Acephale is a principal investment firm headquartered in Chicago operating across both early-stage venture and public markets.
We look for founders and companies building technologies with the potential to transfigure economies and then invest with conviction.
ENERGY · NUCLEAR FUEL
CCTE is an advanced nuclear fuel company developing ANEEL, a thorium-based fuel platform designed to improve the economics, performance and sustainability of existing and next-generation reactors.
Rather than developing a new reactor, CCTE builds fuel technologies that scale across the industry — from today's operating CANDU and light-water reactors to SMRs, microreactors and advanced reactor systems.
cleancore.energy→
COMPUTATION · SIGNAL DEVELOPMENT
Lake Shore Dynamics builds Tide, a signal-development framework that turns market data and a trading objective into deployable alpha.
It gives proprietary trading firms, market makers and bank electronic trading desks the model architecture, data infrastructure, training and evaluation tooling of a frontier AI lab — without building one in-house.
lakeshoredynamics.com→
SEMICONDUCTORS · ANALOG SIMULATION
Analog simulation is the biggest bottleneck in chip design: runs take days to months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and cutting corners adds fabrication risk.
Built on seven years of MIT research, Build4Sim automatically specializes transistor models to foundry PDK parameters, accelerating simulation by up to 100x — dropping into existing workflows with zero changes to current simulators.
build4sim.com→Ashley has a BS in Chemical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, where she did research on plasma reactors. She's interested in renewable energy and bioengineering.
Cedric studied Computer Science and Neuroscience at the University of Chicago and is passionate about machine learning and database systems.
Parth is from Austin, Texas and has a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Chicago. He enjoys thinking about cool shapes and making clothes.
Prateek is a Chandigarh-born, Chicago-based AI geek with an MS in Business Analytics from University of Illinois (UIUC) and a B.E. in Computer Science. Outside of that: F1 on Sundays, cricket and football year-round, and a permanently open flight-search tab.
Rakan has a BA in Economics & Computer Science from the University of Chicago. He's a fan of all things AI, space, philosophy, politics and weightlifting.