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 weekly roundup of interesting news and developments for founders, investors, and venture capitalists. The AI IPO Wave: A $2.9 Trillion Market Test We are on the verge of witnessing three of the largest IPOs in history. SpaceX is targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation, OpenAI is aiming for
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
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
Written by Bogdan, Manus & Claude 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
Written by Bogdan, Manus & Claude 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
Written by Bogdan, Manus & Claude 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,
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
Written by Bogdan, Manus & Claude 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
Written by Bogdan, Manus & Claude 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