Artur Adib

A SAFE and convertible note had a baby and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati was the midwife- out popped the D-SAFE! 👶🏽🎉 A new #climatetech funding instrument was announced by Elemental Excelerator last week. One of the company’s main goals is to support smaller, up and coming companies during the awkward “Scale Gap” phase between #VC funding and natural growth. It’s called the #DSAFE (Development Simple Agreement for Future Equity) and it aims to aid the process by giving companies a small amount of cash to overcome initial risks and expenses during the developmental stages of a product launch or company. How does it work? D-SAFE has a redemption clause meaning companies can choose to have their payments offered as a loan or convert to equity at the investor’s discretion. Funders and companies will have clear communication and expectations about where the money is going and how it will be applied to either the company or the projects at hand. Financiers and companies will work together with more #transparency, and that’s a great boon for #startups and VC alike. As of this month, Elemental has already invested using D-SAFE in eight different companies, including Dimensional Energy and Origen — both companies investing in innovative and out-of-the-box solutions to environmental issues! Seems like a win-win on the surface. What do you all think about the D-SAFE? Alfredo Coppola Momoka Ueda Tim Wagner Stephen D. Torres Olya Irzak Natsuho Toyama Noriya Tarutani Shin Ogawa

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I have a unique list of places to visit, ranging from natural landscapes to tech centers and research facilities. One place at the top of my list was the Sirius synchrotron light source in Campinas, Brazil, the second brightest in the world. I recommend you read this recent piece (https://lnkd.in/dcfucTcr) about Sirius, on how AI turbocharges the particle accelerator and green hydrogen in the capital of science. Reading the piece about Campinas, a city 100 km from São Paulo, reminded me of its remarkable tech-oriented and science-dense economy. Home to one of Brazil's top universities and numerous deep-tech companies with global ambitions, Campinas offers a unique blend of globally-minded tech entrepreneurship and world-class science. Big science projects like Sirius are essential for advancing knowledge and driving innovation. At the GFCC | The Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils, we highlighted this in the "Leveraging Extreme Innovation" report (https://bit.ly/3Wes9a5), analyzing 17 transformational tech projects worldwide, including Sirius. These projects push the boundaries of science, technology, and business, leading to market innovations. Sirius is part of the Brazilian Center for Research in Energy and Materials (CNPEM), a major science infrastructure with global relevance. Notably, CNPEM operates as a private non-profit, showcasing the importance of institutional innovation. Innovation in institutions is crucial for emerging nations, especially in Latin America. Hugo Resende, a favorite author of mine on LinkedIn, shares valuable insights on innovation. We agree on three key points (right, Hugo?) innovation is poorly understood in Brazil, it's primarily about business and the economy, not just science and technology, and Brazil needs to improve its business environment and modernize its institutions to foster innovation. Even operating under the Brazilian business environment and institutional constraints, CNPEM’s innovative model provides a template for what is possible to do in the country regarding science and technology, and even innovation. But real change will only happen when Brazil trains and empowers a globally-minded generation of Brazilians at scale. Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Unicamp), a key player in training talent, has produced companies like the Nasdaq-listed CI&T showcasing successful examples of research-industry partnerships. Interestingly, CNPEM harbors ILUM (https://ilum.cnpem.br/), a highly innovative, project-based higher education program. Federal universities in Brazil need reinvention, and ILUM's innovative setup could serve as an inspiration. It reminds me of what my friend João Jornada achieved during his tenure at Inmetro, combining cutting-edge research with education, creating the opportunity for students to work with cutting-edge science tools, in globally relevant projects. Any thoughts BR colleagues? If you are not Brazilian: to these points resonate with your reality? Comments?

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Today I want to put the spotlight on Arelys Sosa, Thomas Tingelöf and Kent Moore who are the amazing founders of DREV.🔦 The problem they are tackling is that battery gigafactories, semi-conductor factories, and battery recycling plants face big challenges collecting hazardous metal micro-particles, slowing production, and they are squandering precious materials, and endangering staff. These are all individually big problems and combined this is huge.☣️ Drev has the solution to all to this with The Vault, an innovative technology powered by patent-pending dry brush technology and a revolutionary canister design, eliminates water and chemicals from the cleaning process, improves safety, and enables the adaptive reuse of valuable materials that would otherwise be thrown away with save manufactures millons. 🧹 The Drev team has the unique domain experience for solving a particular problem that we're always looking for when we are backing founders at the Norrsken Accelerator. Arelys is an industrial engineer who was part of the original team at Panasonic Energy at Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 so she has seen this problem first hand for years. Thomas has a PhD and he has been the CTO of PowerCell and VP at Volvo Cars and has massively scaled technologies before.🤩 The interest from the industry is huge and they are currently running projects with some of the leading battery manufacturers. You can read more and contact them here: https://lnkd.in/d7V-mKrx

