For Eclipse, the $2.5B Cerebras win is just the start of realizing its physical-world thesis
Eclipse Ventures has seen significant success with its investment in Cerebras Systems, yielding a $2.5 billion return. The firm, founded in 2015, has shifted focus from software to physical-world technologies, which are now gaining traction among investors. This change reflects a broader recognition of the value in hardware and its intersection with software, driven by market demand and supportive government policies.
- ▪Eclipse Ventures invested $6.5 million in Cerebras Systems in 2016, leading to a $2.5 billion return at the company's IPO.
- ▪The firm has invested a total of $147 million in Cerebras, achieving a 17-fold return at the IPO price of $185 per share.
- ▪Eclipse's portfolio companies raised nearly $15 billion from outside investors last year, showing a significant increase in investor interest in physical-world tech.
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| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/17/for-eclipse-the-2-5b-cerebras-win-is-just-the-start-of-realizing-its-physical-world-thesis/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 17 May 2026 15:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-17T15:02:13.128Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-17T15:02:13.128Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | VDdcLonXMTId |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
When Lior Susan started Eclipse Ventures in 2015, the firm’s thesis of digitizing the physical world wasn’t particularly popular in Silicon Valley. “It was the era of enterprise software and SaaS, and it felt fairly lonely the first couple of years,” Susan said on stage at a recent StrictlyVC event in San Francisco. More than a decade later, Eclipse finds itself at the center of the tech world’s action. The firm’s $6.5 million Series A investment in Cerebras Systems in 2016 paved the way for a total return of $2.5 billion when the semiconductor company went public this week. The firm invested a total of $147 million in Cerebras over time, a bet that generated a 17-fold return at the IPO price of $185 per share, according to Eclipse.
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