Ulysses: Blue Frontier We know more about space than the ocean. Ulysses is building the autonomous subsurface robots that will change how we interact with the sea forever. @Willob @Mr_Voorakkara @Jamedderburn @colm_o_brien @UlyssesInc

Radiant: Beyond Prosperity Mass-produced microreactors mean nuclear power anywhere. Behind the supermarket, on a military base, and eventually beyond the star we were born at. Radiant is building them. @DougBernauer @torishiv @RadiantNuclear

Mariana: Critical Mass Mining hasn't changed much in over a century, and it's suddenly the bottleneck for everything from AI to defense. Mariana is rebuilding the industry software-first, from the ground up. @tbc415 @MarianaMinerals

We're thrilled to co-lead Volta's Series A. Compute isn't distributed evenly. Most startups don't have financeable balance sheets: they're funded 18 months at a time. So they have to pay more money for less flexible compute access, and have to wait longer to get it. Volta is building the neocloud for Little Tech. Instead of asking each customer to arrive with a bespoke investment-grade backstop, Volta assembles the credit support, project equity, and debt behind each deployment. Already, Volta has signed a $10B strategic partnership for a 133 MW deployment in Norway and a $5B infrastructure program with Azora. We're excited to partner with Ricard Boada, Sofia Gumuzio, and the Volta team as they expand access to AI infrastructure and ensure startups can compete alongside the industry's largest players. By @RaghuRaghuram and @shangdaxu

.@AppliedInt Co-founder and CTO Peter Ludwig says "a billion machines will become autonomous or intelligent over the next ten years." "Cars, trucks, tractors, mining haulers, defense systems, warehouse robots, humanoids—the physical economy will be rebuilt around software that perceives, decides, and acts." "The prevailing assumption about how we get there goes something like this: models keep improving, world models mature, foundation models for robotics arrive, and autonomy falls out the other end. Intelligence is the whole game; scale the intelligence and the machines will follow." "The contrarian bet, then, isn't against intelligence. It's that the next order of magnitude in physical AI comes from making the engineering system as intelligent as the models it carries." Full piece on compounding systems and Applied Intuition's newest platform, Dana:

Vacation looks very different depending on where you work. Over the course of the year, Germans hold the OOO crown. But not consistently! Swedes and Italians trade places in July and August, and in August, the French take over. Brazil breaks from the European pattern on summer break length. India books vacation days at the last minute. And birthdays are popular days off, but only the big ones. Turning 31? Not worth celebrating, apparently. We teamed up with @deel to look at how startup and tech workers around the world actually take vacation, not just how many days they're offered, but when they take them, how long, and whether they take them at all. North America is stingier than Europe. Most "vacations" are a single day off. Long weekends spike on Mondays and Fridays in summer. And no matter how hard the Europeans work to make their summer holidays count, Christmas break wins everywhere. The British are proportionately at their desks in peak summer; the Dutch over Christmas. Except Armenia, for some reason. Full piece: