SVRGN Weekly Digest #25 💫
From Inflection with love.
This week we span the macro of industrial policy, ageing and electrical grids to the micro of diamond semiconductors and protein simulations. We of course only use typewriters, quills and papyrus so we weren’t affected by Crowdstrike. (jk, we run linux only)
🤼 People
Chloe Coates - Research & Analysis Lead at Zero Carbon Capital
Chloe is a chemist by training and, before joining ZCC, worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge. She held a presentation organized by First Momentum on Grid Hardware this week. The electrical grid will need some serious updates with the coming electrification of everything and increased decentralization of generation, and Zero Carbon Capital have invested in a few companies tackling this. For more interesting information, check out Ryan McEntush’s “Decentralize the electric grid”, and Matt Mandel’s “**Making energy programmable” . We at Inflection think this revolution will require huge amounts of edge compute, new control algorithms, and new security concepts to maintain resilience.**
Matt Clifford - Co-Founder and prev. CEO of Entrepreneur First
After our work with EF at EDTH, and after investing into EF-alumni’s, we were very happy to catch up with Matt. He published his article on def/acc in May of this year which resonated a lot with our own thinking around sovereignty and technology’s role in that. We can’t see defense only as drones and missiles. Defense means scientific, economic and technological superiority across all domains, and our government’s ability to use those powers.
Brought to you by:
💼 Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
🚀 Companies
Torus - Full edge energy provider for businesses
Status: Series A ($67M)
Source: exa.ai
Founders:
Why it’s cool:
Your own little power plant with flywheel, BESS, cybersecurity solution and frequency regulation! This is resilience built in, and saves on your electricity bill. Now just connect it to your PV/wind/SMR solution and you’re good to go. Might not be a scalable solution for society in general, but deploying more of these will certainly help the grid.
Blaide - Making contractors more efficient at electrifying homes
Status: unknown
Source: CAVI
Founders: actual contractors
Why it’s cool:
Not sure if this is super cool, but wanted to include it anyway. It’s cool because it’s not cool, or something. It’s important and non-obvious, so it’s cool. All the fancy tech people haven’t thought about the fact that we’ll need actual people replacing the gas heating with HVACs, the wood-fired cast iron stoves with microwaves, etc. Guess what, there’s an AI company for this!
Diamond quanta - Using diamonds in semiconductors
Status: Pre-Seed
Source: CAVI
Founders: Adam Khan and Tae Sung Kim
Why it’s cool:
Lab-grown diamonds turn out to be useful in semiconductors more than as jewellery. Besides sparkliness, they also have highest thermal conductivity of any semicon material, 30x higher dielectric breakdown strength than silicon and high carrier mobility (aka speed). This makes them great for high temperature and high voltage applications, e.g., power electronics! Quantum Diamonds out of Munich raised ~7M late last year on this from Earlybird and IQ Capital. It’s still not obvious how to grow them well.
💡 Ideas & Science
Good and Bad arguments for industrial policy by Noahpinion
Noah Smith writes an excellent opinion piece on why the much discussed, pseudonymously written Asia Times article on the superiority of the Chinese industrial policy vs. the west’s is not entirely correct.
No-code molecular dynamics framework by Deepforestsci
We’re big fans of Deepforestsci and Bharath.
“MD simulations also help understand conformational changes that influence specific signaling patterns, needed for designing drugs with precise therapeutic effects [1]. Using no-code primitives, Prithvi™ streamlines the entire process of running molecular dynamics simulation by allowing users to upload molecular data, select suitable force fields, and control environmental conditions as they require.”
Mice live longer when inflammation-boosting protein is blocked in Nature
Blocking a random protein in mice seems to increase metabolism, reduce frailty (not sure what that means) and increase lifespan by 25% (that’s about 20y extra for a human). The antibodies that block this are already being tested in humans as a treatment for cancer and fibrosis, so there’s a chance we’d get realistic results soon. This was based on a random discovery, like many other progressions in science (e.g., Pasteur). We can’t wait to be able to computationally search the space of protein interactions on various conditions, maybe not brute-force but much like how materials science is starting to be done. Computation being the first step, then a much more narrow field of automated experiments to do, feeding back results into the simulations.