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NIST launches a new platform to assess generative AI | TechCrunch

April 30, 2024 2:50 AM0


The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S. Commerce Department agency that develops and tests tech for the U.S. government, corporations and the broader public, today announced the launch of NIST GenAI, a new program spearheaded by NIST to assess generative AI technologies, including text- and image-generating AI.

A platform designed to evaluate various forms of generative AI tech, NIST GenAI will release benchmarks, help create “content authenticity” detection (i.e. deepfake-checking) systems and encourage the development of software to spot the source of fake or misleading information, explains NIST on its newly-launched NIST GenAI site and in a press release.

“The NIST GenAI program will issue a series of challenge problems designed to evaluate and measure the capabilities and limitations of generative AI technologies,” the press release reads. “These evaluations will be used to identify strategies to promote information integrity and guide the safe and responsible use of digital content.”

NIST GenAI’s first project is a pilot study to build systems that can reliably tell the difference between human-created and AI-generated media, starting with text. (While many services purport to detect deepfakes, studies — and our own testing — have shown them to be unreliable, particularly when it comes to text.) NIST GenAI is inviting teams from academia, industry and research labs to submit either “generators” — AI systems to generate content — or “discriminators” — systems that try to identify AI-generated content.

Generators in the study must generate summaries provided a topic and a set of documents, while discriminators must detect if a given summary is AI-written or not. To ensure fairness, NIST GenAI will provide the data necessary to train generators and discriminators; systems trained on publicly available data won’t be accepted, including but not limited to open models like Meta’s Llama 3.

Registration for the pilot will begin May 1, with the results scheduled to be published in February 2025.

NIST GenAI’s launch — and deepfake-focused study — comes as deepfakes grow exponentially.

According to data from Clarity, a deepfake detection firm, 900% more deepfakes have been created this year compared to the same time frame last year. It’s causing alarm, understandably. A recent poll from YouGov found that 85% of Americans said they were concerned about the spread of misleading deepfakes online.

The launch of NIST GenAI is a part of NIST’s response to President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI, which laid out rules requiring greater transparency from AI companies about how their models work and established a raft of new standards, including for labeling content generated by AI.

It’s also the first AI-related announcement from NIST after the appointment of Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI researcher, to the agency’s AI Safety Institute.

Christiano was a controversial choice for his “doomerist” views; he once predicted that “there’s a 50% chance AI development could end in [humanity’s destruction]” Critics — including scientists within NIST, reportedly — fear Cristiano may encourage the AI Safety Institute to focus to “fantasy scenarios” rather than realistic, more immediate risks from AI.

NIST says that NIST GenAI will inform the AI Safety Institute’s work.


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BigPanda launches generative AI tool designed specifically for ITOps | TechCrunch

April 26, 2024 12:51 AM0


IT operations personnel have a lot going on, and when an incident occurs that brings down a key system, time is always going to be against them. Over the years, companies have looked for an edge in getting up faster with playbooks designed to find answers to common problems, and postmortems to keep them from repeating, but not every problem is easily solved, and there is so much data and so many possible points of failure.

It’s actually a perfect problem for generative AI to solve, and AIOps startup BigPanda announced a new generative AI tool today called Biggy to help solve some of these issues faster. Biggy is designed to look across a wide variety of IT-related data to learn how the company operates and compare it to the problem scenario and other similar scenarios and suggest a solution.

BigPanda has been using AI since the early days of the company and deliberately designed two separate systems: one for the data layer and another for the AI. This in a way prepared them for this shift to generative AI based on large language models. “The AI engine before Gen AI was building a lot of other types of AI, but it was feeding off of the same data engine that will be feeding what we’re doing with Biggy, and what we’re doing with generative and conversational AI,” BigPanda CEO Assaf Resnick told TechCrunch.

Like most generative AI tools, this one makes a prompt box available where users can ask questions and interact with the bot. In this case, the underlying models have been trained on data inside the customer company, as well as on publicly available data on a particular piece of hardware or software, and are tuned to deal with the kinds of problems IT deals with on a regular basis.

“The out-of-the box LLMs have been trained on a huge amount of data, and they’re really good actually as generalists in all of the operational fields we look at — infrastructure, network, application development, everything there. And they actually know all the hardware very well,” Jason Walker, chief innovation officer at BigPanda, said. “So if you ask it about a certain HP blade server with this error code, it’s pretty good at putting that together, and we use that for a lot of the event traffic.” Of course, it has to be more than that or a human engineer could simply look this up in Google Search.

