These past weeks have been intense. We hosted over 500 people at our hackathons in Amsterdam and Warsaw, kicked off our incubation program for the defense tech hub, launched a new [REDACTED], and closed a few deals.
In the meantime, we’ve been doing some deep research on a couple of topics, which we’re going to be publishing soon on Kepler.
🤼 People
Jamie Croucher - Founder of Society for Technological Advancement
Jamie is now also an Officer for capabilities with NATO DIANA, but prior to that he started the SOTA, which is focused on advancing society through technology and science. Shouldn’t be a hard sell but surprisingly it’s one-of-a-kind org. We talked about high agency people and cultures, and how to further progress and abundance. He’s working on an important hackathon around rebooting state capacity in London on the 26-27th of April.
Danielle Strachman - Founding team member of the Thiel Fellowship, and Founder and GP of 1517 Fund
Danielle is a teacher who started an own charter school, then continued helping young talent through the Thiel Fellowship, now 15 years ago. Then she launched the 1517 Fund. We had a great conversation about [REDACTED] and how to identify truly exceptional people. In a podcast interview she said VCs wouldn’t give the Thiel Fellows the time of day, until they launched the 1517 Fund and showed that it was interesting from a venture perspective.
🚀 Companies
Axonic - Ozempic for sleep
Status: Pre-seed
Source: Network
Founders: Helena Rosengarten and Isaak Freeman
Why it’s cool:
Imagine you don’t have to sleep as much, but still feel replenished. Without negative effects! What a productivity gain for humanity his could be, basically reducing our unnecessary down-time from 7-8h to 4-6h! Helena and Isaak are on to something here, great examples of people who just can’t not do something.
DeepGate - Bit-level intelligence
Status: Unknown
Source: CAVI
Founders: Christian Taylor
Why it’s cool:
Deepgate is building energy-efficient AI systems by embedding intelligence at the logic gate level, aiming to drastically lower energy use and enhance inference speed. Targets significant reduction in energy consumption required for AI systems while also increasing the speed of AI inference.
The Electric Plant Co - Plant intelligence
Status: Seed
Source: CAVI
Founders: Lee M. von Kraus, Justin Mast
Why it’s cool:
Plant intelligence technology company developing bioware systems to capture and interpret electrochemical signals from plants. Creates AI models to decode plant data for environmental monitoring and climate adaptation applications.
New concepts unlocked: Cyborg Botany, Techno-Biophilia and Hildegard of Bingen.
💡 Ideas & Science
Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror
Mimetic contagion, as a concept from Rene Girard, is the worst at University. Young, impressionable minds within a context of zero-sum, top-of-class, scholarship students all choosing approximately the same paths. Of my engineering physics class, a very large amount went to consulting, almost no one founded a company. How can we make young people choose more for themselves?
“I’ll end with a quote from I See Satan Fall Like Lightning: “Mimetic desire enables us to escape from the animal realm. It is responsible for the best and the worst in us, for what lowers us below the animal level as well as what elevates us above it. Our unending discords are the ransom of our freedom.””
The State of Photonic Computing<2025>
Lawrence of Lunar ventures has published another great overview article on the state of photonic computing. Tl;dr: memory is still in its infancy, but we are already seeing early signs of adoption. It’s also increasingly interesting due to European sovereignty and applications in contested EM environments.
America Is Missing The New Labor Economy – Robotics Part 1
Semianalysis goes deep on robotics and the supply chain of manufacturing. China has continued to invest in automation way beyond any other country. “[…] China pivoted and increased their robotics installation by 44% from 2020-2021 in order to implement automation to make up for the lack of a workforce.”