Eclipse's Jiten Behl thinks the next unicorns won't be built in software

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2025

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jiten Behl, partner at Eclipse Ventures and former chief growth officer at Rivian, thinks we're entering an era of major re-industrialization in the US — one where factories run on AI-powered robots, not cheap overseas labor. Behl, who helped scale Rivian from a conference room idea in 2015 to a publicly traded EV maker, is now investing in the next wave of industrial and mobility startups, including two Rivian spinouts: Also and Mind Robotics. It's part of Eclipse's larger bet that the physical world is finally ready for the kind of disruption software saw a decade ago. Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec sat down with Behl to talk about why Rivian keeps spinning out companies, what founders in the "physical world" need that software founders don't, and why automation is becoming necessary if the US wants to compete without Chinese supply chains. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Why Behl looks for founders who are both "hyper-optimistic" and grounded in reality, and why that combination is surprisingly rare, even in Silicon Valley. How vertical integration worked for Rivian but won't work for most startups today. Behl's prediction that autonomy will become "real and something we can touch and feel" in the next five years. Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechRunch's podcast about the business of startups.
0:06.0	I'm Kirsten Koresak, transportation editor here at TechRunch.
0:09.4	And this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.
0:17.6	Today we are joined by Jitenbeale, partner at Eclipse Ventures.
0:22.9	Jetan's been on both sides of the table.
0:25.2	First, scaling a hard tech unicorn from the inside as an early employee and the chief
0:30.6	growth officer at Rivian and now deploying capital into the next generation of
0:35.5	industrial and mobility startups over at Eclipse.
0:38.3	So he has views on where the opportunities are in this interesting moment for EVs,
0:43.2	manufacturing, automation, dare I say, even AI.
0:46.5	Jitaine, welcome to the show.
0:47.8	Thank you, Kirsten.
0:48.6	It's nice to be here.
0:49.6	So I saw you, what was it?
0:51.3	It feels like forever ago, but it was, I think, only about six weeks ago at the also event, which is one of the companies that Eclipse has recently backed.
1:01.8	Also, for those who don't know, is the micromobility startup and spin out from Rivian.
1:07.7	And I would love for you to give us a little bit of insight into how that whole deal came together, because obviously you have a connection to Rivian. And I would love for you to give us a little bit of insight into how that whole deal
1:12.6	came together, because obviously you have a connection to Rivian. But I'm assuming that that
1:18.2	doesn't necessarily mean you're going to invest in everything that Rivian does. So how did that
1:24.2	deal come together? It's a great question. I was at Rivian from the very early days,
1:29.4	joined the company in 2015 when a few of us could fit in a conference room.
1:35.5	We had no technology, no product, no suppliers, no manufacturing facility,
	...

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