It combines this knowledge with what it is able to cull internally across a range of data types. “BigPanda ingests the customer’s operational and contextual data from observability, change, CDMB (the file that stores configuration information) and topology along with historical data and human, institutional context — and normalizes the data into key-value pairs, or tags,” Walker said. That’s a lot of technical jargon, but basically it means it looks at system-level information, organizational data and human interactions to deliver a response to help engineers solve the problem.

When a user enters a prompt, it looks across all the data to generate an answer that will hopefully point the engineers in the right direction to fix the problem. They acknowledge that it’s not always perfect because no generative AI is, but they let the user know when there is a lower degree of certainty that the answer is correct.

“For areas where we think we don’t have as much certainty, then we tell them that this is our best information, but a human should take a look at this,” Resnick said. For other areas where there is more certainty, they may introduce automation, working with a tool like Red Hat Ansible to solve the issue without human interaction, he said.

The data ingestion part isn’t always going to be trivial for customers, and this is a first step toward providing an AI assistant that can help IT get at the root of problems and solve them faster. No AI is foolproof, but having an interactive AI tool should be an improvement over current, more time-consuming manual approaches to IT systems troubleshooting.

BigPanda gets its horn after securing $190M in fresh capital


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Threads launches custom mute filters, teases controls for quote posts | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 11:54 PM0


Threads and Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced today that Threads is launching a new feature that lets users filter out words and phrases from their feeds and mentions. The “Hidden Words” feature automatically mutes common words, phrases, and emojis that might be offensive to users. In addition to these preset filters, users can add their own custom words and phrases in the settings. Users can turn these settings off at any point in time.

Earlier this week, dating app Hinge launched its own “Hidden Words” feature (yes, with the same name) to block requests with comments that contain unwanted words.

Image Credits: Threads

Threads said that the feature will filter out content from both the “Following” and “For You” feeds, search results, profiles, and replies to posts.

Controls for quoting posts

The Meta-owned social network already allows users to control who could reply to their posts: anyone, profiles you follow, or mentioned people only. Threads also have the option to restrict who can mention you in their posts, replies, and bio: everyone, profiles you follow, or no one.

Now the company is planning to introduce similar controls for quote posts. Threads said that it will soon let you limit who could quote your posts. Additionally, users will be able to manually unquote their posts as well.

The company’s rationale behind these new controls for quote posts is that it wants to restrict unwanted interactions.

“Since quoting a post is one of the most visible ways to connect with someone on Threads, it was important for us to give people more agency over who can engage with them and help reduce unwanted interactions,” a company spokesperson said.

Separately, Theards is also testing a way to mute notifications for interactions with posts. While some of these features aren’t available just yet, the company is still shipping new features at a rapid pace as it has started testing a way for people to archive posts automatically.

Image Credits: Threads

During Meta’s earnings call on Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that Threads has over 150 million monthly active users.


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Xaira, an AI drug discovery startup, launches with a massive $1B, says it's 'ready' to start developing drugs | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 6:09 AM0


Advances in generative AI have taken the tech world by storm. Biotech investors are making a big bet that similar computational methods could revolutionize drug discovery.

On Tuesday, ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs, an affiliate of Foresite Capital, announced that they incubated Xaira Therapeutics and funded the AI biotech with $1 billion. Other investors in the new company, which has been operating in stealth mode for about six months, include F-Prime, NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures and SV Angel.

Xaira’s CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a former Stanford president and chief scientific officer at Genentech, says the company is ready to start developing drugs that were impossible to make without recent breakthroughs in AI. “We’ve done such a large capital raise because we believe the technology is at an inflection point where it can have a transformative effect on the field,” he said.

The advances in foundational models come from the University of Washington’s Institute of Protein Design, run by David Baker, one of Xaira’s co-founders. These models are similar to diffusion models that power image generators like OpenAI’s DALL-E and Midjourney. But rather than creating art, Baker’s models aim to design molecular structures that can be made in a three-dimensional, physical world. 

While Xaira’s investors are convinced that the company can revolutionize data design, they emphasized that generative AI applications in biology are still in the early innings.

Vik Bajaj, CEO of Foresite Labs and managing director of Foresite Capital, said that unlike in technology, where data that train AI models is created by consumers, biology and medicine are “data poor. You have to create the datasets that drive model development.”

Other biotech companies using generative AI to design drugs include Recursion, which went public in 2021, and Genesis Therapeutics, a startup that last year raised a $200 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The company declined to say when it expects to have its first drug available for human trials. However, ARCH Venture Partners managing director Bob Nelsen underscored that Xaira and its investors are ready to play the long game.

“You need billions of dollars to be a real drug company and also think AI. Both of those are expensive disciplines,” he said.  

