Better late than never, after an intense but energizing week we’d like to share some of our highlights with you all!
🤼 People
James Lee - CEO and founder of Wave photonics
After a PhD in quantum information systems and a short stint in quant finance, James went off to found Wave photonics - revolutionizing how photonic elements in integrated circuits are designed. We had a great conversation spanning bitcoin’s utility and the future of chips as well as quantum computing.
Tom Schulz - Co-founder of AQAL Capital
Tom founded the company that “brought the internet to Germany” aka, the first nationwide, German, ISP and has the accompanying experience of someone who founded and exited multiple companies across internet infrastructure, media and energy. As an active angel he invests early checks in business that make a change for good.
🚀 Companies - Crypto x AI edition
One observation of the last couple of months is the massive increase in companies working in the intersection of crypto and AI. If this is driven by AI hype, crypto prices looking better than in 2023, Vitalik’s post on the subject or a fundamental interest in the space is unclear. We’re happy to have been part of this with our investments in Modulus, Tune insight, as well as the hackathon we organized last year - Augment. Hence, this week we’re bringing a couple of early stage companies at the intersection of crypto(/-graphy) and AI.
Here’s a landscape of a few more or less established ones by our friend (and co-organizer of augment), Richard Blythman:
AwesomeQA - community management
Status: First funding round done and revenues
Source: Munich ecosystem
Founders: Korbinian and Alexander Abstreiter (Brothers)
Why it’s cool:
Korbi and Alex are young, dedicated startup founders who ran a podcast when searching for what to do next. They bootstrapped their way to early revenues doing automated community management through bots. The crypto-relation is that their initial market is DAO communities. Strong product loved by scroll, dune, and others.
AssetShield - Autonomous multisig signer
Status: Waitlist
Source: CAVI
Founders: ?
Why it’s cool:
Automate annoying multisig signing, implement an additional security fail safe with an AI that actually “understands” the transaction. Could we actually make organizations fully autonomous? This would need to be one piece of the puzzle. Question marks on observability and trusted hosting, but interesting direction.
First Batch - Collaboration and user-centric tools for safe AGI
Status: ?
Source: CAVI
Founders: Kerim Carioca, Ömer Demirtas , Efe Bulduk
Why it’s cool:
A common, shared layer for memory of AI is, at least high-level a great fit for decentralization. They have a great interactive timeline on advances in AI (who can keep up anymore?). There seems to be multiple products brewing, we’ll be keeping our eyes open for what’s next!
💡 Ideas & Science
Inverting three key relationships in computing
The three principles are: “Services comes to the data (instead of data going to services)”, “Guardrails on data use are attached to data (instead of each service individually permissioned)”, and “Trust originates at the edges (instead of services deciding which clients they trust)”. This one is a longer one, but well worth a read!
This is such an awesome tool for generating wiki-tree structures or knowledge trees. Revolutionizes how we learn new topics and place them in context. We’ve thought about and experimented with similar things internally ;)
That’s it for this week! Please do let us know if you like or dislike these weekly digests through a comment below.