John Cowan

The recent CCA program award to Anduril highlights a vital case study for VCs on navigating defense acquisitions and gauging startup maturity from a government perspective. Typically, startups begin with SBIR awards, but the award’s utility varies across agencies, offering weak signal for investors. Anduril’s initial SBIR in 2019 was for $50K; at Machina Labs we secured our first SBIR in 2020 for over double that amount. However, many firms disappear at this stage, so Phase 1 SBIRs are not strong indicators for VC investment; they mainly serve to de-risk tough scientific and technical challenges. Progressing to Phase 2 SBIR, which focuses on commercial viability, both Anduril and Machina have advanced, using this stage to further de-risk engineering for commercial use. Importantly, funding for Phases 1 and 2 often does not indicate product-market fit as it does not typically come directly from the customer’s budget but is more accessible than other government funds. The narrative changes with Phase 3, which is geared toward actual technology acquisition and is a robust indicator of market fit. Both Anduril and Machina, as well as Blue Force Tech (BFT is the company Anduril acquired last year and developed their CCA), have secured Phase 3 awards, suggesting strong government interest in these technologies. To bridge the gap to program of records (like CCA program), which the government budgets for two years in advance, transition funding mechanisms such as STRATFI or APFIT are used. Anduril and BFT have had those. We are working with our customers to secure that. Anduril made a very smart move and strategically acquired BFT, which was likely ahead in that two years to program of records to expedite this transition, killing two birds with one stone, gaining hardware expertise and an accelerated path to funding. In summary, we at Machina Labs are perhaps a couple of years behind Anduril but are aggressively pursuing technology development and scale to meet and exceed our customers’ needs. That being said, nothing is guaranteed with government funding, but we are working very hard with our customers to earn their business. So far, they seem to be happy with us. Keep in mind we have had fraction of the private funding Anduril has gotten to date but going toe to toe in meeting government need! Disclaimer: I am not a government funding expert and my comments only stems from my specific understanding of government acquisition process from tech startups shaped by my experience at Machina. Applogzie if there are any unintentional mistakes

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🌱 Ecosystem builders, it's time to unlock the power of federal funding! The latest the ecosystem builder's edge newsletter is a game-changer. This in-depth guide demystifies federal funding opportunities, including: ✨ Top federal agencies to know (EDA, SBA, NSF + more!) ✨ Strategies for securing matching funds ✨ Step-by-step tips for grant newcomers ✨ Building a sustainable funding mix Whether you're new to federal grants or a seasoned pro, this newsletter is a must-read. Subscribe now and gain the insights to fuel your ecosystem initiatives! 👉 https://lnkd.in/eMMFfm6r Stay ahead of the curve and unlock a world of possibilities with the Ecosystem Builder's Edge. Funding freedom is just a click away! #EcosystemBuilding #FederalGrants #FundtheFuture

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Excited to announce Lagrange Labs' $13.2M seed round, led by Founders Fund, with support from Archetype, 1kx, Maven 11, Fenbushi Capital, Volt Capital, CMT Digital, Mantle Network Ecosystem Fund, and various angels. Read More: https://lnkd.in/gvxFPH_B Lagrange was founded almost two years ago with the vision of using zero-knowledge proofs to expand the design space of applications that could be built onchain. We saw a simple problem: Developers could not securely use historical or cross-chain state. The name “Lagrange” was inspired by mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who discovered Lagrange Points, positions of equilibrium in space between two celestial body systems. These points of equilibrium were the perfect analogy for trustless interoperability in crypto. While Lagrange has moved away from being a purely cross-chain focused company, the name remains, as does our goal of bringing equilibrium and stability to onchain applications. The original vision of secure interoperability still lives on within our State Committee protocol. As we’ve progressed, we have crystallized our mission: to unlock new types of data-intensive and cross-chain applications by enabling verifiable computation over blockchain data at a ‘big data’ scale. The way we achieve this is through our hyper-parallel ZK Coprocessor. Over the past few months we’ve hit a number of major milestones as a company: • Launching Lagrange State Committees as the first ZK AVS on @eigenlayer mainnet. Hitting over $5 billion in restaked ETH after only 3 weeks. • The Lagrange State Committees have generated over 30,000 state proofs and have finalized 2,000,000 blocks. • Launching our first ZK Coprocessor testnet, ‘Euclid’. We’ve currently generated over 400,000 proofs at a growing rate of 127,000 proofs per week. • Launching our infrastructure as a decentralized network with 40+ node operators. • Our first paper, Reckle Trees, authored by Charalampos Papamanthou, Shravan Srinivasan, Nicolas Gailly and Andrus S. from our team was accepted into both CCS’2024 and SBC’2023. More to come soon 🤫 None of our progress would be possible if it wasn’t for the team behind Lagrange. A special thank you to the whole Lagrange family whose tireless work brought us to this point. Thank you to all of our friends, partners and investors who have supported Lagrange in getting here. We have an ambitious roadmap ahead of us this year and we look forward to achieving it all of you on our team.

