SVRGN Weekly Digest #34 💫
Chips, wireless charging by laser and supply chains
The thing I enjoy the most about these posts, is being forced to reflect on and collect the events of the week. This particular week I thought a lot about information diet, since it forms our thinking. Time is finite, but there’s definitely more than enough content out there for any person to take in, even if we spend most of our waken time reading. So thank you to those who chose to consume this particular piece of content. 🙏
🤼 People
Cameron Robertson - CEO and Founder at Arx research
Cameron and David are building chips that unlock new ways of interacting with digital assets. We backed them in 2022 and catch up every few weeks. The chip they’re building is using the NFC standard, but with additional support for generating, signing and verifying Ethereum-compatible cryptographic keys onboard. The team has been innovating for years around physical representations of money, wallets and other digital goods. Keep an eye out next for an exciting stable-coin related application!
💼 Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
🚀 Companies
Avalor - Enhancing Unmanned Systems With Autonomy
Status: EUR2M Seed
Source: EDTH
Founders: Maurits, Jeroen, Marc
Why it’s cool:
General, standardized autonomy for unmanned situations. Just like we trust computers to drive our cars better than other humans, we will trust computers to take mission-critical decisions in emergency situations better than humans.
Iris labs - Powering robots with lasers
Status: Working prototype
Source:
Founders: Bastien, Nicolas, Lakshman
Why it’s cool:
Of course we want high-powered autonomous lasers charging drones! Probably you need a custom PV-cell with a specific band-gap, and a high-powered laser tracking your drone, but it should be doable. As long as no airplanes are in line-of-sight…
Molyon - Lithium-Sulfur batteries
Status: Very early
Source:
Founders: Ismail
Why it’s cool:
Theoretically a much energy density than regular lithium-ion batteries, but problems with mass-production. That’s basically the story of every battery startup out there. Maybe Molyon has solved it?
💡 Ideas & Science
Generative ML in chemistry is bottlenecked by synthesis
Finding new compounds is one thing, finding the synthesis paths is a totally different game. Chemistry is very messy. It’s literally often mixing things, stirring them and heating them in different orders. Of course chemists are doing their best to keep synthesis (aka creating a new compound out of others) as efficient as possible, but it’s very hard. And generating compounds that can be synthesized according to known synth-paths is difficult. Thus genAI for chemistry is bottlenecked by this.
An immersive read on data center cooling (see what I did there)
The government procurement monitoring substack Procure.fyi (we like niche-y) put out a 12 min read on the cooling for data center market and some of the key players. Big compute requires big heat rejection, and so data centers need to buy larger-scale cooling systems. It also covers the most common methods, like air and liquid cooling, but didn’t mention putting the data center in space and using molten metal to disperse heat via black-body radiation for some reason…
America’s supply chains are a disaster waiting to happen
It’s not looking great for supply chains. A series of guest posts on Noah Smiths substack outline exactly why the experts think that we’re headed for another 2020-2021 supply chain crunch with 111 freight containers stuck at sea because there weren’t any truck drivers. In short, our ability to create elastic and resilient supply chains hasn’t improved drastically in the last 4 years unfortunately.