SVRGN Weekly Digest #16 💫
Belated but still worth reading, I promise
This week we’re in Stockholm meeting friends of the fund, entrepreneurs, VCs and former colleagues over pizzas and beers. If you want to have pizza and beers with us, we’re just an email (contact at) away.
🤼 People
Daniel Biene - Managing Director at Cyber Innovation Hub
Daniel is an entrepreneur who joined the German Armed Forces Cyber innovation hub to help incubate and accelerate innovation coming from within the Armed Forces. We talked about the challenges of changing culture in an organization like his, with strict regulations and measures.
Mikolaj Firlej - GP at Expeditions fund
Mikolaj is a lawyer with a PhD in AI safety in autonomous weapons, now running a venture fund with a defense tech focus. We had a great conversation about the future of AI control and other things.
🚀 Companies
Stealth - Photonic ASICs
Status: Grant funded
Source: Network
Founders: 3 physics PhDs
Why it’s cool:
Stealth company is building a novel type of photonic chip that uses a stable 2D material for switches. They aim to do interference calculations of up to 200 bit matrix multiplications. Currently they have two test tape-outs.
Stealth - Event camera processing for robotics
Status: Grant funded
Source: Network
Founders: CS PhD, ex SpaceX
Why it’s cool:
The human eye doesn’t have a shutter. We don’t take a snapshot of the entire retina and then flush it for new photons to enter. Instead, we’re processing continuously. This helps us predict motion, see without blur at high speeds and react quickly to changes in our environment. Is the key to unlocking autonomy in machines to make them more like our human senses? The neural net, approaching brain structure seems to have done a good job in bringing processing way closer to human level. Maybe if we feed it with even more human-like input we can get even closer. Intelligence is about I/O management, not changing the function at this point.
💡 Ideas & Science
The Martian by Andy Weir
Written in 2011, it’s a lot less sci-fi today than it was back then. However, it’s still a great tutorial in how using engineering and understanding about our physical reality can save us. Slowing down and accepting our fate is rarely the solution.
🇪🇺 eu/acc - by Andreas Klinger
The European accelerationism is a response to e/acc, and plays on the common thinking that Europe is left behind by the rest of the world when it comes to innovation. Even Europeans think so. But there is a New Hope inspired by the blogpost by entrepreneur Andreas Klinger calling for the need for unified, simplified legislation around company formation - a “Delaware LLC” for Europe, and better English speaking.