🌐 The Industrial Transition: April 2024
Hi all, welcome back.
👋Awesome to see so many of you on my travels this last month. I will be in Berlin this week, HMU if you’re around
UK DefenceTech Hackathon - Skyral, Future Forces, Apollo Defence and Lambda Automata are co-hosting a defence tech hackathon in London on April 20th. My investment firm is sponsoring and I am helping find promising engineers and builders who would like to join. The event is nearly at capacity with some amazing engineers, from academia and industry. If you’d like to join - please sign up here
🦾Robotics and Manufacturing
Nvidia GTC2024 - NVIDIA’s flagship conference had numerous exciting announcements. Simulation, humanoids and robotics featured prominently and it’s clear that AI’s influence on the physical world is core to NVIDIA’s roadmap. Some notable announcements:
Project GR00T - is NVIDIA’s GEAR Labs (covered last month) first research project and aims to build a generalisable foundation model for Embodied AI, starting with humanoids. The goal is to have a (likely transformer-based) model which can work across several embodiments and perform many tasks. This will be built largely on their stack;
simulation: in the new Isaac Lab, a new lightweight reference application built on Omniverse Isaac Sim for humanoid learning
train: on OSMO, a new compute orchestration system to scale up models
deploy: to Jetson Thor, a new edge GPU chip designed to power GR00T and built on the Thor system on chip (SoC)
Omniverse Cloud PaaS APIs - NVIDIA announced that their Omniverse industrial digital twin will be available through APIs. This enables developers to integrate Omniverse features directly into existing design and automation software applications for digital twins or simulation workflows.
A digital twin for climate - NVIDIA introduced Earth-2, a digital twin of the earth, the cloud platform aims to mitigate the impacts of climate-induced extreme weather. The cloud APIs allow for rapid, high-resolution forecasts and warnings. We previously covered DeepMind’s weather simulation models
New chip for transport autonomy - DRIVE Thor is an in-vehicle SoC launching next year and succeeding DRIVE Orin, designed for autonomous driving. Both, autonomous vehicle company Nuro and trucking company Waabi announced their use of DRIVE Thor to power their autonomy inference.
Isaac Manipulator and Perceptor, pre-trained models, libraries and reference hardware - The Isaac Manipulator enhances robotic arm dexterity and AI capabilities, offering an 80x speedup in path planning and improved efficiency with zero-shot perception. Isaac Perceptor advances multi-camera 3D vision for autonomous robots in manufacturing
🚘 Department of Autonomous Vehicles: Apple’s autonomous vehicles ambitions got canned - ‘Project Titan’ was scraped after 10 years and many billions of R&D spend. It’s unclear what ultimately led to the project being cancelled, though some senior management left as early as 2021. Apple only releases products when specifications are at parity or exceed state-of-the-art, a tall order in AVs.
Phantom Auto, a leader in an emerging tele-operations market has shuttered. The company built technology which allowed remote drivers to operate cars remotely with low latency, with potential uses in autonomous vehicles and industrial settings.
Waymo announced they expanded their robo-taxis to Los Angeles, and expect to launch in Austin later this year. MobileEye launched in Shanghai - the self-driving technology company are expanding their use of SuperVision from Chinese highways to cities, starting with Shanghai and expanding to 60 cities by the end April.
⚒A $115m Series A round for hardware engineering SaaS. Famed company builder Sutter Hill Ventures (best known for Snowflake), announced the public launch of Luminary Cloud. A new computer-aided engineering (CAE) tool for hardware design engineers. Seemingly, Luminary is a GPU-based multi-physics mesh generator and simulator. It’s unclear how they integrate with existing CAD packages, though they have already sold to partners such as Joby Aviation and Trek Bikes;
“While software engineering has become more agile thanks to advances in cloud technologies, physical engineering hasn’t kept pace, despite increasing pressure to deliver advanced products faster and more efficiently,” Luminary Cloud CEO
More foundational models (“FoMo”) for robotics - Warehouse automation company Covariant, announced their RFM-1 model, a multi-modal model which they claim gives robots “human-like reasoning“ capabilities. The model is trained on internet-scale language data and Covariant’s in-field vision data that provides physical reasoning capabilities. Their systems have manipulated deformed objects, handled high occlusions, reasoned about varying suction dynamics across materials and worked in less structured and dynamic environments.
MODEX 2024 summary - the annual warehouse and logistics automation conference was held last month, a few noticeable trends;
There was much chatter and caution around the near-term viability of humanoids. Many are sceptical of the generalisability of these robots across tasks versus using task-specific specialised robots
A noticeable move from vendors offering siloed solutions to more integrated, platform, and device-agnostic ecosystems. Zebra Technologies exemplified this by merging wearable tech, handheld devices, machine vision solutions, and AMRs into a cohesive solution
Humanoid demos everywhere - this last month has seen a glut of humanoid demos, from Figure to Tesla to Sanctuary, as companies vie for mind-share of this emerging space. Apptronik announced a partnership with Mercedes Benz. This makes them the third humanoid company to work with industry partners (Figure→BMW, Agility→ Amazon)
🤗Hugging Face gets into robotics - the open-source language model repository hired ex-Tesla robotics engineer Remi Cadene to lead efforts on open-source robotics projects.