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This is a great article talking about the success of current programs and where VPPs are going in the future - distributed, real-time, granular. Real-time telemetry is possible today - you can find out what your customer loads are doing at this moment by leveraging smart meter data. https://lnkd.in/ghEVHD9B

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Whose building a modern expert network leveraging the latest technology? Who is building the equivalent of what Tegus built years ago? Something that will disrupt the current expert network providers? There is so much to be done with AI that I imagine their are many unique expert networks being built.

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This was a great conversation with a great partner, Neo4j. If you want to hear more about the collision of knowledge graphs and gen AI, see the information below! #ExplainableAI #TrustworthyAI #KnowledgeGraphs

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We’ve seen countless buzzwords come and go. “AIOps” is the latest in a long line of catchy but ultimately misguided terms that fail to capture the true potential of AI in the world of IT ops and observability. The observability market has been fragmented for years, with leading vendors like Datadog, New Relic, and Splunk rarely capturing more than 20% market share. Why? Because fundamentally, observability has been treated as a big data problem rather than an intelligence problem. Why is there an opportunity to change this paradigm now? LLMs offer a unified approach to data understanding. Their ability to process and correlate heterogeneous data types – logs, metrics, and traces – in their raw formats breaks down some of the silos that have plagued observability. The transformer architecture underlying LLMs excels at capturing long-range dependencies, crucial for understanding system-wide patterns. LLMs also bring the power of zero-shot and few-shot meaning they can adapt to new failure modes without extensive retraining, addressing the perennial issue of concept drift in rapidly evolving systems. Beware the technical challenges: LLMs currently struggle with both tabular and time series data, common formats in observability. Although we anticipate that innovations in newer architectures, multimodality, and multi-agent systems will mitigate some of these challenges over time, near-term solutions will require creative workarounds from builders. Read more on our point of view below! Foundation Capital https://lnkd.in/grqHXNMF

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Hold On—Did You Know You're Now Paying 35.8% in Telecom Taxes? It's hard to believe, but the FCC just announced that the Universal Service Fund (USF) tax is now a whopping 35.8%. That's 36 cents for every dollar spent on telecommunications services! Are you ready to explore ways to minimize this impact on your business? Let’s talk. 👇 👇 👇 #TechIndustry #taxrate #telecomtaxes #businessnews #technews

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Community-based health is transforming...learn about the strategic shift from grant-based to sustainable Medicaid funding models for community organizations in our latest blog. A vital shift for long-term success!

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After eight years of operating in "stealth mode" Travis Kalanick's City Storage Systems is ready to talk. Yesterday, Kalanick took the stage at the annual Food On Demand conference to give a rare keynote about the various businesses within the CSS constellation, namely Otter, CloudKitchens, and Lab37 kitchen automation. CSS' vision is to build the infrastructure that enables the "Internet Food Court" of the future, where highly convenient, personalized food delivery is price competitive with the cost of cooking. CloudKitchens boasts over 400 facilities in 30+ countries while Otter touches ~15% of all third-party delivery sales. The presentation underscored Kalanick's obsession with digitizing the physical world, sucking out all of the inefficiencies out of the legacy marketplace model which he described as a "luxury priced product that has a mediocre or worse experience." Despite the company's massive footprint, its success will hinge on whether operators will subscribe to its walled garden of software, services, and real estate. Will they bite? Full story on HNGRY Trends 👇 https://lnkd.in/dMv5yY5D #ghostkitchens #restauranttech #foodtech #startup #realestate #logistics #fooddelivery #marketplaces #restaurant #qsr #restaurantindustry

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Friday marked the first major milestone for our team at Version2.ai in proving that fully autonomous fundraising, powered by #artificialintelligence, is possible. Dan Frezza and the team at College of Charleston introduced their #autonomous #fundraiser directly to two donors to help guide them through their gift journeys. Both #donors interacted with the autonomous fundraiser and made gifts directly in response to the interactions. With these positive results, we've now proven that it’s possible for an autonomous fundraiser to #solicit and close a gift. We've also proven that there are a set of donors who are willing to work with an autonomous fundraiser to make their gift. While we recognize this is a narrow test on an extremely small subset of donors, this is the very beginning of proving that autonomous fundraising is a viable fundraising solution. If we were trying to prove that a spaceship could leave earth, land on the Mars and return to earth, this would be the equivalent of the spaceship lifting off the ground by just an inch and landing intact. It’s a small step, but it’s a giant leap forward for our industry. This week, we will be testing ways that the autonomous fundraiser can work with small portfolios of LYBUNTS to solicit annual unrestricted end-of-year gifts. Our goal is to prove that autonomous fundraisers can, without human intervention, receive opt-in permission from donors to work with AI and guide these donors through end-of-year gift solicitations with the natural outcome being gifts closing by June 30. As part of these tests, we are also trying out new perception-enabled learning technology and methods that give the autonomous fundraiser the ability to understand and learn what the donor really cares about supporting (Scholarship, Athletics, Student life, etc.). The ability for the autonomous fundraiser to learn this information from a direct, first-hand donor response will have a lasting impact on its ability to scale hyper-personalized experiences for every donor in the future. Getting this right will be crucial to its effectiveness. Leading these tests are Meghan Dauler Palombo, the Associate Vice President for Annual Giving & Philanthropic Engagement at William & Mary and Laurie Soenen, Executive Director of Advancement Services at College of Charleston. Both Meghan and Laurie will be working directly with our team to conclusively prove that autonomous AI is able to sit alongside fundraising staffs, particularly at the busiest times of year. The hope is that this technology can help amplify the efforts of #fundraising staffs across the country who are all working tirelessly to close end of year gifts. Special thank you to Dan Frezza, Matthew Lambert, Meghan Dauler Palombo, Bruce Aird, and Laurie Soenen for your leadership, partnership and courage to be the first to explore what's possible. We’ll be announcing the results of our tests and key learnings next week. Stay tuned.

