SVRGN Weekly Digest #38 💫
Superconductors, defense reformation, data centers, laundry folding robots
🤼 People
Full team offsite at inflection.xyz
This week the full inflection team got together. Being a remote team, we do our best to still make time for strategy off-sites twice a year. They usually consist of very intense work sessions coupled with less serious social activities. It’s a great way to check in on our own progress, reflect on where the world is at, and set high level goals for the coming 6-12 months. Each time, I personally feel very grateful for my colleagues, that we get to work together in building inflection, and couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come.
💼 Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
CTO/founding engineer at stealth wearable company (dm me)
🚀 Companies
Suprema Tape - Superconducting REBCO material
Status: pre-seed
Source: CAVI
Founders: Andrea, Fabio, Francesco
Why it’s cool:
Superconductors are pretty useful almost anywhere. It’s a fairly horizontal technology in fact. But in particular, fusion reactors, quantum computers, electrical grid, and novel sensing equipment might be most interesting application areas. REBCO stands for Rare Earth Barium Copper Oxide which has a crystalline structure that enables the superconducting properties at relatively high temperatures and in strong magnetic fields (as in fusion reactors). If Suprema can manufacture them at scale that’s a pretty good business.
Sine Engineering - Communication and positioning platform for UAVs in contested environments
Status: at war
Source: CAVI
Founders: Andriy, Andriy, Sasha
Why it’s cool:
Nothing tests if your drone is EW-resistant and can navigate autonomously better than having the latest Russian tools thrown at it. It’s a fairly hot topic these days, with a multitude of companies working on drone autonomy, from the large (Anduril, Shield, Helsing) to the smaller ones in Ukraine. They’ve also got a pretty awesome website.
Central Axis - Data center planning
Status: so fresh (founder quit her job 2 weeks ago)
Source: CAVI
Founders: Margarita Roisman
Why it’s cool:
Data centers will not get smaller, latency will grow, amounts of copper and other conductors will grow, total power usage will grow, you get the point. These massive amounts of new data centers will need planning, optimal placement, cooling, and loads of energy. It seems CentralAxis is working on software to manage planning, load balancing, cooling and power.
💡 Ideas & Science
Physical intelligence published some pretty cool demo’s of very boring tasks (cf. last week’s “most boring video game ever”). But still, an autonomous robot is folding laundry! It’s cleaning up a table! They’re still working on locomanipulation, but have gotten really far using a generalist model with fine-tuned specialized “laundry folding” models.
Palantir has been in the government contracting business for 20 odd years and now have third largest market cap of any US prime. CTO Shyam Sankar nails his 18 theses to the internet church wall. We’re in a hot cold war, whether you like it or not. And in spite of all other priorities, we should prepare for a hot hot war. Strategically speaking, deterrence won’t come from nuclear bombs alone anymore. The U.S. (and Europe) is facing a national security crisis and must reform its defense industrial base to regain deterrence.
Infineon gives a great overview of power demand in data centers due to AI. Worth a listen.
Optical computing breakthrough addresses (is that a pun?) memory limitations
Photonic computing sounds great (super fast, energy efficient computation) until you think of the fact that most of the time and energy in stupid old special sand computers (aka silicon) is spent locating and moving data in and out of memory. How do you store light? By using ring resonators to produce magnetic fields, they can steer the speed of light with light. This could be a massive breakthrough for nonvolatile memory.
The Ukraine-Russia conflict (read invasion), is a war like non other we’ve encountered in the importance of digital technologies and civilians’ (the hackers) ability to contribute to the success of each side. The cat-and-mouse game between drone builders and EW experts is moving fast. The hackers on both sides are literal keyboard warriors.