SVRGN Weekly Digest #20 💫
Back to the regular scheduled programming and the more easily digestible weekly digest format.
After an intense time in Berlin, with the Europe-Inflection team as well as many many other founders, LPs and friends, we’re socially spent but intellectually loaded. Hope you enjoy this week’s digest!
🤼 People
Iliam Barkino - VP Corporate Development at ZeroPoint
Iliam visited Munich for an event with Intel Ignite, which ZeroPoint is part of. He scooped up the win of the reverse pitch battle taking place at a boxing ring by pitching first Inflection and then ZeroPoint. ZeroPoint makes DRAM and SRAM 50% more efficient and just closed a $5M seed round led by Matterwave.
Cody Huggins - Principal at Scout VC
Cody is a former U.S. Army Ranger instructor, investment banker with JPM and now investor at Scout VC. We’ve co-invested into Radical Aero with Scout and really appreciate their deep expertise in engaging with the government as a customer. With Scout, we also share an interest in how to make compute more resilient through cryptography and secure communications.
🚀 Companies
Stealth - Silent speech/lip reading software
Status: in a fellowship
Source: Network
Founders: Stealth
Why it’s cool:
We can transmit information 3x faster by speech than typing. If we can retrain ourselves to see computers as people we talk to, or tell to do things instead of typing in codified commands into, voice control will be much more efficient. But, it’s loud and awkward to sit in an office/public space and ask your computer to do sensitive work. The solution is either to talk quietly or to not voice the sounds at all. Whispering is exhausting, so just mouthing the sounds is better. Turns out you can read lips with just video, and probably improve results with an IR sensor and get to very high accuracy.
Waveye - high spatial and temporal resolution imaging
Status: Seed
Source: Intel Ignite
Why it’s cool:
Achieving sub 1 degree resolution using “lightweight imaging radar” or LIR. Mostly for autonomous vehicles, but could be used in robotics as well to enable faster moving robots who are now constrained by the resolution.
Konvu - Invisible security
Status: Very early (TM)
Source: CAVI
Why it’s cool:
Konvu is a security industry startup founded by entrepreneurs from Sqreen/DataDog, aiming to make security invisible, with a focus on innovative solutions and a strong team background in security and DevTool startups.
💡 Ideas & Science
Future Imperfect by David Friedman
Discussing the imbalance of physical vs virtual privacy and surveillance. The balance between defending (cryptography) and offending (breaking privacy) is carefully balanced, sometimes power is held by state actors, other times by individuals or corporations. A key requirement to maintain a transparent society is through a well-organized market for information. Also the first time I heard burglary be described as an “involuntary transaction”.
Just beautiful.
The European Union’s remarkable growth performance relative to the United States
A Brussel-based think tank wrote it, but counter narrative and data-based. The EU's GDP growth has actually kept pace with the US. Measured by purchasing power parity, the EU's output is only slightly smaller than the US. The EU narrowed the gap with the US in terms of GDP per capita over the past two decades. The EU has converged even faster to the US in terms of output per hours worked.