Vitaly Golomb

Autonomous Vehicle (AV) funding is surging, according to PitchBook with Q2 2024 seeing $2.9 billion invested in AV startups - the highest since Q3 2021. While self-driving cars grab headlines, innovative startups are finding unique applications beyond passenger vehicles. Key developments: - Supply chain optimization: Outrider is revolutionizing yard operations with autonomous electric vehicles, addressing a $60 billion market. - Specialized transport: Pyka's autonomous planes for cargo and Gatik's local distribution trucks are gaining traction. - Safety & efficiency: Evitado Technologies automates airside operations, mitigating airport collision risks. Of course, more established companies such as Lyft & Uber are working on AV rideshare integration via partnerships with Waymo, BYD, Zoox, and others. The AV sector is focusing on gradual integration and specific use cases. While concerns about job displacement exist, proponents argue that automation could shift human capital to higher-value roles. What those roles are remains to be seen. As the AV landscape evolves, it's clear that the future of transportation extends far beyond just self-driving cars on city streets. Check out the full article by Nadine Manske here: https://lnkd.in/g3HJXZHc? And access the PitchBook Mobility Tech Report here: https://lnkd.in/g4_xP5pr #VentureCapital #AutonomousDriving #FrontierTech #FutureMobility

13

2 Comments

We are delighted to present the concluding installment based on our paper, "Vision 2035: The Emergent Singularity" (link in the comments). In this final section, we illuminate the three critical components that will prove instrumental for companies as they navigate the transformative landscape of machine intelligence: 1. The Role of Data: In the age of machine intelligence, data reigns supreme. As we navigate this data-rich landscape, challenges emerge in harnessing its full potential. The concept of "Big Data" evolves rapidly, demanding advancements in edge computing, natural language processing (NLP), and even quantum computing. Despite this growth, there's a growing reluctance to share data, hindering accessibility. Startups can serve as pivotal players, breaking down barriers and showcasing the value of innovative solutions. From technical to regulatory hurdles, the path to data accessibility is fraught with challenges, but also ripe with opportunities for venture-backed initiatives to lead the way. 2. Open-stack technologies: Rooted in openness across software, data, storage, and computation, open-stack technologies are analogous to open-source software in many ways. By embracing open-stack, companies transcend closed system limitations, fostering innovation and enabling agile, cost-effective development through collaborative ecosystems. Leveraging existing communities potentially reduces customer acquisition costs while cultivating dedicated user bases for lasting relationships. 3. Collective intelligence: Ecosystems built on shared, community, and aggregate knowledge offer prime opportunities for open-stack-centric machine intelligence startups. The emergent benefits from group knowledge can speed up product development and broaden customer reach. Collective intelligence approaches like federated learning can also streamline data processes, minimize data sharing while maintaining control and adaptability, enhance model accuracy, and mitigate technical and product risks across an ecosystem. We hope you have found our series of summary analysis on the realm of machine intelligence to be insightful. As highlighted in our longer vision paper, we are convinced that the value creation potential of winners in this space will amount to a remarkable two orders of magnitude (100x) compared to today's companies. Lastly, we may follow up with a little encore in two weeks. Keep your eyes peeled! Patrick & Sri Machine Ventures #singularity #machineintelligence #ai

12

3 Comments

For those of you still doubting Artificial Intelligence....wake the f$%& up!!! Go walk around downtown San Francisco and maybe all of Google's Waymo driverless cars on the streets may be a wake up call for you. If you need more proof take a look at Y Combinator's current cohort of companies as well as all the AI and AI-Enabled companies in the MedTech Innovator current cohort of companies or the ones pitching at LSI and LSI Europe!

