SVRGN Weekly Digest #2 💫
The weekly digest of Inflection.xyz . Staking, Materials, anti-drone drones, and philosophy of science - what else could you wish for?
Already the third edition of our weekly digest! If you have suggestions for improvement, email us at contact@ or comment directly here.
We’d like to shout out to one of our portfolio founders - Jacob Shiohira, who’s running the U.S. Olympic trials for the Marathon this weekend! We’ll be cheering virtually!
🤼 People
Finn Murphy - Solo GP at Nebular
Finn (founder-operator-VC arc) recently raised his first fund, but has been investing with Frontline prior to striking out on his own. Our hypotheses about the future are very similar (e.g., massive skill shortage in certain realms forcing automation or stagnation on us) but where we at inflection focus on sovereign computation, Finn is going slightly wider as he invests across AI, Biotech and more. Looking forward to exchanging ideas with him going forward!
Julius Schmidt - CEO at Staking Facilities
The backbone of crypto relies on companies like Staking Facilities. With over $1B assets staked, they support operations across all the major L1s. We talked about the importance of resilience and mental strength in uncertain environments (e.g., running DevOps with potentially massive consequences), as well as the next big infra market - zk proving 🤫
Sophie Rödl - Neuro embodiment coach
Sophie held a workshop on the interconnection of our nervous system and our mental states for our founders a few weeks ago. She guided us through the effects and symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system, and helped us become more aware of ourselves. We thought deeply about the most impactful way to help our founders be the best they can be, and where better to start than at their own core. Understanding ourselves better makes us better decision makers!
🚀 Companies - MUNICH 🥨 edition
This time we’re doing a deep dive in a few of the companies based in Munich, Bavaria - the California of Europe (or is it Texas?). Not mentioning some of the more well-known ones like Isar aerospace, Helsing, Lillium and Personio, there’s an endless well of deep tech and compute startups here.
Status: Pre-seed by IOSG, Zee Prime and more, now raising Seed
Source: Munich ecosystem
Founders: Benedikt Eikmanns and Marijo Radman
Why it’s cool:
Professionalizing risk transparency and management in web3 brings us closer to conscientious choices when assessing opportunities. With stacked and compounding factors, e.g., through re-staking or Luna-like structures, risk is often not taken into account in the chase for the best yield. Leading to the wrecking of portfolios and less acceptance in the broader financial ecosystem.
ExoMatter - Computational materials
Status: Early revenue from DLR, Airbus and others
Source: Munich ecosystem
Founders: Josua Vieten, Barbara Prähofer
Why it’s cool:
Using massive amounts of materials data to identify new target materials is the necessary step to scale up new advances in aerospace, semiconductors, battery tech, construction, and more. They were already able to speed up new materials discovery significantly for multiple customers like DLR, Audi and Airbus.
Tytan tech - Protecting Europe's technological sovereignty
Status: Pre-seed funded
Source: Munich ecosystem and defense tech friends
Founders: Balasz Nagy, Batuhan Yumurtaci
Why it’s cool:
Fighting off cheap Shahed drones with million dollar rockets? That’s been a necessary and resource-draining method in Ukraine so far. Tytan are building cheap, rapid anti-drone drones based on kinetic impact take-downs. Saving lives and blowing stuff up at the same time, pretty cool.
💡 Ideas & Science
Wake up, new Vitalik-post dropped
Crypto x AI is something we’ve been exploring for the last 1.5y now. One massive unlock for us in terms of engagement was the Augment hackathon we co-organized, with over 100 participants and $80K in prizes. Vitalik shares his thought structure around these two revolutionary areas.
How do we escape local optima? How to make quantum-leaps in idea-space? First step is realizing that we’re not in the global. The large enough perturbations. Historical examples such as how the cure for scurvy was discovered but not applied for decades because of minute details and seemingly sound reasoning makes us hopeful that hard problems can be solved. It won’t be easy though.
Miqu - leaked (mistral) quantized 70B model
Some anonymous enthusiast leaked weights to a close to GPT-4 performing model. The fact that the 2nd place in the EQ benchmark is held by an open source model says something about the way the state of AI is going.
New transparent PV-cells from EPFL
Again, our Alma Mater and one of the birthplaces of solar cells is bringing us closer to windows that harvest energy.
Apple’s Vision Pro sold out quickly in the pre-orders and the paradigm of spatial computing may finally get the opportunity to revolutionize how we interact seamlessly with tech. From touching the digital objects directly to talking to our computers instead of typing commands in the object space of the OS has changed how we understand human-machine interactions. We have high hopes for even closer integrations than trapping our eyeballs in digital space, bridging the enhanced compute capabilities of silicon closer to our nervous system.