Not Another Fucking Newsletter

Happy Tuesday from Traded VC! 

You can’t make this up: A crypto dev raises $10M for the pre-sale of Slerf tokens & accidentally burns them. Never a boring day in web3 🙊 read 

Let’s get to our dealflow 👇

🧠 Dopamine Dealflow

Small Dopamine

• NFT + fashion 👗

  mmERCH raised $6.4M from @toryburch, @karliekloss & Liberty City Ventures 🫡 The startup uses generative algorithms to create collections of unique pieces....each physical item will also feature…drum roll…NFTs 🔥 read more

• Data on the blockchain ⛓️

  Balaji Srinivasan, the former CTO of Coinbase, invests into Clique, a startup powering data computing for blockchains ☄️ The startup raised $8M from ballers like Polychain Cap, Bankless & Robot Ventures 🤖 read more

• SAPI out of Stealth 👀

  UK fintech SAPI, raised $9.5M from Passion Capital, Tom Blomfield (Monzo), Martin Kissinger (Lendable), Luca Martineti (TrueLayer) & Raffaele Terrone (Scalapay). The startup was in stealth for several years...Huge congrats @the.mai.le 👏 read more

• NATO in space 🚨

  NATO Innovation Fund invests $11M into Alpine Space Ventures 👾 The fund will primarily focus on the security of space and innovative space solutions 💵 read more

High Dopamine

• Hilton expansion 🌍

  Hilton is buying Graduate Hotels 🏨 This is Hilton's first brand acquisition since 1999 & they are planning on paying a whopping $210M 👀 read more

• Remember BeReal? 📷

  BeReal will be fundraising soon as employees were told that the company has 10 months of runway left 🤔 The company was last valued at $600M 💵 We spoke to an early employee a couple months ago, and the way they expanded so quickly to US college campuses is still mind-blowing 🍹 read more

🐬 Deep Dive - AI Robot Brain

We are starting off this deep dive with a riddle. What do you get when you combine an all-star founding team and the words Artificial Intelligence? The answer is a seed round of $70M. Of course, with a baller cap table: Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks, Lux Capital and Khosla Ventures. 

The company we’re talking about is none other than Physical Intelligence. Founded by Sergey Levine, who has done pioneering robotics work as a professor at Berkeley; Chelsea Finn, a professor at Stanford University; Brian Ichter, a former Google research scientist; and Lachy Groom, a former executive at Stripe.

So what's up with AI? On one hand, AI purely in software has been exponentially improving in the last 10-15 years. Most famous and obvious example is OpenAI’s ChatGPT. On the other hand, their moving counterparts (robots) have not seen nearly the same level of improvements.

Basically, we have increasingly general chatbots which,although cannot solve 8th- grade math problems, are pretty impressive. Unlike the shitty robots that can barely do simple tasks. With news headlines such as: “Amazon has a humanoid device moving bins in one of its warehouses.” 🗑️

The difference is, language models can be trained on a super large dataset of - you guessed it - language, which is available on the internet and other archives. Training robots, on the other hand, requires gathering similar amounts of data from the physical world, which is far more difficult to obtain. This has been a fundamental challenge in robotics for many many years. How Physical Intelligence plans to solve this issue is unknown. 

But you’ve got to give it to them; their approach is interesting. Instead of making the actual robots  like Figure AI, they want to develop software that can be applied across many types of robotics. How? By creating their own AI model that somehow acts as the human “brain,” which can be transferred into robot “bodies.” #scifi

Now, get back to the grind 💌