(Re)Share | #25 - Congratulations Ophelos!!
TechBio Discovery | AI Salesman | Artificial Wombs | Space Heists | Animal Translation
Kicking off this issue with some particularly exciting news.
I’m incredibly proud of Fly VC portfolio company, Ophelos, and their recently announced acquisition by Intrum. Ophelos was born from the belief that by harnessing AI, they could transform an industry stuck in the past.
Every year millions of individuals and families find themselves in financial difficulty, and when they do, they’re met with an archaic process that’s been unchanged for decades. Ophelos’ advanced AI engine, wrapped in a delightful software experience, has completely changed what the debt industry thought possible. Ophelos is considered best in class by many, which is why Europe’s market leader in Credit Management Services, Intrum, has asked them to join forces.
Working with Amon Ghaiumy, Paul Chong and Qingchen Wang has been one of the greatest highlights of my venture career. They embody the bold, technical talent that Fly Ventures exists to fund. More importantly, they are the types of humans that any investor would be proud to back. Whether it be securing FCA regulation, building a remarkable team culture, or securing a B-Corp certification, these three founders built Ophelos to the highest standard every time. I am delighted to see what the team can now do with scale and reach at their backs
Stuff worth sharing
Chip stack - The Acquired guys did another deep dive on NVIDIA. This is their third exploration of the GPU king of the hill, but considering the meteoric stock rally as of late I’d say it’s deserved. The first ~50 minutes serve as more a light touch history of language models. Around the 1:08 mark they start getting into the nitty gritty of wafer architecture and the resulting supply chain shortages. At 3 hours overall, this is an investment for sure, but it’s a great example of the spoils that can come from contrarian bets and ruthless R&D.
This makes no missense - While biology may prove to be the killer application of AI, it also seems the more we know the more we don’t. Deepmind released a new tool that has cataloged the 71 million possible missense variants of human proteins. What the hell does that word mean, you may ask if you were me two weeks ago. A missense variant is a single letter substitution in DNA that results in a different amino acid within a protein. Even a single letter can affect the function of a protein. The average person is carries ~over 9,000 variants with most are having little to no effect, but some could severely disrupt protein function. Deepmind’s platform, AlphaMissense, sought to predict the pathogenic probability of every possible variant. At the time of writing they claim 89% classified, which is a mind-blowing improvement over traditional (human) methods of 0.1% .
ABC: Avatar Be Closing - China is in the news a lot. Yes there is massive inequality, an authoritarian regime and a rapidly escalating technology-based Cold War over the most powerful and potentially dangerous innovation in all of human history. But also they buy things weird. Live-stream commerce is probably the biggest consumer trend you’ve never heard of. It’s basically the internet-native progeny of the Home Shopping Network. In 2022 over $4.6 trillion of sales took place via livestream channels - yes, with a T. Now marketers are leveraging deepfake streamers to push their wares in 129 languages. So soon there will be 128 other ways to hear about Casper mattresses that I don’t want.
Self-destruction deconstruction - the University of Chicago released research of an “inverse vaccine” for auto-immune diseases. A typical vaccine teaches the human immune system to recognize a virus or bacteria as an enemy that should be attacked. The new “inverse vaccine” does just the opposite: it removes the immune system’s memory of one molecule; effectively saving the body from its own misguided T cells. Most exciting is that the method could treat diseases after there is already ongoing inflammation. The research focused on multiple-sclerosis but this could prove a promising step towards overcoming several autoimmunity diseases.
Tug-o-warming - A NY-based startup, Amogy, is betting on a very old chemical to be a very new fuel. Amonia is a super energy dense liquid that is predominantly used in fertilizer. A combination of a novel chemical catalyst and low temperature reactor redesign now allows for safe vehicle application. Maritime use cases are really important and quite exciting. Ships account for a massive amount of emissions but voyage times / remote nature make traditional renewables infeasible.
Sheeple - I worked for a woman who once told me that she doesn’t believe society will reach true equality while gestation is dependent on women. We’re getting one step closer to seeing if that’s true. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) is seeking approval for human trials for an artificial womb. This comes off their landmark 2017 research which grew a lamb fetus. The article is fascinating and provides a good overview of the womb’s design and nutrient function. It also highlights the extremely controversial nature of this research. To be clear, the device is being developed to help with the 13.4 million premature births that take place each year - certainly a noble endeavor. But it doesn’t take long to see arguments of designer babies, the loss of the nuclear family and possibly the Matrix.
Roid rage - NASA successfully recovered a sample from asteroid Bennu. Not a meteorite that landed on Earth. Not a weird looking rock that some Moon rover thought looked interesting. We sent a ship on a 1.2 billion mile roundtrip to a flying space rock and stole some of it. That is one of the coolest sentences I’ve ever written. There is a bunch more in the article about the molecular history of the planet and other science things - but if an interstellar space rock heist doesn’t get you immediately interested I don’t want to be friends.
An Orwhaleian future - A long summary in Scientific American on the current state of machine learning within animal linguistics research. A rosetta stone via vector database, if you will. Project CETI, seeks to unlock the communication of sperm whales. They’ve already been able to correctly identify codas of clicks used by whales to identify one another, which sounds an awful lot like names. Animals have names! There are actually a number of species under research in this way: prairie dogs, white tailed deer, various birds and one day, God willing, cockapoos.
We’re so in zinc - A manufacturer of zinc-halide batteries, got a ~$400 million loan from the US Department of Energy via its “conditional commitment” program. (Not unlike Frontier’s AMC program we’ve discussed in past issues). Lithium-ion batteries are the default choice to store energy in devices from laptops to electric vehicles and while costs have plummeted over the past decade, the coming wave of EVs will require even cheaper options. Zinc ranks as the fourth most produced metal in the world, so very cost effective. They’re also safer and offer a longer lifetime than lithium-ion cells (about 20 years vs. 10-15). The tradeoffs are less energy density and debatable longevity - so early use cases would be more less critical applications.
Do it again, monkey! - OpenAI infused their text-to-image offering with the conversational interface of ChatGPT. This allows a user to create an image using natural language and continue to adjust / refine in the same chat. I’ve not yet played around with the new release but the enhanced UX could be a massive unlock. There are more powerful models out there but (IMO) the interfaces are so painful that it borders unusable. As a tech-curious but creativity-deficient individual I have always found prompt engineering to be dark art so good riddance to that s**t.
Portfolio Flex
Fernride announced their $50M Series A!
Evidently AI launched an open source course on machine learning observability. Whether you’re deeply technical and want to learn about in-production monitoring or just ML curious, I highly recommend a watch. The course launches on October 16th but you can sign up now for free.
Wayve continues to expand what’s possible with AI. Their latest release, GAIA1, is a 9 billion parameter model that was trained on 4,700 hours of driving data. With it Wayve is able to simulate complex and diverse driving scenes that are 100% synthetically generated. Seeing is believing so here you go…