🫡 AgentX 1.0 from @SemiAnalysis_ has been months in the making, and the @inferact team did amazing work pushing @vllm_project to become the leading inference system for agents: KV offload, PD disaggregation, and production-grade reliability — all without compromising accuracy!

I asked people: "which AI supply chain startups (compute, power, chips, datacenters) valued at $10b or less are most interesting?" 10 votes: MatX 8: American Terawatt 6 each: Lightmatter, Modal, Prime Intellect 4 each: Valar Atomics, Wafer 3 each: Ayar Labs, d-Matrix, Gimlet Labs, Heron Power, Olix, Panthalassa, Positron, Substrate, Taalas, Tenstorrent, xLight 2 each: Aalo Atomics, Corintis, Fab2, General Matter, Ornn, SF Compute, Starcloud, Stone Power, TensorWave 1 each: 49 more startups, see image and below People also voted for Base Power, Crusoe, Etched, and Fluidstack but those are over the valuation limit. Disclosure: I'm a small angel in American Terawatt and Wafer. I didn't vote.

Eight months after Erik Kriessmann (@ekriessmann) led @Castelion's Series B, Altimeter is pumped to deepen our commitment and continue our partnership with Bryon (@hargsb), Sean, Andrew, and the entire Castelion team as they announce their $1B Series C at a $13B valuation. Castelion is building with a rare combination of speed, technical ambition, and manufacturing scale. In just a few years, the team has taken Blackbeard from a clean-sheet design to flight-tested hardware and a program of record, secured more than $500M in U.S. military contracts, and has begun building what is currently the largest dedicated hypersonic missile manufacturing facility in the country. We believe Castelion is building one of the most important defense companies of this generation and demonstrating what is possible when American engineering and manufacturing move with urgency. Designed in California. Built in New Mexico. Supplied by businesses across America.

Impressive work! For comparison, an H100 can do roughly 100-200 tok/s of Muse 30B for raw inference single-thread, going up to low thousands of tok/s with a large number of threads - and I am sure that for the massively-multi-threaded case they can optimize the prover further. So we roughly, sort of, have single-digit (<10x) overhead for LLM proving! Next step is getting single-digit overheads for FHE, and then ultimately vFHE (aka STARK * FHE). A crazy ambitious milestone given present FHE overheads, but because of how highly structured and almost-linear LLM inference is, it's closer to the realm of possibility than you might think. Single-digit-overhead all the things.

We're very excited for @attestable to come out of stealth today. We @AltimeterCap co-led their seed round with @TLV_Partners, and believe they're building a crucial layer in the AI stack. It's clear two things are happening simultaneously - AI systems are making more consequential decision while their risk is going up (see Hugging Face incident). An existential questions becomes "how can you prove a model did what it was supposed to do?" Attestable is building this exact integrity and verification layer for AI, using zero-knowledge proofs to verify the right model ran on the right inputs and called the right tools. As agent workloads become longer running, verifying each step becomes even more important. The technical breakthroughs the Attestable has made to get here are incredible. Zero-knowledge proofs used to carry a 1,000,000x compute overhead, making them completely impractical for AI. The Attestable team has gotten this down many orders of magnitude, making ZK for AI something that can actually be deployed. We'll need this kind of integrity / security solution in a post-quantum world :) From securing model weights, to proving open models are backdoor-free, to giving agents verifiable identity - Attestable is building the integrity layer for an AI-powered world. As co-founder @Yogi_Brn puts it: every token should be a proven token. More below from my conversation with Yogi

The world has identified verifiable AI as a missing civilization-scale primitive. The core technical obstacle, practical zero-knowledge proofs, was considered impossible. We solved it. Today, we are launching @attestablecom, the AI Integrity Company, and announcing a $20M seed round led by @jaminball at @AltimeterCap and @YonatanMandelba at @TLV_Partners , with participation from @HalcyonFutures, Cerca Partners, @Weiner_Lia at Netz, @nickymontanaa at Zero Knowledge Ventures, @assaf_rappaport, Asaf Ezra, Nadir Izrael, Jon Coller, Eyal Manor, @OmerPerchik.

Very excited to partner with Volta and join the board alongside @RaghuRaghuram / @shangdaxu from @a16z. We've partnered with Volta at every round of financing, from their first to their most recent. AI is the biggest trend of our lifetime, and the infrastructure buildout that's coming to support it could end up >5% annual GDP. Building AI infrastructure is incredibly hard to do well, and even harder to do on time. We don't think there's a team better positioned to attack this opportunity than cofounders Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio. Ricard once sent me a text that said "Nothing as joyful in this life as owning powered land." He was built for this :) Onward!

Next up on @AltimeterCap First Pass: A conversation with @matei_zaharia from @databricks on Omnigent Agents are in their infancy, and so are the ways we develop and build them. Omnigent is a meta-harness aimed at solving many of the gaps in agent development today