SVRGN Weekly Digest #37 💫
SRAM, cleaning robots and building a home for compute
The EU-inc project is already the largest grassroots startup movement in European history, but please sign it anyway HERE.
🤼 People
Anders Berglund - CEO at Xenergic
Xenergic pitched at Intel Ignite for the last session of pitches, just ahead of the closing party of Ignite, and Anders was representing. Xenergic has been building IP for speeding up SRAM since 2017 and are currently raising a new round. Anders is a fellow engineering physicist; we chatted about the need for more young people to just build things. Agency is everything.
💼 Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
HW/EE CTO at defense stealth co (dm me)
🚀 Companies
Somatic - Cleaning robots
Status: Series A
Source: Googling “Toilet robots”
Founders: Michael Levy, Eugene Zasoba
Why it’s cool:
The most widely deployed robot today is already a cleaning robot - the Roomba. Why should we limit ourselves to vacuuming? This allows remote operators to “play the worst video game ever” where they clean bathroom stalls in office buildings across the US, while gathering training data. At least you don’t have to get your hands dirty.
Openmind - Open, safe machine intelligence
Status: Very early (tm)
Source: CAVE
Founders: Jan Liphardt and Paige
Why it’s cool:
Jan Liphardt published a piece on why AGI will use crypto (so why shouldn’t you?) which is great. Another reason why this seems like an interesting approach is that they take a decentralized, self-governed approach to safety. Very curious to see how this is implemented!
💡 Ideas & Science
How to build the future of AI (in the US)
Most people agree we’ll be doing more compute going forward. Boring consensus, but still likely true. (Disagree? tell us why at contact @ our url). The large strategic question is: how to keep it safe and produce it locally? Who doesn’t want organic, home-grown compute if you can! As outlined by Leopold Aschenbrenner in the Situational Awareness essay, among others, it’s also a massive security topic. Think-tank, Institute for Progress, thinks about how this tank is gonna roll in the US.
If you didn’t have time to listen to Daniel Yergin’s 2h podcast with Dwarkesh which we featured some weeks ago, maybe try speed-reading this 500-page book. Especially the history of fracking and the geopolitical implications of energy are great sections. Climate change is covered extensively, but also the massive acceleration to society induced by the utilization of oil and gas. I learnt a lot about exploration and the extent of national investment into developing these assets. The later chapters on battery energy density improvements and Tesla’s rise are probably less informative for most tech people.
Cofounder mode - A Tactical Guide to Finding a Cofounder
Finding a cofounder isn’t easy. You might be lucky and have a bunch of friends with all the right skills and interests, but if you don’t here’s a guide!
Stripe acquires Bridge.xyz for $1.1B
👀 This is overall great. Stablecoins are killer apps and it makes sense Stripe makes an acquisition in the space.