SVRGN Weekly Digest # 22💫
Brought to you through STT, delivered to your brain by Text-to-photon-to-electrical
I'm not writing this but rather dictating this with a sweet dinosaur-inspired app. It's part of our experimentation with new human machine interfaces. It's working quite well, I think. Let's see if it's actually faster and produces better results than typing.
🤼 People
Joseph Krause (dictation said Cross) - CEO and co-founder of Radical AI
Radical AI recently raised a $10M pre-seed round in March 2024 partially from the previous employer of Joseph. Radical AI is creating a pipeline for the discovery of new materials. Materials are truly at the base of any type of technological progress we can imagine. If we don't innovate on materials, it's going to be very, very hard to truly have exponential progress in any other area. From energy to compute to aerospace to transportation and mobility, all rely on having lightweight, strong materials with certain chemical and physical properties.
Jonathan Fajado Cortes (dictation messed this one up…) - investor at IMEC Xpand
Jonathan has an interesting path into venture from South America to the US, then to some of the top universities in the world. Technical University of Munich. Delft university, in the Netherlands. IMEC Xpand is a semiconductor and hardware-focused investor part of the massive fab and foundry group with the same name. We bonded over a couple of really new ideas of how to build fast computers using organic matter.
🚀 Companies
xLight - Ultimate light source for semiconductor manufacturing
Status: Seed
Source: CAVI
Founders: Erik Hosler, Nicholas Kelez
Why it’s cool:
One part of overcoming the end of Moore’s law is better light sources for lithography. xLight is innovating at the extreme ultraviolet end of the spectrum. They're saying that they prepare for high volume manufacturing in the United States. The question is if they are a lot better than the European light sources, or just American. Anyone tackling this problem is worth their salt, in our opinion.
Phantom Photonics - Specialized quantum sensors
Status: Seed
Source: NATO DIANA
Founders: Alex Maierean, Dr. Shihan Sajeed, Prof. Thomas Jennewein
Why it’s cool:
Novel types of sensing using quantum coherence features is quite interesting. We need to have better types of sensors in place in order to improve data, so that we can train better models and truly make AI useful in all situations. This might very well be the case for phantom photonics, as they enable ultra-long distance sensing and resistance to so-called blinding effects.
💡 Ideas & Science
From my old professor in semi-conductors, a new paper for a method of detecting gases at very low concentrations. Specifically hydrogen. This is especially interesting and important for the production of hydrogen gas as an energy source. Because it's explosive nature and lack of smell any leakage of it can be very dangerous. Either during production, transportation, storage or during usage. They're also building a company around this called SweSenSi AB.
An interesting look into the state of venture in the last couple of years. Seed volumes are down, but valuations are up. We have a higher bar to raise capital, but those that are getting capital are raising slightly more. Public markets may look like they're recovering, but it's mostly due to outliers.
No majority on chat control for now. ICYMI, the EU was looking at adopting a proposal for significant online surveillance extension. This would include “scanning” images in private messaging and chat services for potential illegal content.
While, safety is important, It seemed completely uncertain whether or not one could even build such a... A scanner that reliably detects these types of illegal images. And the downside of having it is that every image that you send to everyone will be scanned by some EU authority. It would probably not work locally, meaning they need to be sent to some server, decrypted, scanned and classified.
