SVRGN Weekly Digest #17 💫
The longest titles and the worst regulations, defense tech, and memes
This week I (Jonatan) was on a VC panel at the TUM Blockchain Salon organized by the brilliant Filip Rezabek and kind Eomji Park. The conference was incredibly high quality, with top distributed systems, economics, and cryptography researchers from across Europe. A break in the academic ambiance came when we turned off the recordings to chat about founding companies and investing into crypto. My not so spicy take was that we need to stop building (and funding) products that only serve others in crypto, and look beyond our own noses and in-groups. The culture needs to change, we can’t rely only on speculation as a use case. If we do I’m not sure I want to be part of it. The most controversial opinion of the day was that “web3 gaming” isn’t worthless… Beyond UGC, what is there? Not a gamer so feel free to ignore.
🤼 People
Edvinas Kerza - Managing Partner at Scalewolf and former Vice Minister of Defense of the Republic of Lithuania
Edvinas spent 14 years in Lithuanian government, ultimately as Vice Minister of Defense, so we know he is tenacious. He focused mainly on national security and resilience, until leaving the public sector to start Scalewolf - a dual-use venture fund and accelerator specifically focused on Lithuania.
Madison Hamman - Managing Director at BlueSky Capital
Madison manages the venture activities connected to Samtec - an electronics giant out of Louisville, Kentucky. They’ve done some awesome partnerships and investments into strategically relevant companies such as AyarLabs and Cambridge TeraHertz.
🚀 Companies
HeroTech8 - Drone-in-a-box
Status: Operational, first customers
Source: Referral
Founders: Edward Anastassacos, Robin Gojon
Why it’s cool:
We’re pretty convinced by the long-term vision of semi-autonomous drones flying around cities and critical structures doing jobs and observations. It becomes a massive optimization problem much like how Uber decides pricing and location for their cars, predicting where drones will be in high demand and then maximizing utilization. Application areas range from policing (Doctor Who, or black mirror style) to heat mapping of building insulation, and much more.
Venice.ai - permissionless AI
Status: bootstrapped
Source: Friend of the fund
Founders: Eric Vorhees
Why it’s cool:
Intelligence should be for anyone, not in control of any thought police. We can’t express it any better than Eric does HERE.
…those who fear liberty of the human mind would also detest its unfettered interaction with intelligent machines.
💡 Ideas & Science
Aerospacelab breaks ground in Belgium
500 satellites per year to be assembled in the third largest satellite lab in the world, now in Europe! It’s not nothing.
European Dynamism and defense: six months on
Brilliant overview of the state of European and British public and private efforts to make Europe sovereign. Tl;dr is that it’s going slowly but in the right direction. It may not be enough though. Ukraine and Russia are locked in an innovation and ingenuity race, while Ukraine is highly dependent on political good-will from the West. Estonia established a EUR50M defense fund. Germany is still faxing documents within the military, and exit scenarios for defense tech companies is still uncertain.
Optical nonlinearity advances lay foundation for visual computing
All-optical computing is very high-potential but has quite some hurdles left before practicality hits. This breakthrough from UCLA and California Nanosystems Institute allows us to process incoming light directly in the sensor. Meaning we could remove the need for a optical to digital transformation.
PSA: Slack will read your messages and feed it to their AI (if that wasn’t clear already)
And to finish off: have you really experienced Germany until someone presented themselves to you this way?