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Last week, I had the pleasure of moderating a discussion on navigating FOAK in climate tech at the Greentown Labs Summit in Boston (which had >600 people!!). Here’s a quick rundown of what was shared by Katherine St. James of Spring Lane Capital, Paris Smalls, PhD of Eden GeoPower, and Hannah Friedman of Planeteer Capital: 🌱 What is the definition of FOAK? We discussed how the term can be controversial - it's almost too general because it doesn't identify what kind of "First" FOAK refers to - first team project? First geography? First of a technology in a sector? First time for the integration of a system? It's also too specific because it has the word "first" in it, which can be anathema to later stage / project finance investors. 💰 Partnerships for Funding FOAK Projects We discussed how important it is to build a blended capital stack & use off-balance sheet capital for a project so you're not using the most expensive equity dollars to fund an infrastructure project with low-ish IRR. We also talked through being creative about using corporate partners to provide in-kind services or ink some agreement (at least an LOI) to attract this funding. 🏛 Role of Government We talked about how government capital is seen by investors & how it can be catalytic for FOAK. Government capital can provide validation that a startup has passed a rigorous diligence process by a third party - and incentives like grants or credits can help improve returns for the first project- but it's important to be doing this in conjunction with getting customer validation and to be able to present line of sight to competitive economics without concessionary capital. 👥 Advice for FOAK startups The panelists offered some very specific pieces of advice for startups going through FOAK: how to get creative with things like revenue sharing agreements or convertible notes, getting smart with project development early on (like with DeveloperU), being careful about using FOAK too liberally with certain investor groups, getting the right commercialization / FOAK talent in and around you early Huge thanks to the panelists and the team at Greentown Labs (Jill Kirkpatrick, Julia Travaglini, Aisling Carlson, etc you rocked it!!) for hosting this discussion on bridging the FOAK gap. Also immensely enjoyed the rest of the agenda. Check out the full recap & videos here: https://lnkd.in/d9ApYe9Y #ClimateTech #FOAK #ClimateFinance #ProjectDevelopment #GreenTech #CleanEnergy

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Generative AI Breaking News (21AUG2024, Wednesday) - Rutgers University Cancer Research - GPT/Natural Language; Rutgers break's through using Generative AI for Cancer biologic protein sequence modelling. quote "Another category of AI-based tools for protein structure prediction are protein language models, which differ from AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold in that they are not trained on structures but rather on protein sequences7,8,9. Collectively, such protein structure prediction tools have been extensively used by researchers across various disciplines in the biological sciences and are expected to continue to add value alongside experimental structure" end-quote #rutgers, #cancer, #oncology, #pharma, #biotech, #machinelearning, #startups, #newjersey, #jersey, #miami, #geneva, #switzerland, #lifesciences, #investments, #israel, #berlin, #hedgefunds, #privateequity, #stocks, #nasdaq Ref - https://lnkd.in/eR2RYzvv

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Excited for DCVC portfolio co Alta Resource Technologies to emerge from stealth! The design space of biology is many orders of magnitude larger than inorganic chemistry, and Alta uses it to massively reduce the cost of extracting rare earth metals. https://lnkd.in/g_q5UwRF

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Check out my recent post on why President Trump is the forcing function for us to solve the “Missing Middle” and catch the industrial Tsunami of onshoring coming to the US!

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I'm so excited to continue supporting Prolific Machines, Inc., and the incredible Deniz Kent, PhD ,Max Huisman, and Declan Jones. Today's cellular biology processes are incredibly expensive, inefficient, imprecise, and sometimes purely ineffective. These processes are used from everything from making antibodies to treat diseases, to fermentation used to make high-value nutritional proteins in baby formula, to whole cuts of cultured meat. Prolific has developed a biology platform that leverages light to guide cell behavior and optimize performance over time using AI. By combining light, bioengineering, hardware, and AI in fundamentally new ways, Prolific can help pharmaceutical, nutritional, and therapeutics companies get to market faster, less expensively, and more efficiently — ultimately in hopes of helping improve outcomes — a mission any of us can get behind. Mark Cuban Peter T. Frederick Blackford Cooper Rinzler David Adelman Darco Capital Breakthrough Energy Michael Schulson Kevin Love Tobias Harris Breyer Capital Charles Besser Brennan Besser Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants https://lnkd.in/ea2TqdQk

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Continuing in a theme...Please sign up for my blog so you can read prior pieces and if you want to see all my past blog entries consider a paid subscription.

