Vivek Ramaswamy

Interesting piece from Marc Andreessen on how startups are not getting the regulatory support they need to sustain America's technological leadership. "Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain. Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence." While many investors themselves (both in the US and Europe) are worried how AI will change our lives, our jobs and social interactions, the top VC opinion leader thinks regulation is already too restrictive. #techstartups #techleadership #strategicgrowth

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Expressions of Interest (EOIs) for the Beanstalk AgTech Drought Venture Studio close this Friday July 12th. Since launching the venture studio the team have been engaging with researchers and AgriTech innovators, scouting for technologies that can be validated and commercialised. For those still considering the opportunity, here are a few details: - The Drought Venture Studio is specifically designed to support technology development and commercialisation at the earliest stage, including pre business incorporation. - Technologies can target drought resilience across a broad range of crop types and applications in the field and the back office. Examples include, water and soil management, pest and weed control, financial resilience and supply chain management systems. - Up to $250k in funding will be available for projects once validated, to support development as well as salary funding for co-founders in the early stages. - Need a co-founder? The venture studio will facilitate the process of bringing a co-founder or CEO into validated businesses. This recent webinar provides a great overview of the venture studio, the team and the process. All the EOI details can be found here 👇 - Applications: https://lnkd.in/gyqYB4ww - Webinar video: https://lnkd.in/g8RqXm9n Marcus Agnew, Jeremy Chan-Youker, Cal Archibald #agritech #sustainability #drought #BeanstalkVentureStudio #FutureDroughtFund

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Gain insights from the 193rd PIFW event, 'Future Harvest - Cultivating Investment Success in Agriculture,' which brought together seasoned #investors to discuss future strategies in #Agriculture and #Aquaculture investments.

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#Elections are stressful, but what gives us at J2 Ventures hope is the observation that both U.S. political parties value the future of technology. Geoff Orazem and I dug into the database for the AAAS tracking federal government spending on R&D to produce the chart below. Since 1953 (we chose an arbitrary date) to 2022 (where the data set ended) American government R&D grew on an annual basis of 4.3% with a CAGR of 3.7%. This is the money that fuels the future and it carries contractual obligations to allocate to #veterans, #nativeamericans, #women, #peopleofcolor and many other groups that because of it, are given in a voice in the transformative technology that shapes our world. J2 is a fundamentally apolitical organization- we are on the side of America and its allies - but the data would suggest that whether your party wins or loses every four years, in the long run, both parties agree the future is something worth investing in. United States Department of Defense DoD SBIR/STTR Program Office Republican National Committee Democratic National Committee

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Last quarter, 161 AgTech startups raised a total of $1.5B. There were eight AgTech exits last quarter, all through M&A transactions. See all the details in my latest CropLife.com article.

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We are so excited to announce our investment in Raechel Lambert, Bernard Kobos, and Ryan Lambert and their company, River Platform Company. River is a platform that empowers brands and influencers to build large-scale, in-person communities. To date, the platform has hosted over 2,000 events with 3,000 crowdsourced hosts and 55,000 attendees across more than 15 cities worldwide. We like to think of it as the operating system for community management. If the Catholic Church were founded today, it would use River to coordinate its global activities. No kidding. Jason Calacanis, the American internet entrepreneur and investor known for his All-In podcast with Chamath Palihapitiya, David O. Sacks, and David Friedberg, saw their potential early on. So did Balaji Srinivasan, Bryan Johnson, Tim Ferriss, and many others. We met the River team six months ago and have been incredibly impressed by their big-picture thinking, relentless hustle to connect with the right people and flawless execution. And as if that wasn’t enough, working with them is an absolute pleasure. These guys are a source of renewable energy. We’re proud to be part of this journey alongside wonderful co-investors like Blue Wire Capital, Blockwall, Solana Foundation, very early Ventures, and LAUNCH. Congratulations to the entire River team on this exciting milestone! We know firsthand that when things seem effortless, it’s because a tremendous amount of hard work went into making it happen. Want to join or host an IRL community event? Head over to getriver.io. #getriver #community #blockchainfounderscapital #startup #venturecapital #creatoreconomy

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Wondering about the Nebraska ecosystem resources. See the attached chart below…and more to come!

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For anyone in Chicago on Tuesday October 1st please feel free to come to our Midwest Impact Investing 2024 Showcase Event. RSVP Here: https://lnkd.in/gmYswD8V For the past 10 years, Impact Engine has produced a Chicago Impact Investing Showcase, designed to help impact investors learn from others who deploy capital for impact across asset classes and geographies. Twice during that period, Impact Engine also compiled and shared the results of a landscape study of the Chicago impact investing community. Leveraging the success of the Chicago landscape reports and the Chicago Showcases, Impact Engine is extending the same concept to the broader Midwest, partnering with Cogent Consulting PBC to create a landscape report covering the states of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Dakota, and Wisconsin. We are excited to present the Midwest Impact Investing Showcase on Tuesday, October 1st from 5:00 - 8:00 PM. This showcase will highlight the work of impact investors across the Midwest through a series of fireside chats. Confirmed speakers include: - Joe Aguilar, Chief Investment Officer, Illinois State Treasurer Michael W. Frerichs - Jessica Droste Yagan, Chief Executive Officer, Impact Engine - Stephanie Goodrid Lawson, Executive Director, McKinney Family Foundation (MFF) - Marianne Markowitz, Chief Executive Officer, First Women's Bank - Elizabeth McGeveran, Vice President of Investments, McKnight Foundation - Priya Parrish, Chief Investment Officer, Impact Engine - Debra Schwartz, Managing Director, Impact Investments, MacArthur Foundation - Lakota Vogel, Executive Director, Four Bands Community Fund - Andrea Zopp, Managing Partner, Cleveland Avenue

