SVRGN Weekly Digest #50 💫
don't BCC the CCP, supersonics and hyper-hypes
🤼 People
Jeanine Graat - EMEA manager at Ultimaker
My new slogan is “Don’t BCC the CCP” and part of that is not supporting/working with chinese component manufacturers, or in this case 3D printing companies. Ultimaker supplies printers to the Dutch Navy and are expanding into defense/dual use applications, where data is highly critical.
TL;DR
don’t print sensitive stuff on your Bambuu printer (it will send your data to Xi).
Exactly 0 ppl said they’d be sad if I stopped pushing portfolio jobs here so I’ll stop doing it. Visit our jobs board yourselves instead
🚀 Companies
Aiurion - self-optimizing laser powder bed fusion pipelines
Status: Raising seed
Source: CAVI
Founders: in assemblage apparently
Why it’s cool:
3D printing for more than prototyping is real, (see EOS and Solideon) but pretty niche still. Maybe Aiurion (please change names though) can change that?
[redacted] - OSS supply chain security
Status: pre-funding
Source: network
Founders: ex-gov cyber sec. + ex-CISO
Why it’s cool:
We see an inflection point in software vulnerabilities and attacks within the open source software stack, and at the same time massive reliance (and AI training) on OSS. There should be an incentive to build a business in here.
Fractal Brain - new foundation models
Status: Probably raised 100M pre-seed /s
Source: CAVI
Founders: Filip Filipinski
Why it’s cool:
All in on RL since DeepSeek dropped of course, and now I see more people are working on this area! What are the odds. JK, RL was always cool.
💡 Ideas & Science
After the American airline companies blocked a decidedly European supersonic company from flying cross country in the US 40+ years ago, probably through some dealings with the FAA, there’s finally a homegrown, US-domiciled supersonic commercial company! Boom Supersonic flew the XB-1 “Baby boom” above Mach 1 last week. It’s progress and a shot at getting across the world without massive pains! Read more at Ashlee Vance’s substack.
The Short Case for Nvidia Stock
Reportedly Meta set up an emergency response unit to DeepSeek’s revelation. NVIDIA tanked and people panicked, meanwhile Satya teaches the world about Jevon’s paradox. If you want an in-depth analysis check out SemiAnalysis thoughts on the topic. Tl;dr: it cost more than $6M to pre-train. Personally, I think DeepSeek was priced in (because why the hell not, it wasn’t a secret) and there conflation between early knowledge of massive tariffs about to come and an open-source GPT-4o equivalent model.
Meta’s hyperscaler infrastructure
How to build a massive data-center, as told by Meta. No one objects to vertical integration. The article is a bit much corporate-speak for my taste, but reminds us of the staggering scale at which these (US) companies operate. Up to a million servers per region…
A hype movie about all the cool aerospace companies in the US and the force of all the talent flowing in and out of SpaceX, by Jason Carman (formerly S3, now Story and Science). New Space as a category was created by SpaceX, not NASA, not Boeing, and certainly not by ESA/Ariane. Starlink is growing like crazy, and Europe struggles to do 10 launches a year. China ramps up capacity, while practicing how to take down satellites with rockets.