Jared O'Leary is the CEO and co-founder of SirenOpt, a deep tech company building the manufacturing intelligence layer for advanced materials production. Their technology came out of a decade of plasma physics research at UC Berkeley - and they're already deployed at Tier-1 manufacturers across turbines,
From ImageNet to Marble — everything she's been building, saying, and arguing for Last issue we went deep on Yann LeCun and JEPA. This time we're covering the researcher the New York Times once dubbed the "Godmother of AI" — Fei-Fei Li. The connection isn'
Everything he's been researching, saying, and building — and why it matters If you've been watching the AI space closely this past year, you know that while the rest of Silicon Valley races to build bigger language models, Yann LeCun — Turing Award winner, co-inventor of convolutional neural
Thrilled to be a small backer here!! 💪 🚀 🙌 Mike Xia and Vijay Pradeep are extraordinary entrepreneurs and I'm super excited I get to back them on this journey!! Anvil Robotics has raised $6.5M led by hard-tech veterans Matter Venture Partners and Humba Ventures with participation from Supercharge.vc,
I invest in robotics companies. I talk to founders building humanoids, manipulation systems, and autonomous machines every week. Now I've been trying to build a few robots myself. I've been learning by ordering parts, assembling a robot arm from scratch, and training an AI policy to
Last week I joined a vibe coding workshop run by Michael Raybman - a builder who's been sitting down with founders, operators, and investors and watching how much product they can ship before they have to call an engineer. The room had a biotech researcher, a dietitian, a
Gary Chen and Conley Oster of Raise Robotics have deployed robots on construction sites, in steel fabrication facilities, and in shipyards. Their view on humanoids is more nuanced - and more grounded - than the narrative driving most of the capital right now. Listen to the episode here: Summary: There
Dr. Asad Tirmizi, Co-Founder and CEO of Trener Robotics, breaks down the full lifecycle of AI in industrial robotics. Listen to the episode here: We cover how models are actually built - the training pipelines, the data, and what separates people who've done it from people who'
A few weeks ago, I hosted a small dinner in San Francisco — about fifteen people around a table. Founders building robotic hands, mobile manipulators, warehouse systems, autonomous vehicles, and world models for manipulation. Investors from early-stage funds to multi-stage industrial tech platforms. A few operators. Everyone had skin in the
A conversation with Ben Bolte — AI & Robotics Engineer, formerly K-Scale Labs, now at OpenAI About the Speaker Ben Bolte is a roboticist and AI engineer who recently joined OpenAI. He previously founded and led K-Scale Labs, building open-source general-purpose humanoid robots for embodied intelligence. Before that, he worked at
Takeaways from Quanting Xie's presentation at CMU's Lab to Market, San Francisco — February 11, 2026 Increase a gear ratio by 100x and the reflected inertia increases by 10,000x. That single physics problem explains one of the biggest disconnects in robotics right now: we can build
A quiet but powerful consensus is building among robotics founders who are deploying real systems at scale: the hardware that powers today's most advanced robots is not the hardware that will power the robot revolution. While general-purpose AI accelerators from giants like NVIDIA have been instrumental in getting
SCIENCE
Executive Summary: The development of general-purpose robots has converged on a critical, near-term strategy: leveraging human-operated teleoperation to generate the vast datasets required for training embodied AI foundation models. While effective, this approach has created a strategic schism in the market. This briefing provides a framework for analyzing the divergent
SCIENCE
Introduction The field of Artificial Intelligence is undergoing a profound shift, moving beyond the digital realm of text and images into the complex, dynamic environment of the physical world. At the heart of this transition are Vision-Language Models (VLMs), a groundbreaking technology that enables machines to understand and interact with
SCIENCE
In this series, we’ve explored the mission-critical role of thin films in extreme environments: the thermal barrier coatings that allow jet turbines to operate at impossible temperatures, the nanoscale layers that form the architecture of every semiconductor chip, and the delicate electrode coatings that determine the performance of every
SCIENCE
The electric vehicle revolution and the global transition to renewable energy are built on a single, foundational technology: the lithium-ion battery. This market is in a state of explosive, unprecedented growth. In 2024, annual battery demand surpassed 1 terawatt-hour (TWh) for the first time, a historic milestone. By 2030, that
SCIENCE
In the digital age, the semiconductor is the bedrock of progress. From the smartphone in your pocket to the vast data centers powering the cloud, these tiny silicon marvels are the engines of the modern world. Now, a new and insatiable demand for artificial intelligence is pushing the semiconductor industry
SCIENCE
From the roar of a jet engine propelling an aircraft across continents to the steady hum of a gas turbine generating electricity for our cities, we are surrounded by feats of immense power. These machines operate at the very edge of material science, harnessing controlled explosions and extreme temperatures to
FOUNDERS
I recently had a long, candid conversation with a robotics founder who’s deep in the trenches - not building flashy demos, but trying to get robots deployed in real industrial environments. No press releases. No humanoid hype. Just real customers, real contracts, and real headaches. The conversation stuck with
FOUNDERS
In the ever-churning world of venture capital, it's easy to get caught up in the noise: the hype cycles, the fundraising frenzy, the relentless pursuit of the next unicorn. It is a rare and grounding experience to step away from that noise and sit down with a seasoned
INDUSTRY
A comprehensive report from the UNION Deep Tech Commercialization Bootcamp. Feb 04 2026 On February 4th, a curated group of founders, VCs, and corporate leaders gathered at the SVB Experience Center in San Francisco for "Crossing the Divide," a tactical bootcamp focused on the gritty realities of commercializing
PRESS
Derapi Raises $7M Seed Round to Scale the Software Infrastructure Behind Distributed Energy Ecosystem/PRNewswire/ -- Derapi, a software company building the connective infrastructure for the distributed energy ecosystem, today announced it has raised $7…Cision PR NewswireDerapi Feb 03 2026 Funding accelerates the adoption of a universal integration layer,
PRESS
Congrats to Positron AI for raising $230M Series B co-led by Atreides Management, LP and DFJ Growth for their next generation inference AI accelerator !! 🦄 💕 🥂 Other investors include Arm, Qatar Investment Authority, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, LP, Flume Ventures, Jump Trading, ARENA Private Wealth, Unless, SHACK15 Ventures, and many others.
FOUNDERS
As a founder, you're constantly navigating the fundraising landscape, balancing growth with the ever-present concern of dilution. When you're at the Series A stage, a new and powerful tool often enters the conversation: venture debt. But is it the right move for your company? This article