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@DecarbConnect Decarb TechInvest event is only one week away! Taking place in Boston, September 10th-11th, the event is unlike any other climate event and focuses on facilitating investments across the full capital stack to de-risk, scale and exit essential hardtech and startups at Series B+ and FOAK phase, to accelerate the commercialization of breakthrough technologies.  I’ll be speaking on; ‘De-risking industrial decarbonization technology – overcoming the project development hurdles’ alongside Wim Reyntiens and Matt Lucas. Click here to download the agenda and book online: https://lnkd.in/egjP833q #decarbconnect #DCTI24 #decarbtechinvest #decarbonization #decarbtech #hardtech #climatetech #industrialemitter #carbon #carbonemissions #hydrogen #ccus #ccs #carboncapture#netzero #netzerotech #foak #firstofakind #energytech #wasteheat #syntheticbiology #longdurationenergystorage 

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Excellent blog post on the realities of Climate & VC. While these are "tough times for the transition," there are also many opportunities. Significant capital will continue to flow, with Corporate VCs playing a larger role in financing this transition. Through this process, they will strengthen their LP positions in funds tackling climate challenges. I receive weekly calls from large Holding & Corporate VCs seeking introductions to Climate / Energy / Infra VC Funds. When I ask about their target sub-verticals within Climate / Energy, they often mention that they default to focusing on specific regions due to limited resources and coverage. In other words, rather than evaluating whether a DACH VC is better positioned for solar or grid-tech compared to a Nordic or US VC, they simply pursue whichever regions they can access—a haphazard approach at best. I always advise LPs to evaluate VCs within their operating market context. Since sourcing is crucial in venture capital, Holding Cos. and Family Offices should carefully assess a VC's location, regulatory context, and market environment before investing and building a portfolio of Funds. I've heard "I wish I had discovered this VC / region sooner" far too many times... * At ComposeVC's Built World Fund, we do not invest in Climatetech or Energytech directly, only as it relates to our Built World thesis.

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#ImpactFund managers and impact entrepreneurs - will you be at the Mission Investors Exchange #MissionInvest2024 conference this week? Happy to share how Realize Impact can help you tap into #DAF capital. We've moved about $40 million into impact investments since 2020. Drop me a line.

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The last few days I've been attending SynBioBeta conference in San Jose, CA. Really cool innovations that are tackling big problems in health, industrial production, and climate. It was also AgFunder's AGM... some non-standard observations: 1- Venture markets are not back: it will not be a bounce, but a slow recovery 2- Smart startups are partnering with engineering/EPC firms earlier in their life. This is key to de-risk scale production from day 1. My first employer out of college Black & Veatch was a key partner in the growth of Tesla, and now they're active in the bio space 3- If you say you're AI, you better prove it. Nothing wrong with saying you're doing ML

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Last week Peak Energy announced its $55M oversubscribed series A, which Xora Innovation led, joined by lead seed investor Eclipse (Greg Reichow, Ryan Gibson), as well as TDK Ventures (Anil Achyuta), TechEnergy Ventures (Alejandro Solé), Doral Energy-Tech Ventures (Roee Furman), Lachy Groom, and Tishman Speyer (David Aron). Special thanks to 🌱🤝🌍 Anil Achyuta for the original introduction.   Peak is commercializing a new standard in grid-scale energy storage systems based on sodium-ion batteries. Peak’s market is benefiting from the twin tailwinds of renewables and AI, and the company has just the right founding team to scale at "ludicrous speed".   Landon Mossburg, Co-Founder and CEO, is one of the most phenomenal team builders we have had the privilege of backing. He brings deep experience in building battery gigafactories from his prior role as Chief Automation Officer of Northvolt, where he didn’t shy away from sleeping on factory floors for months in Northern Europe.   We have a special place in our hearts for entrepreneurs who have the grit to spend 10 years+ building deep tech startups from the foundational stage to commercialization. Cameron Dales, Co-Founder, President and Chief Commercial Officer, has done it not only once, but twice, at Symyx Technologies and Enovix (current market cap $2.65B).   Liam O'Connor O’Connor, Co-Founder and COO, previously scaled major portions of Tesla’s and Apple’s supply chains, flying over 500,000 miles a year when required. Liam has a deep understanding of what it takes to build resilient supply chains in hypergrowth mode, having previously scaled from <$5B to $40B in spend over a matter of a few years.   The climate tech sector is in need of more entrepreneurs who truly understand what building on a massive industrial scale means. We couldn’t be more excited that Landon, Cam and Liam have decided to apply their talents to enabling grid-scale energy storage.