14

Just finished reading "The Next Giant Leap" by Space Capital - a pioneering VC investing in the emerging Space Economy. The report speaks to how SpaceX’s Starship is more than just the most powerful rocket ever built—it is poised to reshape the global space economy in profound ways. With its immense payload capacity, reusable design, and lower cost per launch, Starship will unlock entirely new industries and transform existing business models. But how should industries and businesses evolve to align with this paradigm shift? 📈 Rethinking Business Strategies & Supply Chains - For businesses, Starship represents an era of mass-production over precision engineering. This means moving away from the focus on mass efficiency toward cost-effective, redundant, and scalable production. - In terms of supply chains, this opens opportunities for new players in manufacturing, materials, and space components. The demand for off-the-shelf parts and non-aerospace suppliers will rise dramatically. 💡 New Use Cases & Opportunities   The opportunities Starship unlocks go beyond launching satellites. - In-space manufacturing of high-value products like pharmaceuticals and advanced materials that cannot be created on Earth. - Mega-constellations of satellites for global broadband, expanding on what Starlink has already begun. - In-orbit assembly and servicing, allowing for larger space structures like telescopes or even habitats to be built in orbit, radically reducing costs. - Lunar infrastructure and resource extraction will become more viable, paving the way for sustainable human presence on the Moon and, eventually, Mars. 📊 What Should Businesses Do Now?   1. Embrace Redundancy & Scale – Instead of focusing on one-off, high-cost solutions, businesses should embrace redundancy and mass production.    2. Simplify Design – With Starship’s payload capacity, there is less pressure to optimize for mass efficiency. Simplified, scalable designs will allow for faster production and iteration cycles, akin to how SpaceX rapidly tests and evolves Starship itself. 3. Develop Strategic Partnerships – Collaborating with forward-thinking space startups, suppliers, and even non-aerospace sectors will be essential to capitalize on the opportunities Starship provides. 🌌 A New Era of Innovation   Starship will democratize access to space, lowering the barriers for businesses to create and scale. The next decade will witness breakthroughs in scientific exploration, energy production, and in-space transportation that we can only begin to imagine today. #SpaceEconomy #Starship #Innovation #SupplyChain #Manufacturing #SpaceTech #Entrepreneurship #FutureOfSpace https://lnkd.in/gNdbwXdq

8

2 Comments

https://lnkd.in/dDGfRVai "The amendments can be broken down into five core components, and while they don’t actively advance the fortunes of AI companies, they do make their lives easier. For example, one amendment will replace criminal penalties for perjury with civil ones, meaning the act now invokes no criminal charges for any violation and the legal repercussions of stepping out of line are significantly reduced.  The amended bill now also cuts the Attorney General’s ability to seek civil penalties “unless a harm has occurred or there is an imminent threat to public safety.” The amended bill makes the Attorney General’s office the main regulatory body for AI, rather than an originally proposed state regulatory body."

2

Sharing a sanitized version of the mu ventures Q2 q'ly LP update. Included musings: 👉 SEOs shrinking impact, and the rise of LLMO (large language model optimization) 👉 examples of the Commerce AI application layer coming to life 👉 a modern fund strategy that accepts companies require less capital, time, and people to trigger the power law 👉 Mu's guide to investing in AI 👉 all 30 companies in the Mu-niverse (and several others we admire) Founders, VCs, LPs - if you like how we think and suspect we can partner, hit us up! https://lnkd.in/dTJ2zjav

52

7 Comments

Ilya Sutskever has raised $1 billion from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital for his 3-month-old startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI). The valuation lands at $5 billion according to sources. SSI, which currently has 10 employees, plans to use the funds to acquire computing power and hire top talent. It will focus on building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel. According to SSI, they've raised the money to help develop safe artificial intelligence systems that far surpass human capabilities. $1B raise at a $5B valuation. For a company that is a couple of months old and doesn't seem to have a product or even a single line of code in production. Wild. In this case, everyone knows it takes hundreds of millions to train models. So investors are essentially rolling the dice on an extremely well-regarded team. And if it takes about a billion just to get off the ground, the valuation would need to be at least in the couple billion range to make it worth it for employees to work there. US dream 🦅 #artificialintelligence #startups #venturecapital

2

Is AI's future locked into trillion-dollar investments, or is there a more democratic path forward? I recently spoke with Eugene Cheah, founder of Recursal AI and co-lead on the open-source RWKV project, who's working to democratize AI by tackling some of the core constraints of transformers. Listen in on our full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gKrrVRjp

21

3 Comments

💲The Founders Weekly BOOST - the 12 Rules to 10x your Business, All the New Minted Ca$h from VCs for you to Pitch for, AI 🤖 Lots on AI & so much more 🔥 💲 Another Jam Packed edition from Rubén & I to help you Raise Capital and Grow Revenues 📈 💲Gen AI - Whats Coming Next According to Sequoia 🤔 💲or lack of 💲- Whats happening in a World With No Exits as we're still 90% (😱) off of Peak! There are green shoots 🌱 💲You Founders in Pro Services - Convert to an AI Business 🤖 It's All in Here 💙 💲Dig in, share with friends & colleagues BUT also ask questions too - we have loads of experts who can join the conversation 📣 🎯 Don't Forget To Subscribe so you Never Miss A Single 💲of Value 💙 "The Founders Corner"

