SVRGN Weekly Digest #35 💫
SMRs, MPC, GLP and Mechazilla
🤼 People
Sylvain Bellemare - Researcher at IC3
Sylvain has contributed a lot of research to cryptophysics - aka. how to hide atoms aka. ensuring security through physics. We talked about the research to product to company pipeline, the future of crypto and academia. If you want to read up on what he’s doing, check out his recent preprint.
💼 Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
Systems Engineering Lead (Chinese/English bilingual) at Fabric
UX designer (freelance) for stealth company (dm us about it)
🚀 Companies
Stoffel MPC - framework for building expressive confidential blockchain applications using MPC
Status: Pre-seed
Source: Explore
Founders: Mikerah Quintyne-Collins
Why it’s cool:
Mikerah is a long-term friend of the fund and an even longer term contributor to the cryptography and blockchain space. She’s founded the security and cryptography agency Hashcloak previously, after receiving the equivalent of a Thiel fellowship from Vitalik to work on crypto. Stoffel is a company, and based on a library they’ve been developing for making MPC practical and dev-friendly.
STEALTH - EM field sensing
Status: Series A
Source: Discord
Founders: Stealth
Why it’s cool:
Proprietary tech that use electromagnetic field sensing instruments for things like AR/XR, robotics, security and more. They’re making a couple of $M ARR and are raising $50-100M. The tech could make out facial expressions by integration into glasses, capturing faces in full 3D at close proximity, or when attached to a tool, ensuring it stops when coming into contact with skin to name a few use cases.
Deep Atomic - Compact Nuclear Reactors, Purpose-Built for Compute
Status: Unknown, founded 2023
Source: CAVI
Founders: William Theron
Why it’s cool:
Nuclear for data centers make sense for the very large scale ones so far, with Microsoft and Amazon both putting down contracts locking in exclusive energy supply at ~$100/Wh from nuclear plants in Susquehanna (AWS) and Three Mile Island (Microsoft). It’s carbon free and doesn’t mess with the energy prices, it’s also great base load which can be complemented by solar or wind if needed. SMRs are still pretty undeveloped, but might be friendlier as there’s less capex, less nuclear material in one spot, and less space needed.
💡 Ideas & Science
It’s so cliché to be an Elon stan, but this week has been good for us. First the cybercab announcement (great branding, I’d much rather have my epitaph say “Hacked a cybercab and sped off into the sunset” than “Wacked in a waymo”), and then catching the super heavy booster with giant robot arms.
Ozempic is the cure to all disease
Ozempic is doing really well in the leaderboard for miracle drugs so far. US obesity as fallen in the last two years (potentially) as a result of it, 13% of Americans have used Ozempic, which is the Diabetes treatment version of the GLP-1 inhibitor. Besides diabetes and obesity, there are indications it’s helpful against addiction, Parkinsons, Alzheimer, and certain cancers!
Google spends more on compute than people
Traditionally, labor was the driver of cost in most projects (something to consider when investing in an area where talent is expensive), but there’s a shift as scaling laws seem to continue and we expect to get more labor out of compute than out of people going forward. Google and Microsoft each budget $30 and $50B in compute power. As Deepmind now contains more Nobel Prize winners than last week, then may have all the brain power they need, all that’s missing is TPUs.