SVRGN Weekly Digest #56 š«
Inflection's weekly digest of interesting people, companies and ideas
Everything is physics, and everything else is math.
š¤¼ People
Alexander Schubert - Partner at SciFounders
At a techbio dinner in Munich this week I was lucky enough to sit next to Alexander, we discussed West Coast vs. East Coast biotech funds, artificial embryos, and epigenetics. We also talked about the high signaling value of MD PhDs, and SF mindset.
š Companies
Stealth - Sampling biological reality through parallelized experiments
Status: Pre-seed
Source: Network
Founders: Stealth
Why itās cool:
Precision fermentation is growing by ~46% CAGR, it produces alternative proteins, enzymes, fats and molecules for pharma. However, scaling production and optimizing yield isnāt easily done. This company runs thousands of micro-experiments in parallel on bio-chips, essentially mL bioreactors, to sample from reality.
Bi-pedal stealth co - Long-range bi-pedal robotics
Status: Pre-seed
Source: EDTH
Founders: Stealth
Why itās cool:
Ostriches are pretty good runnersā¦ Bi-pedal robots are usually not that fast or energy efficient, so people put them on a wheeled platform. This team thinks theyāve figured out a mechanism for making them more scalable and flexible. Applications could be abound.
š” Ideas & Science
How prediction markets create harmful outcomes: a case study
Prediction markets: the beloved use case of crypto, though itās questionable how much of crypto is needed to run e.g., Polymarket. This is a pretty good criticism of some of the āharmful outcomesā of prediction markets by a high-performing forecaster. Incentivizing fraud, the production and spreading of misinformation and generally acting more like sports betting sites than futarchies. Co-incidentally, I earned my first bitcoin by participating in a forecasting contest in the early 2010s!
The AI energy bottleneck - Complex Systems podcast
Patrick McKenzie interviews Institute for Progressā Tim Fist about how AI is fundamentally bottlenecked by energy supply, both in chip production, but also in operation. My favorite idea from this interview was that even if AI progress stagnates here, the massive economic pressure in the AI buildout for achieving cheap energy likely leads to a full green transition. It might be solar+batteries, it might be geothermal, or something else, but itās being paid for by data centers.
In Pursuit of āSpace Control,ā USSF Gets First Upgraded Jammer
Space is being weaponized. Itās clearly a strategic priority, with a fairly consistent upwards trend since the 1950s. Weāre now seeing the first signs of Russian-designed Starshield (military Starlink)-targeting devices and likely capability of the Chinese to harm Western space assets. Luckily there is Lodestar Space and Radical Aero!