114

68 Comments

Friends, Q2 was a quarter of progress and learning for us at HawkTower, where we invest in early-stage startups applying breakthrough computing technologies to maximize California's natural resource markets. Our focus is on technology-enabled interventions (e.g., AI-enabled geospatial radars for lithium-ion batteries in the waste stream) for critical, market-level imperatives (e.g., disaster prevention) that can drive rapid commercial adoption (e.g., placed on every recycling truck in the world). Our current investment priorities are: - Agricultural productivity and efficiency - Biomanufacturing - Labor and mobility automation - Waste stream optimization and decarbonization - Disaster prevention and management Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve been up to: Milestones and Investments: - In late April, we officially launched our fund, filing with the SEC. Yay. - By June, we completed our first fund close ahead of schedule, with backing from family offices, foundations, high-net-worth individuals, and organizations aligned with California's future. - Our portfolio now includes three early-stage investments (Farm-ng, Agriful Software, and Nexstera Tech). Strategic Partnerships: - We believe that startups operating closer to their customers and resources, especially in agriculture and biomanufacturing, have a strategic advantage. For instance, the Salinas Valley, a major agricultural hub, is less than an hour from Silicon Valley and serves as a center of thought leadership in the convergence of agriculture and AI (from Western Growers, Taylor Farms, and others). - Similarly, the North San Joaquin Valley is emerging as a biotech and agtech innovation hub, and we are proud to support BEAM Circular, a startup hub for the circular bioeconomy. Key Relationships: - Karen Warner, CEO of BEAM Circular, joined HawkTower as a strategic advisor. - Jackie Cruz, Ed. D. Cruz, Hartnell College’s VP of Advancement, advises on Salinas Valley and workforce development. - Ben Palone from Western Growers, with his technical background in agriculture, became a trusted advisor. - Matthew Hoffman from Driscoll's Global R&D team provides insights on global agriculture, product positioning, and investment strategy. - We collaborated with Monterey Bay DART for workforce development and automation in agtech. - Dominic Milano and the Milano Technical Group from Merced collaborated on key initiatives and advised us on investments. - HawkTower is participating in Santa Cruz Works's accelerator cohort as a mentor and advisor. Thank you Doug Erickson. - We published an overview of entrepreneurship across the UC system with input from across the University of California system. Moving into the fall, we remain deeply committed to supporting founders shaping California's future natural resource markets. Stay tuned and be in touch! : ) Db

95

5 Comments

This is just incredible. Neal Ghosh's demonstration of how #VentureIQ takes deeply technical and complicated content across a range of industrial use cases and ages/stages through an AI-generated conversational podcast (a la #notebookLM) is really mind-blowing. Check out his post, below, and if you haven't seen VentureIQ, yet, let's get you set up to learn more. You can visit VentureIQ.ai or DM any of us over here to book a demo!

2

Language is powerful--but the first way we interact with and learn about the physical world is through spatial intelligence. Building AI capabilities that enable us to perceive, reason and create in a truly 3D world requires a team that is out of this world. Enter World Labs. Martin Casado and I are thrilled to partner with the brilliant and tireless Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall as they expand the aperture of AI to real and virtual 3D worlds. We've only scratched the surface of what's possible with AI. The chance to back the pioneers of ImageNet, NeRF, Style Transfer, and Gaussian Splats while they tackle spatial intelligence to create generative worlds is why I joined Andreessen Horowitz.

96

3 Comments

AI memory is fundamental for conversational AI and AI agents. It is critical for building personalized experiences and improving reasoning. Check out Letta’s course to understand how to use AI memory to enhance the customization and quality of your AI app.

15

Find errors with SUMPRODUCT 👇 Here's the formula: =SUMPRODUCT(--iserror([range])) Note: In the video I incorrectly say "double negative 🙃," but Matthew Herbert of BizTrix pointed out that "the double minus is an operator, not negation. The double minus is the unary operator and it explicitly converts logical values into numbers (true converts to 1 and false converts to 0). ISERROR returns a logical value. This is why SUM(ISERROR(range)) or SUMPRODUCT(ISERROR(range)) returns 0 but placing the unary operator in front of ISERROR returns >0 when there is an error." Even as an experienced user and instructor there's always something new to learn! ~~~ 👋 Hey, I'm Chris Reilly, and I teach Financial Modeling based on real Private Equity and FP&A experience. 𝘱.𝘴. please ♻️ share this with your network if you found it helpful, thanks!

193

4 Comments

This analysis, at least anecdotally makes sense to me. In many situations, infringe and holdout is the least painful option for large infringers. The system enables it. - The plaintiff must allocate the time and $$ to assert, taking time and $$ away from selling and developing products. Even if they engage litigation financiers they are limiting their upside potential. - The infringer continues to infringe while employing stall tactics or simply relying on the painfully slow, overburdened legal system. - The cost benefit analysis for infringers - "infringe and pay lawyers" typically outweighs the cost of design around or license. - Enhanced damages and injunctions are rare. - Litigation insurance products reduce risk all around. "The Marcum report shows that there is indeed something wrong with the patent system in the United States but it’s not excessive litigation or patent trolls. The real problem is the inability of patent owners to enforce their rights against infringers. Given the difficulty of obtaining injunctive relief and the limited enhancement of damages, it is unsurprising that predatory infringement has become a standard business practice when, at worst, all an infringer can be expected to pay is a reasonable royalty and, at best, nothing at all."

