(Re)Share | #20 - Fly VC's very good portfolio
AI drug trials | Techbio investing | LLM jailbreaks | Superconductors
(Re)Share is back after a one month hiatus - so still technically living up to my occasionally weekly claim. Please enjoy our our regular deep tech news + snark programming.
Shameless plug
Dealroom and LocalGlobe unveiled the latest iteration of The Journey to Series A report - a comprehensive study of early stage funding stats across Europe. I highly recommend a read and would pay particular attention to slide 13 - don’t worry, I’ve got you.
The success of all of these companies belongs to the founders and their teams but I will happily agree that the Fly Ventures portfolio is a very good one!
Stuff worth sharing
Putting on some water weight - If you need any more reason to be concerned about man-made environmental impact you can add gravitational integrity to the list. Ground water depletion and polar ice cap melt is altering the position of Earth’s pole and its polar motion (the speed and consistency of rotation around Earth’s axis). That was a bit hard to get my head around but this NYT summary has a helpful analogy - imagine frisbee poorly thrown by my wife that’s wobbling in the air (it’s fine, she won’t read this). That mid-air shakiness is a result of the shifting mass of water around the globe. The study found that Earth's pole has drifted by 4.36 cm/yr during 1993–2010. The world is sort of actually falling apart.
A spoonful of Tensor GPUs - Stunning AI milestones is a frequent topic here but this one really deserves a shout out. Insilico Medicine, an drug discovery company, began Phase 2 clinical trials of the world’s first AI-discovered therapy. This is a completely novel compound, which treats idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, was both discovered and designed using computational means, which took a mere 18 months end-to-end. Other companies have made similarly grandiose claims so the real focus of this is on the Phase 2 gate, which is a massive deal for any drug candidate. AI is in no need of more hype, but many are watching this trial. Success here will open the floodgates.
It’s who you know - Decently well known venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, released a comprehensive study on the technical talent of Europe and it’s great. Atlas is a multimodal research and data visualization effort that provides talent insights across 24 EU cities and 14 engineering skill areas. Where are the best locales for robotics and drones engineers? How much share does Big Tech have on AI talent? Is Lisbon all it’s cracked up to be? All of this and more can be answered in a delightfully enjoyable UX. (PDF too)
What would you say you do here? - I recently discovered the wonderful newsletter Century of Biology by Elliot Hershberg and did a deep dive over the past few weeks. While many posts are noteworthy, I particularly enjoyed this explanation of modality vs. target-based companies / investing. I’ve found it challenging at times to cleanly delineate Fly’s point of focus within the techbio vs. biotech segmentation, so this framework was quite relevant.
Black box, meet red tape - One of the most important stories within EU tech is the Union’s impending Artificial Intelligence Act. This is a topic we’ve covered before but the latest development is the expected pushback from 150+ European executives who suggest that the current drafting is bad for business. Everyone can agree that AI needs governance just so long as it doesn’t impact them - a digital NIMBYism if you will. The OSS folks are jumping in too.
“FML” says the NPC - All eyes are on the writer’s strike / fight over AI copyright protection, but I’m increasingly interested in the gaming realm. User-generated content (UGC) is an underpinning of some of the biggest titles out there, but the inclusion of generative AI systems places players, studios and algorithm developers in an interesting stand off. This Wired article highlights some of the key considerations. Partial disclosure - I’m following this in no small part due to Fly’s still unannounced investment in the area.
R(AI)n or shine - This paper from December outlines a machine-learning-based weather simulator called "GraphCast" that can outperform most 10-day forecasts. Depending on the reader this is either the most interesting or most boring link this week.
Get out of jail free card - A team from Carnegie Mellon figured out an automated system to perpetually trick LLMs in removing their safeguards (a.k.a. "jailbreak). By adding non-sensical charectar strings to a user prompt a user can access otherwise prevented content like bomb building or identify theft. This obviously has huge implications so I highly recommend this read. I also enjoyed the last step in the AI’s plan to steal from charity.
Lukewarm mighty maestro - Everyone was talking about this research paper that announced the synthesis of an ambient room temperature superconductor, which is a material that can expel magnetic flux fields. I know nothing about superconductors and quantum mechanics it makes my brain hurt, but all past research has required either extremely low temperatures or extremely high pressure so the room temp aspect was the big flex. If this works, why does it matter? See Wakanda.
Portfolio Flex
Jonny Goodwin, CEO of Orbital Materials, unveiled his founding motivation for the company. Read it and try not to be inspired.
My personal guiding belief is that the most powerful technologies in the world should be applied to the most important problems we face. At the time AlphaFold was released I had just started work on applying large scale machine learning to what I believe is the foundational physical science problem of the 21st century, known as “Materials Science”.
Evidently AI continued their just-keep-shipping ethos with the release of Monitors, a centralized monitoring dashboard - full open-source and self-hostable.
Wayve introduced a new generative AI system, GAIA-1, for simulating novel training data for self-driving edge cases.
Job Drop
Quick reminder that every week I share new roles from the Fly portfolio here.