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Exciting to see startups aiming to use AI to discover chemicals, materials, drugs, etc. Semi companies have taken notice: AMD is investing in and Cadence is acquiring them. Semi/EDA companies have broken out by becoming critical path, whether it’s through critical software, packaging, IP, design kits from foundries, or user communities. Aside from just making it easy to make new materials, these “AI for making X” companies also need to articulate a vision as to how they can establish monopolistic positions in their industries.

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This is just incredible. Neal Ghosh's demonstration of how #VentureIQ takes deeply technical and complicated content across a range of industrial use cases and ages/stages through an AI-generated conversational podcast (a la #notebookLM) is really mind-blowing. Check out his post, below, and if you haven't seen VentureIQ, yet, let's get you set up to learn more. You can visit VentureIQ.ai or DM any of us over here to book a demo!

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🧬 It's a big year for Cemvita Inc. Gold H2 and Endolith. These companies are enigmas, marshaling the power of microbes to unleash economic and industrial solutions directly with the largest industrial titans and they are all the scientific brainchild of Dr. Tara Karimi, now officially appointed Chief Science and Sustainability Officer of Cemvita Inc. Dr. Tara Karimi will go down in history of one of the most brilliant minds of our time in biology. Just look at what she's created and successfully commercialized: 🛩️ Cemvita Inc.: Industiral microbes that utilize carbon waste including CO2 to produce economic sustainable feedstocks for palm oil to Sustainable Aviation Fuel. 🫧 Gold H2: Microbes that produce the cheapest form of clean hydrogen on planet Earth from abandoned oil wells. ⛏️ Endolith: Unleashing Olympic caliber microbes to increase recovery rates in copper and lithium while minimizing environmental impact, making mining more sustainable and effective. We've always known of Dr. Tara Karimi's brilliance. And now the world will too. Check out this feature from World Economic Forum. cc Moji Karimi Prabhdeep S. Sekhon Liz Dennett, PhD Kerem Ozmen Wes Mendenhall Filip Vurdelja Haluk Sabanci Dincer Grant Brown Ishan Meswani Garuth A. Andrew Irwin Shilpa Patel

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This Nobel Price for Physics to Professors Hopfield and Hinton has a special meaning for me. Their work had inspired my Master in Physics and the early years of my career as a Machine Learning scientist in the early ‘90s. There is an article in the Economist this week arguing that the Nobel committee had stretched this year the definition of physics to include computer science and artificial intelligence. I disagree. Despite the fact that the research of Hopfield and Hinton had a huge impact in computer science, the foundations and methods used by them are definitely in the field of physics. The Hopfield network was created with nodes and connections representing “spin glasses” a complex systems of material where spins of particles interact with each other. Very complex collective phenomena emerge from the study of these systems with applications in many fields, other than computer science. My Theoretical Physics Professor M. A. Virasoro at the University of Rome “La Sapienza” and his colleague in Rome, Professor G. Parisi, were leading world experts on spin glasses (Parisi received Nobel Price for Physics in 2021 also for his work on these complex systems). I first heard about neural networks from them in 1989 while at university and I decided to focus my research on this for my thesis. The same physics foundations can be found in the work by Hinton that is based on that from Hopfield where he applied the stochastic methods of statistical physics. His initial network was rightly named Boltzmann Machine because of the Boltzmann equation used. Hinton was the 1986 co-author of the famous Nature paper on the backpropagation algorithm that allowed training of a neural network with examples. He was also the co-author of the seminal work on Time Delay Neural Networks (TDNN) in 1989 by Professor Alexander Waibel, the first example of convolutional neural networks, still used in speech recognition today. For my thesis in 1990, I modified the architecture of TDNN improving their performance with a recurrent architecture that I named RTDNN. Hinton in 2006 revived neural networks from an apparent decline by introducing a method (using again Boltzmann machines) to pre-train complex neural networks with many layers of neurons. Deep Learning was born. So we should not forget that the theoretical foundations of Neural Networks are on physics and mathematics although the applications are now on many fields, computer science, particle physics, astrophysics, molecular biology, material science, economy, to name a few. #Nobel #Physics #NeuralNetworks

