SVRGN Weekly Digest #58 💫
Inflection's weekly selection of people, companies and ideas
🤼 People
Ifa Reist, Lee Moser and Tal Kelman - Venture and General Partners at Protego Ventures
Ifa, Lee and Tal invited me to moderate a panel discussion around European Defense in Munich last week. They were doing a little roadshow for the first private Israeli defense venture fund. As former diplomats and 2nd in charge of the IDF Airforce, there were some good discussions in the room.
🚀 Companies
MagnetFab - High-precision Micromagnets
Status: Grant funded
Source: CAVI
Founders: Milan, Abdellatif
Why it’s cool:
Provider of high-performance micromagnets for semiconductor and microelectronics applications. Manufactures wafer-integrated permanent micromagnets at microscale for MEMS devices, biomagnetic sensors, and quantum computing components.
Voltrac - Autonomous, electric tractors
Status: Pre-Seed
Source: Network
Why it’s cool:
Fran and Tom are not part of the Inflection portfolio, but we are big fans of them and their work since 1y+. Fran built cruise missiles and hypersonics at Destinus previously, while Tom co-founded Extropic, the AI chip company out of SF.
With Voltrac they are rethinking how to build large, electrified autonomous ground vehicles, from the drive train upwards. One important impact of their platform, not covered as much in the publicity they received recently through The Next Web, is the potential impact on the battlefield of the future. With our investment in Ark Robotics, we’ve observed first-hand the impact of UGVs in Ukraine, and specifically the coordination of all kinds of autonomous systems on modern warfare. Ground robots have a very important place there. Just today, I was in Prague at our 10th European Defense Tech Hackathon in 11 months, and I spoke to a medic from the Ukrainian frontlines who said they have to use UGVs for medical evacuations and casualty evacuations because the front is controlled by Russian drones. ItIt’s too dangerous to send an ambulance or any type of personnel to retrieve the wounded, as the Russians specifically go after any medical support in order to increase their own lethality. This in itself is a violation of the Geneva convention, by the way. In Ukraine, they’re being modified according to needs, with brigade-level engineering teams welding and re-programming according to the mission needs. In the future, once we have a robust supply chain of crystalized designs that make sense, we’ll likely see modular platforms, similar to how modern car manufacturers have a “vehicle platform” that they share across models and brands. E.g., MQB (Modularer Querbaukasten) is one used by Volkswagen Golf, Škoda Octavia, Seat Leon, and Audi A3. One can vary wheelbase, track widths, and body style while maintaining the same mounting points.
Talking shortly about the difficulties of building useful UGVs, they need to be versatile, incredibly robust and modifiable. The versatility means having one platform that can be used for multiple use cases, in terms of range, conditions like mud, snow, low/high temperatures, etc.. Specifically for Europe, that means being able to handle Arctic conditions (-40 C and snow/ice) in the north as well as muddy swamps or rocky hills. Not necessarily all in one configuration, but at least it should be clear what conditions requires which adjustments. On the software side, we need everything from the mission planner to the world understanding and action planning to work, long-term. Short-term, it might be enough to have a robust enough fiber optic cable system for UGVs so that they can be operated in EW-denied environments.
With Voltrac, I think we’re seeing the early signs of the next generation of APCs, IFVs, maybe even main battle tanks, and certainly recovery and support vehicles. The simplicity of the components make sense, the approach to the software makes sense. Autonomy will come, Tom has worked on it most of his career. We just need to incorporate the feedback loops with military.
[REDACTED] - Brain organoid replacement
Status: Seed
Source: CAVI
Founders: [REDACTED]
Why it’s cool:
Growing brain organoids is difficult but could be very useful for replacing damaged parts of the brain, disease modeling, or just studying how the brain develops. Long-term, we might even be able to copy-paste our brain structures.
💡 Ideas & Science
Big projects go over budget and time almost always. It’s insane. Especially nuclear power plants, nuclear decommissioning projects and rail projects. Big solar, wind and road projects are modular and thus are easier to estimate, plan and execute. There’s an amazing researcher, Bent Flyvberg, who built up a data base of BIG projects globally to study them. One could argue a startup is a big project, or it should be at least…
Praha byla centrem inovací v obranném systému. Hlavní roli sehrály drony
I also don’t know what that means, but it’s what Czech media had to say about our most recent hackathon. Please check out the video to see a dubbed version of me speaking Czech! The other Czech TV-channel, CNN Prima and Czech Reuters picked up the story too.