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🌟 New Client Announcement: Dufferin County’s Best Practice Application of Localintel's Tools 🌟 Thrilled to share that County of Dufferin has harnessed Localintel Economic Development's data visualization tools to craft a captivating new page on their website, showcasing the county's strengths to attract businesses, site selectors and talent. Here are the 4 tools from Localintel' catalog featured on their new pitch page: - Community Profile: Offers a comprehensive snapshot of the county, including demographic and socioeconomic data. - Logistics and Accessibility Advantages: Highlights Dufferin County's strategic location and transportation infrastructure. - Workforce Advantages: Details the skills, education, and availability of the local workforce. - Quality of Life Advantages: Promotes what makes living in the county special. By leveraging these tools, Dufferin County has created an engaging experience for potential investors, emphasizing the county’s business-friendly environment. Excited to see the positive impact on their economic development efforts! 👉 Visit Dufferin County's new pitch page to explore these tools in action: https://lnkd.in/gxB7H_Zq

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Venture capitalists have poured billions into defense tech startups, but the U.S. government seems hesitant to take the plunge. Is it a lack of trust or just a fear of commitment? Is this a case of "innovation theater" or a missed opportunity for national security? Either way, this mismatch could dampen the innovation we need to stay ahead in the global arena. #SiliconValley #DefenseTech #GovernmentContracts #VentureCapital #EmergingTech https://lnkd.in/gSjCP6TU

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Lots of interesting data points in this report, but the bit on "false election contributions" caught my eye as the political cycle hits hyperdrive here in the US (and other places). But it wasn't what I thought. I'd imagined from the write-up that this was tricking people into actually donating somewhere else or somehow exceeding donation limits, etc. It's much simpler: attackers are pretending to ask for campaign donations and are just stealing the money instead. For attackers, simpler remains better. Full report at https://lnkd.in/gzFUQkBV

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Join me and the highlight.io team next Tuesday (July 2nd) for (yet another!) LLM observability webinar. We'll discuss the latest developments around otel and how people are using it to build and monitor LLM apps https://lu.ma/bvnkoy5v

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🌟 Find out about our initiative, Climate Tech Academy, and our collective of business partners Eben Piorkowski, Brandon Bates, Antuan Cannon, Dwayne R. Norris at our upcoming Climate Tech Academy #free webinar on Monday, May 6th at 12pm - 1pm EDT. #eventbrite in the comments, you may also use the #qrcode on the flyer! Our #workforcedevelopment initiative paves the way for #cleanenergy and #climatetech companies to hire #data focused talent to meet their technical goals through skill-based training, co-developed with industry partners covering the following topics: 🔋 Building Management & Automation Systems Analysis ⚡ Energy and Utility Analysis 🚗 EV Transportation & IoT Data Analysis 🤖 AI & API Programming in Clean Energy 📊 Data Analysis Software for Clean Energy Industries

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Hitting $20k MRR is a great milestone, but it’s not yet time to expand to new markets and new products. When is it time? And then how do you decide in what direction to expand? Here’s my system:

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Probably the most important AI news of the day - HumanX and HarrisX - a Stagwell Inc. company are releasing the results of the most comprehensive study done of AI in organizations to date. Over 1000 companies told us everything about their challenges, successes, hopes and fears about AI - and how they are faring against their competition as a result. These profound insights will all be explored in depth at HumanX next March. If you are responsible for AI in your organization, you must attend.

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Metallic Convergence and Catastrophic Divergence Under the new administration, one of the biggest impact areas will be the ACA marketplace. I believe we should closely watch how things unfold and the impacts of potential changes. I've started downloading numerous ACA-related open datasets. Thanks, C. Seth Lester, ASA, MAAA, for guiding me to these resources! Today, I explored the Rate Review data from one of the CMS websites. These data files contain information about ACA plans - including their past performance metrics like MLR, projections, and premium information. While the files are messy and need more cleaning - it's still a work in progress - I wanted to share my initial findings, as I usually do. Here's what I plotted: The chart shows premium rate changes over time by metal level. As expected, premiums have been rising. But what's interesting is how these metal levels have evolved as a group. All metal levels now have surprisingly similar premium rates. Bronze plans saw the steepest increase, becoming very close to Silver, while Silver rates approached those of Gold plans. This evolution has significantly widened the gap between Catastrophic plans and all other metal levels. Of course, I'm still new to analyzing these data files, so if you have any insights or tips, I'd really appreciate your help! The preliminary data files are available at mimilabs!

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