at this stage of development.
Here's the AngelList link for easy access: https://portal.angellist.com/l/dr/c0221cdf
Red Bear Ventures is an independent organization wholly managed by its Managing Partners. It is neither affiliated with, nor endorsed by, Cornell University.
Red Bear Ventures is a service mark used under license from its owner, Red Bear Angels Management LLC, which operates the angel group, Red Bear Angels. Please see www.RBAngels.com for information.
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