Convective Capital Closes $85M Fund II, Expanding From Wildfire to All-Hazard Disaster Resilience
TL;DR
Convective Capital, the WePay-founder-turned-firetech-VC launched by Bill Clerico, has closed an $85 million Fund II, more than doubling its $35 million debut fund from 2022. The new vehicle expands the firm's mandate from wildfire-specific "firetech" to the broader disaster resilience market, with backing from John and Patrick Collison, the Arbor Day Foundation, Pathstone, StepStone Group, WovenEarth Ventures, two insurance companies and a pension fund. The LP mix is the real story: Fund I was angel-heavy, Fund II is institutional, and the shift validates the thesis that protecting the physical world is now a genuine venture asset class.
Key Takeaways
The LP composition flipped from rich individuals to institutions, and that's a category signal. Fund I was funded mostly by wealthy individuals (including Clerico personally). Fund II added two insurance companies, a pension fund, foundations, and asset managers like StepStone. When insurance carriers and pension funds anchor a thematic resilience fund, the market is no longer treating climate-adjacent tech as a niche.
Convective is expanding the aperture without breaking the focus. The firm started in 2022 as the only specialist wildfire fund. The new $85M still writes "specialist" cheques: ~18 investments planned across pre-seed, seed and Series A, just now across wildfire, flood, storm, and grid risk instead of just fire. That's a more defensible long-term franchise than getting stuck as "the wildfire fund" once the news cycle moves on.
The Fund I track record is what made this raise possible. 79% of Fund I portfolio companies graduated from seed to Series A, which is dramatically above industry benchmarks (typically 25-40% depending on vintage). Fund I portfolio companies have generated roughly $100 million in revenue and are valued at a collective $2 billion. That's a credible mark-up story even if no exits have crystallised yet.
The team build matters as much as the fund size. Clerico added Kat Manalac (formerly a long-time Y Combinator partner and architect of Startup School and the Female Founders Conference) and Mike Trapanese (most recently a Behrens partner) in September 2025. That's the difference between a solo-GP brand and an institutional firm, and it's the kind of move that lets a firm raise a credible Fund III in two years.
Fund Overview
Fund Name: Convective Capital Fund II
Fund Size: $85 million
Stage: Pre-seed, Seed, Series A
Check Size: Larger than Fund I (~$2-5M range based on portfolio construction of ~18 investments)
Geography: Primarily US, with selective international exposure
Focus: Disaster resilience: wildfire, flood, storm, grid hardening, insurance technology, risk measurement and mitigation
Key LPs: John and Patrick Collison (Stripe co-founders), Arbor Day Foundation, Pathstone, StepStone Group, WovenEarth Ventures, two undisclosed insurance companies, several foundations and a pension fund
Why This Fund Matters
Bill Clerico has been arguing for three years that the United States now suffers a billion-dollar disaster roughly once every 18 days, a frequency that has tripled since the 1980s, and that the total economic cost of climate-related disasters now rivals US defence spending or interest on the national debt. The skeptical investor view was that this is a problem for governments and insurance carriers, not venture capital. Convective's Fund I track record is the first real data point challenging that view.
Fund I built positions in Pano AI (camera-based wildfire detection), Raine (autonomous aerial fire suppression), Burnbot (robotic vegetation clearing) and Stand (home hardening insurance). Those companies have collectively raised more than $515 million in follow-on capital and now protect 30 million acres and over $140 billion in assets per Convective's own data. The customers paying for those services include utilities (the Pacific Gas & Electric bankruptcy taught the sector that under-investing in resilience is existential), insurance carriers (who are pulling out of high-risk markets because they have no other lever), state and federal agencies, and asset owners.
Fund II broadens the aperture beyond wildfire because the underlying customer pain is broader: utilities also need flood, freeze and grid resilience tech; insurance carriers want to underwrite hurricane, wildfire and severe convective storm risk together; and the federal government's appetite for resilience procurement increasingly cuts across all hazards. The first four Fund II investments demonstrate the broader scope: The Lumber Manufactory (forest-management economics), Drafted (AI-driven home design for resilience), Voltaire (YC-backed drones for power-line inspection) and Edge Technologies (commodity-hedging insurance).