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Data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) illustrates the current "readiness" of #ClimateTechs + their potential impact on carbon reduction. As shown, many techs are at an early stage of being able to have a material impact. Concerningly, some tech funds recently returned capital back to investors recently + closed their funds - citing inability to fund capital intensive techs, found in areas like ClimateTech. This in part may be contributing to the $2 trillion shortfall in ClimateTech, that Deloitte estimates. What this may mean for the future? - The migration of LPs to global, super VC funds within ClimateTech, given the large capital pools needed to fund tech development - Greater specialization from smaller funds, energizing more niche elements of the ClimateTech market - but also altering their / LP's risk profile - A greater role to be played by debt financing in funding growth entities at an earlier stage - impacting cashflow dynamics Will be an interesting space to watch moving forward. We at The Proptech Connection are constantly working with all parts of the Proptech ecosystem. From the leading LPs, funds, techs and adopters in market, providing an independent view. Reach out to us today to find out how we can help. #InvestorTrends #Strategy #Global Ivo van Breukelen Stuart Daun Kiki C. Ethan Ward

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'Drill, baby, drill' isn't just for oil and gas - it could unlock geothermal energy and geologic hydrogen too. That's the fascinating paradox of climate tech I discussed in a recent TechCrunch feature examining how VCs are viewing the sector's future. The reality is that policy impacts are rarely straightforward - deregulation of drilling and permitting, such as for overhauls in transmission and distribution, could actually accelerate clean energy solutions. Furthermore, the sector has shown remarkable resilience through multiple administrations and market cycles. The core message I shared with Tim De Chant and Rebecca Szkutak rings true: technological advancement and declining cost curves will keep driving solutions forward, regardless of the political situation. The energy landscape continually presents new opportunities at every turn. Worth a read for anyone interested in the exciting future of climatetech investing. https://lnkd.in/gjNdm4DW #ClimateInnovation #VentureCapital #Geothermal #GeologicHydrogen

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Stop this removal-only obsession in the carbon markets. What kind of hare-brained approach is that? We need avoidance even more than we need removals. This article reminds me of the analogy I made a few months ago about a sinking boat. No amount of bailing water with buckets will save you if the hole in the hull is getting bigger. Remember, if deforestation was a country, it would be the world's third largest emitter. And no, you cannot just demand/legislate that poor rural people stop deforesting without providing alternative income. That is why forest carbon exists. It takes some form of totalitarian mindset (and/or total lack of understanding of rural economies)to think one can just ban things they do not like. https://lnkd.in/eCddBRwt

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I don’t think anyone needs to read another disappointed reaction to SBTi’s latest report… What I found interesting about the last 24 hours is the clear difference in speeds that “doers” and “commentators” are working at. Today, Microsoft’s CSO highlighted their 2024 Criteria for High-Quality Carbon Dioxide Removal. On the same day SBTi issued a series of statements and two 96 page reports, that essentially concluded that they aren’t sure what corporates should do. The Microsoft document offers a concise action-orientated documented, that overtly seeks to “advance a common definition of high-quality carbon dioxide removal by providing widely applicable quality benchmarks… to help catalyze CDR market maturation that facilitates just, effective climate action at scale”. In the same we see a clearly bifurcated carbon market, with high-quality projects being actively procured, and a low-quality market losing liquidity and relevance, there is a two-track approach to climate action. A group of leaders have acknowledged the need for urgent action, publicly defined and held themselves to account on their response plan and what will constitute “quality” and “valid usage”, and are simply getting on with the job at hand. This type of proactivity is a real positive North Star, to help fill the policy void that is delaying action from a broader group of corporates looking for a rule book. Through all the noise, there seems to be a simple consensus to anchor to - we all need to reduce our emissions in any and all ways possible, and we should use the levers we can to accelerate our impact and remove what stubborn emissions can’t be abated with today’s technology. … Who else is worth recognising for pro-actively getting on with the job at hand? #SBTi #CarbonOffsets #Sustainability #ClimateAction #NaturalCapital

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Freeline and Swan to Spur new AAV Development... I couldn't resist. Syncona announced they are combining Freeline and Swan Bio to create Spur Therapeutics to advance the most viable components of the latter two companies' pipelines. That pipeline will be headlined by Freeline's Gaucher program (on the cusp of starting Ph3), and Swan's candidate in adrenomyeloneuropathy. Syncona previously took Freeline private to create new optionality for the company. This was after AAV headwinds had battered the stock and other candidates reached approval first in their prior lead therapies (hemophilia). This shows there's still interest in AAV and its proven delivery capability to diverse tissues and cells. But there is continuing culling in the industry's pipeline. Want to take a look at that pipeline? or think about how it impacts your own prioritization? Reach out and we can discuss! #venturecapital #genetherapy #pharma https://lnkd.in/g8-ZKp4C

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Renewable energy is expensive … ok Compared to what? Compared to responsible fossil fuel where emissions are fully compensated or mitigated? We have paid simply for the fossil fuel for decades but not for all the rest … History should not be a benchmark in this debate, corrected history or future oriented might be. Changing that perspective might well give a different outcome to most of the sustainability debates but should also have political and policy consequences. Who dares?

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