MIT’s path planning breakthrough - researchers have improved robotic path planning through a deep learning model, instead of normal random search methods. This has implications for mobile robotics working in confined spaces, such as AMRs and drones. This is a similar goal to ETH spin-out Flink Robotics, who use an impressive differential simulation method to solve this problem (👋).
🌍 Climate Tech
Earth AI breakthrough - AI continues to impact mineral and rare earth discovery. Earth AI, in partnership with Legacy Minerals, just discovered a large deposit of Nickel-Platinum-Copper group elements, just 5 months after their last discovery. Last month, we covered Kobold Metals recent discoveries, also utilising AI for search optimisation of potential deposit sites.
Anodeless batteries, the next big thing? Ion Systems have developed and anodeless and compressionless solid-state battery which successfully achieved and exceeded 125 cycles with less than 5% capacity degradation in performance. This makes the batteries safer and cheaper to produce, which has potential aplications in defence, EVs and long-duration energy storage (LDES).
New battery manufacturing process - MIT spinout 24M Technologies has simplified lithium-ion battery production with a new design that requires fewer materials and fewer steps to manufacture each cell. The company says the design, which it calls “SemiSolid” for its use of gooey electrodes, reduces production costs by up to 40 percent
Unspun partners with Walmart to make fast fashion sustainable. up to 40% of materials are wasted due to cutting, in the current clothes manufacturing method. Unspun use robotics and their Vega 3D method to spin and weave materials into end products at the point of sale, meaning less wastage and transportation;
US Department of Energy (DOE) pushes to commercialise next-gen geothermal - the DOE has unveiled a roadmap to commercialising next-gen geothermal energy. As covered last month, Fervo Energy recently had a breakthrough in generating abundant energy from the earth’s crust. Geothermal remains a promising and massively underutilised renewable technology:
🌐Tech Geopolitics and Defence
Is Palantir the first software defence prime? Palantir secured a $178.4 million contract for the Army's TITAN ground station program, aimed at modernising battlefield intelligence. The contract involves delivering 10 prototypes for deep-sensing capabilities and data fusion.
“Overall, it’s a software-defined solution, so it’s designed to be modular, flexible, adaptable, configurable”
Lambda Automata just released ‘Jericho’, a high resilience communication case which can be fed data from various inputs. The system provides continuous, high-capacity mobile connectivity with multiple fail-safes through a comms strategy dubbed (PACE) Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency. It facilitates rapid distribution of essential tactical data in the field. A map-based interface streamlines operations, enabling remote management of extensive Lambda system fleets:
Really fast drones - Red Bull in conjunction with Dutch Drone Gods, have created the world’s fastest FPV camera drone. Capable of following an F1 car across a track. Similar electric motors and composites will be used for counter-UAS drones as defence becomes increasingly based on attritable drone systems.
‘Countering CCP Drones Act’ - drones from China, namely from DJI, are in the crosshairs of Capitol Hill. New legislation aims to block Chinese drones from being sold in the US market, and could also lead to the revocation of their existing FCC authorizations. A potential boon for companies such as Skydio and AeroVironment. The legislation claims:
“[DJI] drones are collecting vast amounts of sensitive data – everything from high-resolution images of critical U.S. infrastructure to facial recognition technology and remote sensors that can measure an individual’s body temperature and heart rate.”
DJI have rebuked many of the claims, which you can read here.
Defence and fund sustainability regulations. We previously covered ‘Defence going from Taboo to consensus’ amongst VCs - Finserve Nordic has become the first European Defence fund to be classified as an Article 8 Fund. SFDR defines Article 8 as: “Funds that promote environmental or social characteristics”. This should allow more institutional European capital to invest in defence funds.
The European Union continues to build defence capabilities - they announced the European Defence Industrial Strategy (EDIS), which whilst still very vague aims to;
be more collaborative and European investment from Member States
Improve the responsiveness of the European defence industry under any circumstances and time horizon;
Mainstream a defence readiness culture, including across EU policies
👭From the community
Report: Electrothermal energy storage (SystemIQ)
‘Electravision’. A comprehensive and detailed report on electrifying and powering everything with renewables (JP Morgan)
💰Notable Funding Rounds
Sunfire (€500m Series E) the green hydrogen producer raised a mix of equity and EU grant funding, from investors such as LGT, GIC, Ahren Innovation and Carbon Equity
Applied Intuition ($250m Series E) autonomous vehicle software company raised from Lux Capital, Elad Gil and Porsche Investments
Aira (€145m Series B) Swedish heat pump maker raised from Altor, Kinnevik and Temasek
Oishii ($134m Series B) is a vertical farming company, NTT led the round
Luminary Cloud ($115m Series A) is a next-gen computer-aided engineering (CAE) package, incubated by Sutter Hill Ventures. The round was $15m of equity and $100m of debt
Nozomi ($100m Series E) cybersecurity for critical infrastructure OT / IoT, raised from Mitsubishi and Schneider Electric
Physical Intelligence ($70m seed) is developing generalisable models for robotics. The round was led by Thrive Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Lux Capital, OpenAI, and Sequoia Capital
Bear Robotics ($60m Series B) is a robotic waiter, LG led the round
Greenly (48m Series B) a Paris-based carbon accounting platform, the round was led by Fidelity
Viam Robotics($45m Series B) is a software programming platform for robotics, they raised from USV and Battery Ventures