5

The perception that deep tech startups (like those in robotics, space, and biotech) are prohibitively expensive to build is increasingly outdated... Advances in tech infrastructure, better access to startup talent, and an abundance of funding options (both VC and non-dilutive government grants) are making it easier and more affordable to launch deep tech companies than ever before. Costs for key components have dramatically dropped, and supportive macroeconomic and political tailwinds are driving demand for new technologies. With the right approach, ideas that once required tens of millions of dollars and years to develop can now be realized with smaller teams and seed funding, making deep tech a prime opportunity for today’s founders. But what’s impressive about YC is how they push even deep tech startups to generate revenue within the short span of the program. This challenges the notion that hardware and science-based startups need years before showing market traction. Take a look at some from S24: 1. Spaceium: Developing automated space stations for spacecraft refueling and repair. They secured $86.1 million in binding commercial contracts and have an additional $230 million in the pipeline. 2. Network Ocean: Building underwater data centers to reduce power usage and improve GPU efficiency. They already have GPUs available. 3. Theseus: Creating unjammable drones. They've sold units to multiple customers, obtained six-figure LOIs from large drone manufacturers, and have eight-figure funding requests from the DoD for FY25. 4. Ionworks: Offering battery-simulation-as-a-service to accelerate design cycles. With batteries projected to represent 4% of global GDP by 2030, they've gained significant traction with some huge companies across several industries like automative and aerospace .

19

7 Comments

👀 Looking at our recent investments at Draper Associates, here’s what standout founders nailed, making our decision to invest much easier (and faster): 💥 Visionary Tech with a Bold Vision – These founders are not here for incremental wins; they’re reimagining what’s possible in across tech - biotech, robotics, aerospace, and beyond. Their vision is big and audacious, tackling complex problems that demand breakthrough solutions, others have not been willing to try. 👊 Clear Passion & Purpose – The drive in these founders is undeniable. They’re committed to their mission with a depth of purpose that shapes every choice. One founder, for example, took two years completely off to learn and meet everyone in longevity biotech. This level of grit and dedication is rare but essential for the most impactful founders. 🌟 Assembling All-Star Teams – They bring together top-tier talent from diverse disciplines: experienced business leaders with successful exits or industry experience at top companies, technical co-founders with deep expertise, often PhDs or industry pioneers, and even published authors. It’s a complementary team, unified by a shared vision. They make the: "Why this team?" obvious - at a glance. 💻 Data-Driven to the Core – These founders present data insights that show why their approach is unique, especially against a competitive field of companies. This data is delivered with clarity and they make the complex simple. Many are published in top journals, adding depth and credibility to their approach, and reinforcing that they know their tech inside out. ⚡️ Memorable, Clear Vision – They don’t just pitch; they make the future feel tangible, with a vision that’s both compelling and concise. If I can relay their pitch in under 30 seconds to my team, they’ve killed it. 📣 Transparent & Proactive Communication – The best founders don’t wait for questions. They come prepared, often with a comprehensive FAQ doc, give timely updates to our questions, and are candid about challenges. This level of openness builds trust and strengthens our partnership. 💸 Milestone-Driven Funding Strategy – Each funding stage aligns clearly with already achieved or upcoming achievable milestones. They’ve mapped out a roadmap that minimizes risk at every step, giving us confidence in their journey. 💰 Revenue Milestones Along the Way – Even if it'll take a decade to hit revenue on their big vision, these founders find revenue generation stops along the way to profitability. They share a trajectory that connects early wins to revenue, showing how every step is a building block toward their bigger vision. Overall, the best founders are incredibly thoughtful, prepared, and fantastic verbal / written communicators. #founders #startups #fundraising #VC

35

2 Comments

Our team at Andreessen Horowitz believes now is the time for AI to give everyone a superhuman assistant - enter AI scribes (CC Anish Acharya) Today, scribes are most commonly seen in the medical, legal, and govt fields. There are ~100k medical scribes in the US, one for every 10 physicians. Scribes can save hours of work time per day, but human scribes are typically quite expensive and hard to access - AI fixes this! At a base level, an AI scribe listens to you, transcribes, and produces notes. But we think products here can go much further, and are particularly excited about startups building scribes as a wedge into broader vertical software. Early examples here include: - Ambience Healthcare for human doctors - Scribenote for vets - Rilla for sales teams - Granola for people in back-to-back meetings - Aqua Voice for consumers Check out the market map below for what we've seen in this space so far ⬇ If you're building here, please reach out! 👋

751

194 Comments