Some roommate situations evolve into lifelong friendships. Few result in $100 million. That’s the amount of capital raised by new firm Conductive Ventures, announced on Tuesday by its founders Carey Lai and Paul Yeh. The two former roommates turned veteran VCs in Series A and B companies, focusing on business-to-business software and hardware. Conductive Ventures has already made four investments to date: microprocessor company Ambiq Micro, lead generation software maker CSC Generation, metal 3D printing company Desktop Metal and customer experience manager Sprinklr. Conductive will invest checks of about $2 to $7 million in about a dozen companies. There are two twists to Conductive that make it stand out from your typical VC firm. First: its first capital commitment comes entirely from Japanese electronics maker Panasonic, meaning that much of Conductive’s offering to startups will be that the firm can help them enter and leverage the Japanese market. Perhaps more unusual: Conductive’s roots in a fateful rooming situation in San Francisco after the last dotcom bubble. Fresh out of college at the University of California at Berkeley and at UCLA, the two met through a third roommate, Kevin Chou, in 2002. All three moved to San Francisco, where they lived together and worked in tech-focused investment banking after the dotcom bubble had burst. “It was an awesome and amazing experience,” says Lai. “We all got slaughtered for two years.”