Today we’re announcing we’ve raised $20M in seed financing led by @QuietCapital , with participation from @GradientVC , @haystackvc and @CompoundVC and other amazing folks to build the verification layer for AI-driven biology. We are also delighted to be welcoming @vqctran who is joining us from @GoogleDeepMind as a co-founder. AI is not going to cure all diseases without a verification substrate - a scalable environment where models can test predictions and learn against living human biology. AI is becoming increasingly capable of generating biological hypotheses, therapeutic candidates and experimental designs. But generating ideas is advancing much faster than our ability to test what those ideas will actually do in human biology. Existing systems force a tradeoff: the most biologically relevant approaches are slow and expensive, while faster in vitro and computational systems often lack the fidelity needed to capture human response. Polyphron’s bet is that tissue is the fastest, cheapest, most parallelizable verification substrate that still contains the biology that matters and we believe the path to biological superintelligence runs through closed-loop interaction with these living and simulated human systems. Thank you to @axios for covering the announcement. Link to our new website in the thread.

1) Genuinely happy for Instinct. This is so amazing for them. 2) If you're a later stage VC that missed out on this round at $10b, I know a bunch of deep tech companies with incredible products and/or traction that would be thrilled to raise at ~1% of this valuation. 😁

Meet Gamera, a new category of Group 5 strike and sensing UAS that we unveiled at @AFA_Air_Space's Air, Space & Cyber Conference today. Mass-producible, significantly lower cost than legacy platforms, and the first UAS specifically designed to employ bomber-class strike munitions such as LRASM/JASSM-ER, Gamera delivers all of the capabilities needed in the next generation of UAS, at 10X lower cost-per-effect than legacy approaches to strike. With over 9,000 nautical miles of unrefueled range, Gamera's unique combination of low cost, large payload, and long range does not exist in any other UAS. Since 2022, Swarm has been designing and building Gamera to provide the low-cost persistent strike and sensing that the @usairforce's Massed Modular Aircraft program is now seeking, making the force more capable, survivable, and effective, and renewing U.S. dominance of the skies. Read our announcement here:

I reread this every year. I cry like a baby every year. Todd Beamer died a father, husband, and hero. Todd: Hello… Operator… listen to me. I can’t speak very loud. This is an emergency. I’m a passenger on a United flight to San Francisco. Our plane has been hijacked. Lisa: I understand. Can they see you? Todd: No. There are three that we know of. They have knives — razor knives, like box cutters. Someone announced from the cockpit there was a bomb. It sounded fake. Lisa: Your name?Todd: Todd Beamer. United Flight 93.Todd: They killed one passenger in first class. They forced most of us back. Fourteen of us here. Five flight attendants. The guy with the bomb ordered us to sit on the floor. Lisa: Are you okay? Todd: We’re going down… wait. No. We’re leveling off. We changed directions. We’re flying east again. Todd: A guy named Jeremy called his wife. She told him two planes hit the World Trade Center. Lisa, is that true? Lisa: I have to tell you the truth. It’s very bad. Both towers are gone. A third plane hit the Pentagon. Our country is under attack. I’m afraid your plane may be part of their plan. Todd: Oh God. Lisa, will you do something for me? Call my wife and my kids. Promise me you’ll call. Lisa: I promise. Todd: Our home number is… You have the same name as my wife. Lisa. We’ve been married ten years. She’s pregnant with our third child. Tell her I love her. I’ll always love her. We have two boys — David, he’s 3, and Andrew, he’s 1. Tell them their daddy loves them and he is so proud of them. The baby is due January 12th. I saw an ultrasound. We still don’t know if it’s a girl or a boy. Lisa: I’ll tell them. I promise, Todd.(Lisa patches in the FBI.) Agent: Todd, your plane is on a course for Washington. Best guess is the White House or the Capitol. Todd: I understand. I’ll be back. Todd: Everyone knows this isn’t a normal hijacking. We have decided we will not be pawns in their plot. Lisa: What are you going to do? Todd: Four of us are going to rush the one with the bomb. Then the cockpit. A stewardess is getting boiling water. We’ll take them out. Todd: Would you pray with me?They pray the Lord’s Prayer. Then: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Todd: God help me. Jesus help me.Are you guys ready? Let’s Roll.

I lost my Dad on 9/11. I don’t get a lot of reach on here. But I just wanted to share a picture. He was 39. I thought he was old. I’m now in my mid 30s and I still feel like a kid. He was a great trader. He loved markets. He loved to find a stock no one was talking about. The first trade I ever placed was on his work computer, where he let me click the button to buy AMAT. I loved going to the office with him. It was electric. He was the best dad. We spent hours out in the street after dinner where he’d throw “pop flys” for me to catch. Eye on the ball. He loved watching Sponge Bob and eating cereal, wrestling with us in the living room. He just loved being around his kids so much, and we knew it. I’m so grateful I got a dad like that. Love you, Pops.

Announcing: $161M Strategic Breakthrough with the U.S Space Force In response to @WhiteHouse EO Ensuring Space Superiority, and the National Initiative for Space Nuclear Power, @AntaresNuclear has been awarded a first-of-a-kind Strategic Breakthrough award to advance space nuclear power to flight.

Organoids are so cool. They are tiny 3D tissues that mimic features of human organs. E.g. cardiac organoids beat spontaneously and immune organoids can produce antibody responses. Great post by @annasofialesiv on their potential to transform drug development.

I've coded up lots of personal tools over the last few months: * it's so fun! * so easy to get to 80% done, so hard to hit 100% * I wish latency was lower * main impact on my investing: seeing what I can do with Claude in 10hrs/wk has recalibrated my expectations for sw teams.

Instant digital version of your bookshelf 🤯 I spit out my coffee after Astra one-shotted this during breakfast. Just snap a photo of a bookshelf and get an instant real-time 3D bookshelf. Searchable. Linked to goodreads. Wow.

Making galactic scale ambitions a reality is notoriously hard. Hence the famous, "the best way to become a millionaire in the space industry is to start as a billionaire" quote. But I find the strategic sequencing one of the most fun challenges. When you have a big vision for space, how do you break that goal it into the right size chunks to actually make sustaining revenue while moving along the most critical derisking points in the operational path? That has led us to "unsexy" problems that matter enough to build a 185,000 sqft factory around! It's gratifying to feel the momentum of this flywheel reward us with more scope and more resources to run even faster. Thanks for coming by for a first look at the factory @MollySOShea !

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

The DoE announced participants for its Nuclear Energy Launch Pad initiative, and almost 20% are backed by @humbavc! It's great to see and @AntaresNuclear on the list, and I'm very bullish on nuclear energy in the US in coming years.