SVRGN Weekly Digest #18 💫
Big announcement happened this week.
This week we announced that we’re going to organize the European Defense Tech Hackathon! Benjamin Wolba, friend of the fund and venture partner over at Lunar Ventures has been driving this with us.
We’ve been exploring the defense tech space in the same way as our modus operandi: research new areas with eyes wide open and in “discovery mode”. We try to understand the merits of a market, technology or research field from first principles and then why others aren’t investing into it. With defense and dual-use there are many common factors among the people on the sidelines, and almost everyone is on the sidelines.
In a similar way we keep exploring crypto, as Alex hosted various panels and talks during Berlin Blockchain week, as well as meeting up with founders and friends.
🤼 People
Jannic Meyer and Jack Wang - Associate and Principal at Project A ventures
Jannic and Jack have been active in the dual-use space since some time with investments in Arx robotics, Labrys and Quantum Systems. They had some very helpful insights when it came to our hackathon and committed to partnering up and participating in the hackathon. Thank you, good to have you onboard!
Phil Lucsok - founder of something new
Phil has been in the crypto scene since many years, with many years at Parity technologies - an OG crypto company that contributed massively to Ethereum as we know it today. He’s now teamed up to explore what’s next and how we can make resource allocation across chains more efficient.
🚀 Companies
ELOOP (old name) - data layer for DePIN
Status: Re-positioning
Source: Network
Founders: Leroy Hofer, Frederic Nachbauer, Nico Prugger
Why it’s cool:
The (data-driven) jury is still out on whether DePIN projects are a killer use case for blockchains, but it philosophically makes sense. If we can coordinate real-world benefits through a decentralized system, we can cut out middlemen and make it happen cheaper and in a trustless way. Open to anyone, for anyone to profit from. ELOOP built this for car sharing, which in itself is quite a messy business, but still did well. Now they’ve learnt from their experiences building a DePIN project and are supporting others.
Enzum - Revolutionising battery efficiency with advanced Machine Learning forecasting
Status: Techstars
Source: Techstars
Founders: Ana Gerlich, Mary Boryslawska
Why it’s cool:
Battery efficiency will continue to be a bottleneck the same way compute is. Sure it’s more convenient today than 10 years ago to do compute, we’re less constrained locally, but globally the demand goes up. With electrification, the same thing will happen for batteries. Enzum helps us understand our batteries better, and prolong their life and prevent failure. Since new battery tech is notoriously difficult to scale from the lab to production, let’s try and make better use of the ones we have, for now.
💡 Ideas & Science
FEATHER: A Reconfigurable Accelerator with Data Reordering Support for Low-Cost On-Chip Dataflow Switching
Speeding up ML inference isn’t a small problem. Performance significantly depends on the compiler implementation, i.e., how we use the hardware at hand optimally by translating programming language to machine instructions. FEATHER is a suggested implementation of an accelerator that focuses on the reconfiguration of dataflows. Normally, the issue with doing this is that datapath reconfiguration and on-chip data layout reordering incurs a high overhead. There’s more to be explored here for sure.
Why Ukrainian defense is necessary for the security of Europe
Great speech from American historian, Timothy Snyder on how Ukraine is to Russia what Czechoslovakia was to Germany in 1938.
Can Anduril Reboot the US Defense Industry?
If you’re not familiar with Palmer Luckey, you’re in for a treat. My favorite quote is around 10:20 in:
Emily Chang: “Is it hard to poach people from tech companies?”
Palmer Luckey: “Oh no! The way to poach people from tech companies is to tell them that their career is meaningless and they’re wasting their lives on something that doesn’t matter.”
McKinsey’s “The future of European defense and security”
From the Firm who brought us the opioid crisis in the US, here’s a paper for the defense industry in Europe! Only half-kidding, and friend-bashing, but can do some solid analysis. Defense spending is increasing across Europe and NATO, but is it enough? They look at the impact of the peace-time significantly reduced spending on capabilities and changes upcoming because of the increase budgets. One issue is fragmentation across procurement and development. Europe has a very different approach to types of systems than the US, as seen below. Not that it is necessarily much better in the US, with the Lockheed Martin F-35a and F-22 not being able to communicate directly with each other.
