When SOSV and the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) announced a $50 million co-investment to build a new global headquarters for SOSV’s HAX in the heart of Newark in 2022, we knew the stakes were high. But HAX has just the right team to help early stage founders scale their product development and get to market, and the timing could not have been better, given the enormous drive to decarbonize, automate, and re-shore U.S. industry.
We started working with founders almost immediately in makeshift space in downtown Newark, and we worked around the clock to build out a facility packed with sophisticated labs and industrial fabrication equipment far superior to anything available elsewhere to early-stage founders. Then, in 2024, Governor Tim Murphy cut the ribbon to open the 35,000 sq ft HAX headquarters. In total, we have worked side-by-side with nearly 100 early-stage teams to advance their deeply technical products from lab to investable prototype. Some of the notable wins include Still Bright and Princeton Critical Minerals, as well as the biggest home run to date being the acquisition late last year of Hyperlume, an optical interconnect switch company, just months after it raised a $12.5M seed round.
In parallel, we built a tremendous team at HAX, including our HAX Partners, Susan Schofer, PhD (CSO), Ji Ke (CTO) and Andy Gollach, and it’s been clear for a while that we needed an additional SOSV General Partner to work alongside me with our expanding collection of HAX companies.
Today, I am happy to announce that we’ve found that person: Please meet Avra van der Zee, who joins SOSV from Elemental Impact, where she was the Chief Operating Officer.
Avra is a seasoned climate-tech operator and investor with deep, real-world experience scaling startups. Her approach to investing is grounded in the belief that innovation is not self-executing and breakthrough technology doesn’t scale on its own. It requires operational rigor, disciplined sequencing, and a willingness to do the hard, often unglamorous work of turning science into deployment. That’s exactly what she’s bringing to SOSV and HAX.
Most recently, she served as Chief Operating Officer at Elemental Impact, where she oversaw investments and portfolio (a portfolio that includes Fervo Energy and Artyc, a SOSV and HAX company), communications, and operations and helped steer the organization’s growth into one of the world’s leading climate-investment platforms. Prior to that, she was in the trenches as COO and General Counsel of JUMP, an early SOSV investment where she first met SOSV Managing General Partner Sean O’Sullivan. There he got to see her grit firsthand as she led the company from scrappy early operations through hypergrowth and ultimately to its $200M+ acquisition by Uber. She has negotiated with cities, partnered with policy makers, scaled global supply chains, built high-execution teams and navigated the complex, nonlinear path from pilot to deployment.
Avra also serves as a Director at green cement company BioMason, as a member of Novo Holdings’ Planetary Health Advisory Group, and Board Chair of the biochar startup Made of Air.
Avra will bring all of that experience to bear on HAX both in Newark and in our soon-to-open facility in Princeton, HAX Plasma Forge, a new $49.5M project with the NJEDA and the Princeton Plasma Physics Labs (PPPL). You can always find HAX – and now Avra – on the frontiers of hard tech.
Please join us in welcoming Avra van der Zee.