SVRGN Weekly Digest #29 đ«
Re-energized, replenished, recharged, call it whatever you like, but weâre back and weâre excited for what 2024 has in store for us still!
Some happy news: our portfolio company Fabric Cryptography announced their $33M Series A raise! Check out the coverage in Forbes, TechCrunch and their own thread.
We co-led their Seed round in 2023 and have been working with the team closely since 2022. Theyâve come a long way and are coming out as the most versatile, most performant hardware for cryptography out there. The âNVIDIA of cryptographyâ vision is made possible by the insane pace of execution and close co-design with expert cryptographers and leading partners. Huge congrats to Michael, Tina, Sagar and the team! Weâre very proud to be part of the journey.
Read more in our SVRGN piece on Fabric Cryptography â
đ€ŒÂ People
Weâre still mostly staying focused and limiting meetings to the absolutely necessary this week, so not so many exciting conversations to report on yet. But, conference season is startingâŠ
Benjamin Wolba - Founder at European Defense Tech Hub, writer of Future of Computing, ex-VC at Lunar.
Benjamin was part of organizing the European defense tech hackathon, and now weâre collaborating further on the launch of the European Defense Tech Hub in Munich. More on this, future events and content to come soon!
đŒ Portfolio jobs board
This weeks selection of opportunities from the portfolio:
Various Applied Researcher positions at Fabric
đ Companies
Pioniq - novel materials for energy storage
Status: Pre-seed by Quantonation
Source: CAVI
Founders: Brigitte, Rémi, Clément
Why itâs cool:
Weâll need insane amounts of batteries for the level of electrification that is expected. They should be relatively cheap, mass-produceable, long-lasting and weâll need different kinds to cover the time spans of energy storage our grid will expect. Pioniq seems to be on something with new materials to potentially help develop new systems with more certainty than your regular battery startup (who usually famously struggle to scale efficiency).
Palet - A web browser that does things
Status: Stealth
Source: CAVI
Founders: Stealth
Why itâs cool:
Weâre surfing the web like itâs 1995, only faster. Computing and content could have diverged more by now from its origins but weâre stuck in a future of bland landing pages. Arc has done a hot to shake things up with itâs âBrowse for meâ feature in Arc Search, Arc Max and auto pre-view summaries. Maybe soon weâre at the stage where we can generate a webpage at the same speed and quality that we can serve it.
đĄÂ Ideas & Science
What is the future business model of content creation? Being a writer on the internet means something, but itâs rarely something that pays your bills. Weâre fans of Every.to âs writing and creativity in incorporating tech in great writing. In the âMaster Planâ they lay out how to reach beyond the confines of expectation on âbloggersâ or content creators, etc. to build a real business.
Axiomatic by Greg Egan
Axiomatic is a series of sci-fi short stories from 1995 but incredible prescient technologically, and with amazing mind-twisting concepts. For anyone who sat in a maths/physics/CS/chemistry lecture and wondered âhow could we live this concept of [countable infinity/many-world interpretation/neural nets]?â. Greg Egan gives an (often horrifying) version of that future. It raises. questions around morality and technology, but also philosophical questions around our consciousness and integration with technology.