The fund is also a useful case study in how to evolve a thematic specialist franchise. Most "single-theme" VC funds either spread too thin in Fund II or die when the original thesis cools. Convective is doing what Lowercase Capital did with crypto-curious bets in 2010, or what BoxGroup has done with founder-network-led seed: take the franchise's core advantage (deep operator network in resilience and disaster response, including the Red Sky Summit and the 10,000-person Updraft network) and use it to underwrite adjacent categories where the founder talent is going.
The Team
Bill Clerico founded Convective in 2022 after selling WePay to JPMorgan for $300 million in 2017. He spent the intervening years as an angel and built up a deep network across the fire service, utilities and resilience-tech entrepreneurs that became the firm's edge. In September 2025, he added two partners: Kat Manalac, who spent more than a decade at Y Combinator running founder community, Startup School and the Female Founders Conference and is one of the most respected community-builders in early-stage tech; and Mike Trapanese, an operator-turned-investor most recently at Behrens, a New York private equity firm focused on essential businesses navigating volatility. Trapanese is Clerico's college friend from Boston College and brings operating and finance discipline alongside the investing role.
The team is small but unusually well-networked for a fund this size, which matters because the customer set (utilities, insurance carriers, government) is notoriously hard to penetrate without deep relationships.
Early Portfolio
Fund I positions include Pano AI, Raine, Burnbot, and Stand, among ~18 companies. The first four Fund II investments are The Lumber Manufactory, Drafted, Voltaire and Edge Technologies. Convective expects to make a similar number of investments in Fund II as in Fund I, with larger cheques per company.
What This Means for Founders
If you are building resilience-tech, you now have one of the most credible specialist VCs in the world writing you a serious cheque. Convective brings unmatched network access to the Red Sky Summit (now a full week, 600+ annual attendees), the Updraft practitioner network (10,000 people), and direct relationships with the utilities and insurance carriers that will be your first ten customers. For a vertical where the sales cycle is the single biggest risk, that distribution advantage is hard to overstate.
If you are building horizontal climate or AI tech and don't have a clean resilience angle, this is not your fund. Convective is increasingly specialist, and the team's pattern-matching is sharpest on companies that protect or insure the physical world.
Fund Momentum Take
Convective is one of the clearest examples we can point to of a "thematic specialist" thesis actually working in venture, and we think the firm will benefit enormously from the macro tailwinds over the next decade. The $1 trillion annual disaster cost is not going down; the insurance carriers are not coming back to high-risk markets without resilience technology; utilities will spend more on hardening than on generation in the next 10 years. Whoever owns the founder network in this space wins.
The thing we'd watch carefully: institutional LPs are now invested, which means Fund II carries genuine TVPI expectations on a shorter clock than the angel-funded Fund I did. Clerico will need to demonstrate at least one serious mark-up event (likely Pano AI or Burnbot at a $1B+ valuation) within the next 18-24 months to keep the Fund III conversation easy.
We also think the firm is undervaluing one adjacent category: federal procurement reform around resilience. If the next US administration cuts a real cheque to states for hardening, several Convective portfolio companies sit in the most direct line of beneficiaries. That optionality is not priced into either the fund's narrative or its LP letters today.
Frequently Asked Questions
How big is Convective Capital Fund II?
$85 million, raised from a mix of institutional LPs including insurance carriers, a pension fund, foundations, asset managers and individual investors like John and Patrick Collison of Stripe.
How does Fund II differ from Fund I?
Fund I was $35 million, raised in 2022, and focused specifically on wildfire technology. Fund II is $85 million and expands the mandate to all-hazard disaster resilience while keeping the same ~18-investment portfolio shape with larger cheques.
Who runs Convective Capital?
Founder Bill Clerico (former WePay co-founder), partner Kat Manalac (former Y Combinator partner), and partner Mike Trapanese (former Behrens partner).
What kind of companies does Convective back?
Pre-seed through Series A companies building resilience to physical-world risk: wildfire detection and suppression, flood and storm hardening, grid resilience, insurance technology, risk measurement and mitigation.
What's the Fund I track record?
79% of Fund I portfolio companies have graduated from seed to Series A. Portfolio companies have collectively generated approximately $100 million in revenue and are valued at roughly $2 billion in aggregate. No exits have been crystallised yet.
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