SVRGN Weekly Digest #7 💫
New materials, application security, Dencun and data center goes nuclear
Happy confusing week where the US has entered summer time and Europe is still in daylight savings!
🤼 People
Simon Pastor - Associate at Entrepreneur First
Simon was part of the instigating force for the defense tech hackathon in El Segundo, organized by EF and 8VC among others. People flew in from all over the country to hack on important tech. Gundo, being home to some of the most important hardware startups in the US such as Anduril, Picogrid, Castelion, and Epirus.
🚀 Companies
Astroteq.ai - Predicting earthquakes 12 days in advance
Status: Grant funded
Source: Intel
Founders: Itamar Zabari, Noemi Zabari, Kevin Cheminant
Why it’s cool:
Earthquakes cause massive havoc and destruction like few other things. Lives upended and cities reduced to rubble, but many of the casualties happen after the event due to the destruction of critical infrastructure and access to housing, energy and clean water. If we can evacuate and prepare days in advance compared to 12 seconds (as it is today), then lives can be saved.
Polaron - Advanced materials engineering
Status: Spin-out from Imperial
Source: CAVI
Founders: Isaac Squires, Steve Kench
Why it’s cool:
Look beyond the buzzy GenAI terms and underneath there’s real advance in optimizing and finding new materials using computational methods.
Staris AI - Comprehensive application security
Status: Just out of stealth
Source: CAVI
Founders: Andrew Becherer, Adam Cecchetti, Austin Fath
Why it’s cool:
“Human based defense is dead. Staris is reinventing application security for an increasingly AI driven world. The future promised by generations of security automation is finally achievable. We use generative agents to eliminate the undifferentiated manual toil that has limited the scope and effectiveness of security assessment.”
Volonaut - Flying motorbikes
Status: In R&D
Source: CAVI
Founders: Tomasz Patan
Why it’s cool:
Do we really have to say why jet-driven motorbikes are cool?
💡 Ideas & Science
Every rational person is convinced of the the merits of nuclear as a carbon-free, safe energy source. Amazon is following Microsofts lead and is now also showing their commitment to nuclear power, as they bought a data center campus for $650M power entirely by one of the US largest nuclear power plants.
Introducing Chain Abstraction Key Elements - by Frontier.tech
The roll-up centric roadmap is killing the UX of crypto. Moving assets between solana and base requires buying different underlying assets and paying for bridging fees in native tokens. Users don’t care, they just want it to be secure and seamless. Just like how they don’t care if the web app is hosted on GCP or AWS, users shouldn’t have to care what L2 the app is on. Chain abstraction to the rescue.
CHIPS TO COMPUTE WITH ENCRYPTED DATA ARE COMING
Michael Gao, CEO and founder of portfolio company, Fabric, is quoted in this article from IEEE on the tech trends for 2024. “Gao founded Fabric Cryptography after leaving his previous startup, an optical computing company called Luminous that sought to accelerate AI. Impressed and a little concerned with the amount of data his customers had, Gao wanted to see what encrypted computing could do about maintaining people’s privacy while still helping businesses benefit from the information. The result is a chip that Fabric expects to be in mass production within the year.”
Ethereum’s Dencun upgrade is nearing
Ethereum scaling is highly dependent on roll-ups, as per the “roll-up centric” roadmap. Even though transaction fees are 3-100x cheaper on L2s than the base chain, it’s still too high for some use cases. And much of the cost is related to data storage. One key feature of the upcoming Dencun upgrade is "proto-danksharding," which involves the introduction of data "blobs" to reduce transaction costs for rollups and increase transaction throughput on Ethereum. Proto-Danksharding introduces a new transaction type called a "blob-carrying transaction," leading to lower transaction costs for both Layer-2 users and operators.