Pax is a solo venture fund built around founder Michelle Volz’s background at Palantir and a16z’s American Dynamism team, and its name draws directly on Pax Romana and Pax Americana, reflecting its view that national strength comes from superior engineering and industrial capacity in areas shaped by government demand, like defense, aerospace, energy, and industrial supply chains. Pax is designed for very early-stage founders in these fields who need hands-on support before larger, multi-stage funds get involved, which shows up in its investments across the nuclear industrial stack and in less obvious picks like a vertically integrated minerals company reopening a copper mine and refining lithium from wastewater.