about us

Black Hills Partners provides investment for companies with an immense global impact as well as strategy, business development, and advisory services to CEOs and key stakeholders in start-ups, venture capital, private equity, Fortune 500 companies, and government organizations globally.
 

Engagements include the development of new types of public-private partnership programs to accelerate commercialization with non-dilutive capital, development of new regulatory approaches for emerging industries, designing and executing the full go-to-market strategy for a new technology product, briefing over 46 investment firms on new technology trends in several industries and establishing key partnerships between large multinational companies and new technology innovators.

The firm leverages deep expertise in both financial and operational strategy to add value at all stages of corporate growth. With that, our clients range from entrepreneurs building new companies to senior executives from large organizations looking to stay on the cutting edge of technology. Black Hills Partners also builds innovative communities and has mentored over 300 founders at MIT and Harvard.

The founder, Tyler Ellis, is an entrepreneur, investor, and scientific advisor focused on building and investing in companies with an immense global impact.

As both an investor and advisor at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, he has been working with the founders since prior to incorporation of the company and currently focuses on a wide variety of strategic issues, including business development, government affairs and regulation. The company has raised over $2B and has more than 300 employees. He served on the Department of Energy Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee for Long Range Planning which published the Powering the Future: Fusion and Plasmas report and has presented at numerous Nuclear Regulatory Commission public meetings on fusion regulation.

Passionate about energy innovation, he was previously with TerraPower, a Bill Gates-backed nuclear energy company based in Bellevue, WA. There, he joined pre-launch as employee #9, grew the team by 12x, raised ~$500M and managed 120 engineers and physicists to deliver a fully integrated conceptual design of a first-of-a-kind Traveling Wave Reactor ahead of schedule in only 9 months. He has worked as a venture capitalist investing in technologies which address society's most pressing problems and has held senior management positions leading business and product development with several other MIT alumni founded start-up companies in the areas of advanced motors, energy storage and transportation. 

He received his Ph.D., S.M., and S.B. degrees from MIT in Nuclear Science and Engineering and a MBA from Harvard Business School where he was also featured as a Case Protagonist in Entrepreneurial Finance. He has authored 22 academic papers, created 4 U.S. and 6 international patents, and routinely contributes to top-tier publications and conferences including TechCrunch.