When Jamie Gull left Stanford with a master’s degree in aeronautics in 2007, he headed straight to the Mojave Desert to build experimental aircraft at Scaled Composites. Just two years later, he joined SpaceX and helped make the Falcon 9 rocket reusable, a breakthrough that transformed the company’s future.
Now, Gull is turning his attention to venture capital. He has launched Wave Function Ventures, an early-stage deep tech fund that just closed its first $15.1 million raise. The fund has already backed nine startups across nuclear energy (Deep Fission), humanoid robotics (Persona AI), and aerospace (Airship Industries). Gull expects to make around 25 seed and pre-seed investments from the fund.
The rise of Wave Function comes amid growing investor appetite for deep tech, with new funds like Leitmotif ($300M from Volkswagen Group) also entering the field this year. Gull’s background positions him well: beyond his engineering career, he co-founded eVTOL startup Talyn Air (acquired by Ampaire in 2023) and has been an active angel investor in companies like Boom Supersonic, K2 Space, and Varda.
“I can really leverage my experience to help founders navigate those early uncertain stages and build lasting companies,” Gull said.
While deep tech often requires heavy upfront capital, Gull argues that startups in this space can tap government contracts and asset-backed lending to scale more sustainably than software startups. He sees the sector as fertile ground for major returns in the next 10–20 years.
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For Gull, the long game isn’t new. He once worked on the Stratolaunch aircraft at Scaled Composites and saw it take flight only a decade later. With Wave Function Ventures, he seems ready to play a similar patient role in backing the next generation of frontier technologies.
