Aaron Fyke

Aaron Fyke is the Founder and Managing Partner of Thin Line Capital, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on low-capex technology companies addressing climate change and resource scarcity across the energy, water, and food sectors. With over thirty years of experience as an investor, engineer, and entrepreneur, Fyke has co-founded six technology companies -- including two unicorns -- spanning fuel cells, ocean power, concentrating solar, and grid-scale energy storage. He earned his MBA and MSME as an LGO fellow at MIT and his BEng in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Victoria, where he graduated at the top of his class. He holds Professional Engineer certifications in both California and British Columbia.

Fyke's entrepreneurial career began in the mid-1990s with work on hybrid electric vehicles and fuel cells at BC Research Inc. and Ballard Power Systems in British Columbia. After graduating from MIT in 2002, he joined AeroVironment in Southern California, working on solar-powered fuel-cell hybrid aircraft, which launched his deep-tech career in the Los Angeles area. He subsequently spent over twelve years at Idealab, where he founded and led several energy ventures. As CEO of Edisun Heliostats (later renamed Heliogen), his first unicorn, he worked to lower the costs of solar thermal power with backing from Idealab, Bill Gates, and NRG. He also founded and served as CEO of Energy Cache, a grid-scale energy storage company, and was involved with Energy Vault, which became his second unicorn with SoftBank support.

Beyond his entrepreneurial work, Fyke served as a Partner at Starfish Ventures, Australia's largest venture capital firm, where he led the fund's largest investment and exit, investing alongside KPCB and Khosla Ventures into Ausra, a concentrated solar company. He also directed the development of a $10 million XPRIZE in Energy for the XPRIZE Foundation and serves as an adjunct lecturer on entrepreneurship at USC. He is a mentor at Foresight, a Canadian cleantech accelerator, and Thin Line Capital has been recognized on the ImpactAssets 50 list as an emerging impact manager.

Thin Line Capital targets the decarbonization of the global economy by investing in seed-stage, low-capex technology companies operating in trillion-dollar markets across renewable energy, electrification of transport, and climate resiliency. The firm's thesis centers on backing entrepreneurs building transformational companies in energy, water, and food sustainability that respond to climate change and resource scarcity -- what Fyke calls "the biggest economic opportunity since the Industrial Revolution." The fund takes a concentrated portfolio approach with active board-level participation in each investment. Fyke's three decades of hands-on experience as a cleantech founder and operator differentiate Thin Line Capital from purely financial investors, allowing the firm to provide deep domain expertise alongside capital. The fund specifically seeks low-capex, capital-efficient business models within the sustainability space, avoiding the heavy capital expenditure pitfalls that plagued earlier cleantech vintages.