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I'm thrilled to announce Madrona's investment and the official launch of Aizen Therapeutics! Madrona invested alongside our friends at Wilson Hill Ventures and Cercano to form the initial investing syndicate. We were lucky to have met founder David Van Valen, M.D. Ph.D. and founding CEO Ajay Kshatriya early in their company building journey and to partner with them from day one. Aizen is focused on designing and developing Mirror Peptides to use as both a delivery mechanism and therapeutic modality. Mirror Peptides are peptides composed entirely of D-amino acids and represent the mirror image of naturally occurring peptides composed of L-amino acids. Since these peptides do not exist naturally, it has been extremely challenging to design and develop candidates with valuable and programmable therapeutic properties. The Aizen team is solving this problem via their novel drug discovery platform DaX - an AI based platform for exploring, designing, and optimizing D-amino acid based therapeutics. This platform emerged from research in Dr. Van Valen's lab at Caltech which has long focused on developing leading AI approaches to challenging problems in biology. Aizen represents another true day one investment for Madrona and our first investment in a Caltech spinout. We are always excited to partner with incredible founding teams at the beginning of their journey and help them achieve their visions from the start. Partnering with world class teams like this one and helping them succeed is the best and luckiest part of my job and working with the Aizen team is truly a pleasure. Here's to much more to come! See our blog for more details about why we invested and why we are so excited about Aizen's vision and their cutting edge approach to developing mirror peptides: https://lnkd.in/gfyR8g-9 Luke Ursell Todd Peterson Dillon Phan, PhD Joseph Horsman

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Not all of the investments that Kindred Capital VC makes can be a 13 year sourcing process.... but... this is one of those very fortunate moments in which a relationship that started over a decade ago in the Bay Area where the brilliant A-H. Hleileh and I overlapped has now turned into an incredibly exciting opportunity for Kindred to lead his and Ron Holifield's first institutional round at Civic Marketplace. We believe: 1. Local government procurement is one of the most underserved areas in technology today, and has failed to keep pace with the private sector. They deserve better. 2. This is a huge opportunity, with US local governments spending alone amounting to over $1.5 trillion in annual spend, which is only going in one direction... 3. As the brilliant Kip Harkness shared with me in our diligence phase, "this industry moves at the speed of trust." And this is a unique founding team with A-H. Hleileh and Ron Holifield at the helm who bring together two critical ingredients: 1) decades of trust-building within this domain, and 2) a team who can build beautiful and scalable technology platforms. Onwards!! 🚀

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I'm so excited to continue supporting Prolific Machines, Inc., and the incredible Deniz Kent, PhD ,Max Huisman, and Declan Jones. Today's cellular biology processes are incredibly expensive, inefficient, imprecise, and sometimes purely ineffective. These processes are used from everything from making antibodies to treat diseases, to fermentation used to make high-value nutritional proteins in baby formula, to whole cuts of cultured meat. Prolific has developed a biology platform that leverages light to guide cell behavior and optimize performance over time using AI. By combining light, bioengineering, hardware, and AI in fundamentally new ways, Prolific can help pharmaceutical, nutritional, and therapeutics companies get to market faster, less expensively, and more efficiently — ultimately in hopes of helping improve outcomes — a mission any of us can get behind. Mark Cuban Peter T. Frederick Blackford Cooper Rinzler David Adelman Darco Capital Breakthrough Energy Michael Schulson Kevin Love Tobias Harris Breyer Capital Charles Besser Brennan Besser Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants https://lnkd.in/ea2TqdQk

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 Understand the unique scaling challenges in #AGTech compared to traditional tech ventures, emphasizing the need for active, informed #investing for tangible returns.

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Gro Intelligence’s IP acquired by another startup, incoming Secretary of Agriculture is picked, and Paine Schwartz acquires a supplement provider. Debates about impending trade wars heat up, PepsiCo to add more chips to address ‘shrinkflation’ criticism, and bats as crop protection. Experience is the foundation of a successful entrepreneur. It is the barometer through which all entrepreneurs, and their teams, are judged upon. Agtech needs knowledge, technology and, I argue most glaringly, experience to succeed. We will describe and quantify what experience #agtech needs in this week’s newsletter. #agriculture #startups #innovation #experience #wisdom #experienceaboveall #agtwitter #agtechfriday #experiencefactor https://lnkd.in/g4SJdTRE

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On-point piece in Kiplinger explaining that impact investing goes beyond checkbook charity by focusing on measurable social and environmental impact, as well as a financial return. I'm particularly struck by the closing point that contends being an impact investor means tracking progress and making sure that your goals are being met. That is absolutely the case. #ImpactInvesting

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