SVRGN Weekly Digest #53 💫
Better late than never.
We are living in interesting times. Constant, “Will-they-won’t-they” on tariffs, cease-fires, mineral deals, suits. It’s exhausting. For the first time in my life I’ve spent more time being on podcasts than listening to them in the last weeks, as a consequence of lack of alone time and people apparently being interested in my opinion on things. Strange.
🤼 People
Martin Schilling - CEO at Deep Tech Momentum
Deep Tech Momentum is a deep tech conference and network in Berlin, and Martin founded it after Techstars Berlin. We discussed what the European deep tech ecosystem needs, what current topics of relevance are (surprise they intersect with our interests), and how to collaborate.
🚀 Companies
[REDACTED] - offline p2p money
Status: Idea/PoC
Source: Network
Founders: [REDACTED]
Why it’s cool:
Bitcoin is great, so are stablecoins. It’s clearly superior technology to traditional digital money. However, it’s not truly peer-to-peer. It always goes through a “node” and requires a global state update. What if we could have cryptographically secured, offline, digital cash? It would be private by default, work in all settings and be instantaneous. We could make it programmable without complex smart contracts or other scaffolding. All it requires is some very cool cryptography…
[REDACTED] - Wetlab on semiconductor
Status: pre-seed
Source: Network
Founders: PhDs in microfluidics
Why it’s cool:
We need to speed up the physical part of the learning loop. Especially in the biological and chemical realm. Why there? Because of the massive lag in physical loop vs digital loop. We can simulate and compute all we like, but if we don’t go closer to the actual physical reality and work on accelerating that part of the loop we’re not going to achieve much.
EMF Space - Space-based power to earth
Status: pre-raise
Source: Discord
Founders: Dan CaJacob, Eric Haengel
Why it’s cool:
Normally, the efficiency of reflecting sunlight onto earthly solar farms is iffy. EMF however, want to collect solar in high orbit 24/7, convert it to laser, and beam it in to earth, supplying solar farms with illumination. If this works, it’s very cool. Scale will be hard.
💡 Ideas & Science
Meta’s brain-to-text tech is here
Meta and the Basque Center on Brain, Cognition and Language have been working on decoding brain signals, training an AI model on it and then using it to better predict thoughts/words. It’s interesting, doesn’t seem ready yet, but along side a couple of other interesting initiatives we’re seeing it’s heading towards an inflection point in human-machine interfaces.
Microsoft’s topological qubit that wasn’t, maybe?
You may have read/heard about Majorana, Microsofts 1-qubit chip. It made splashes, Satya Nadella came on the Dwarkesh Podcast and the results looked promising. However, there are reasons to be skeptical. Henry Legg (University of St Andrews) argues that Microsoft’s topological gap protocol for detecting Majorana zero modes is vulnerable to false positives, undermining the foundation of their qubit design. Peer reviewers of Microsoft’s Nature paper also noted it provides no conclusive proof of MZMs, only "findings that might enable future experiments", which you know, surprise! Media overstated research implications and company didn’t correct them!
Microsoft also had to retract a Nature paper on this in 2018 due to data manipulation…
Space Force general: ‘Golden Dome’ missile shield requires Manhattan Project-scale effort
Remember Space Force, it’s not just a Netflix show, they actually exist and do… real things. Presumably. Just kidding, we know the Space domain will continue to be very important for national security. Partially hence our investment in Lodestar. A Golden Dome is not related to Trumps adventures in Moscow in the 80s, but rather an American Iron Dome (of course it’s golden) to protect against any aerial threat to the CONUS. And it will be expensive and difficult, says guy in charge of requesting budget for it and building it, General Michael Guetlein.