Xaira wants to position itself as a powerhouse of AI drug discovery. However, some view bringing on Tessier-Lavigne as CEO as an unexpected move. Tessier-Lavigne resigned last year from his position as Stanford president amid allegations that his laboratory at Genetech manipulated research data.

But investors are confident that he is the right person for the job.

“I have known Marc for many years and know him to be a person of integrity and scientific vision who will be an exceptional CEO,” Nelsen said in an email. “Stanford exonerated him of any wrongdoing or scientific misconduct.”  


Software Development in Sri Lanka

Robotic Automations

Exclusive: Eric Schmidt-backed Augment, a GitHub Copilot rival, launches out of stealth with $252M

April 25, 2024 2:16 AM0


AI is supercharging coding — and developers are embracing it.

In a recent StackOverflow poll, 44% of software engineers said that they use AI tools as part of their development processes now and 26% plan to soon. Gartner estimates that over half of organizations are currently piloting or have already deployed AI-driven coding assistants, and that 75% of developers will use coding assistants in some form by 2028.

Ex-Microsoft software developer Igor Ostrovsky believes that soon, there won’t be a developer who doesn’t use AI in their workflows. “Software engineering remains a difficult and all-too-often tedious and frustrating job, particularly at scale,” he told TechCrunch. “AI can improve software quality, team productivity and help restore the joy of programming.”

So Ostrovsky decided to build the AI-powered coding platform that he himself would want to use.

That platform is Augment, and on Wednesday it emerged from stealth with $252 million in funding at a near-unicorn ($977 million) post-money valuation. With investments from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and VCs including Index Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Innovation Endeavors and Meritech Capital, Augment aims to shake up the still-nascent market for generative AI coding technologies.

“Most companies are dissatisfied with the programs they produce and consume; software is too often fragile, complex and expensive to maintain with development teams bogged down with long backlogs for feature requests, bug fixes, security patches, integration requests, migrations and upgrades,” Ostrovsky said. “Augment has both the best team and recipe for empowering programmers and their organizations to deliver high-quality software quicker.”

Ostrovsky spent nearly seven years at Microsoft before joining Pure Storage, a startup developing flash data storage hardware and software products, as a founding engineer. While at Microsoft, Ostrovsky worked on components of Midori, a next-generation operating system the company never released but whose concepts have made their way into other Microsoft projects over the last decade.

In 2022, Ostrovsky and Guy Gur-Ari, previously an AI research scientist at Google, teamed up to create Augment’s MVP. To fill out the startup’s executive ranks, Ostrovsky and Gur-Ari brought on Scott Dietzen, ex-CEO of Pure Storage, and Dion Almaer, formerly a Google engineering director and a VP of engineering at Shopify.

Augment remains a strangely hush-hush operation.

In our conversation, Ostrovsky wasn’t willing to say much about the user experience or even the generative AI models driving Augment’s features (whatever they may be) — save that Augment is using fine-tuned “industry-leading” open models of some sort.

He did say how Augment plans to make money: standard software-as-a-service subscriptions. Pricing and other details will be revealed later this year, Ostrovsky added, closer to Augment’s planned GA release.

“Our funding provides many years of runway to continue to build what we believe to be the best team in enterprise AI,” he said. “We’re accelerating product development and building out Augment’s product, engineering and go-to-market functions as the company gears up for rapid growth.”

Rapid growth is perhaps the best shot Augment has at making waves in an increasingly cutthroat industry.

Practically every tech giant offers its own version of an AI coding assistant. Microsoft has GitHub Copilot, which is by far the firmest entrenched with over 1.3 million paying individual and 50,000 enterprise customers as of February. Amazon has AWS’ CodeWhisperer. And Google has Gemini Code Assist, recently rebranded from Duet AI for Developers.

Elsewhere, there’s a torrent of coding assistant startups: Magic, Tabnine, Codegen, Refact, TabbyML, Sweep, Laredo and Cognition (which reportedly just raised $175 million), to name a few. Harness and JetBrains, which developed the Kotlin programming language, recently released their own. So did Sentry (albeit with more of a cybersecurity bent). 

Can they all — plus Augment now — do business harmoniously together? It seems unlikely. Eye-watering compute costs alone make the AI coding assistant business a challenging one to maintain. Overruns related to training and serving models forced generative AI coding startup Kite to shut down in December 2022. Even Copilot loses money, to the tune of around $20 to $80 a month per user, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Ostrovsky implies that there’s momentum behind Augment already; he claims that “hundreds” of software developers across “dozens” of companies including payment startup Keeta (which is also Eric Schmidt-backed) are using Augment in early access. But will the uptake sustain? That’s the million-dollar question, indeed.

I also wonder if Augment has made any steps toward solving the technical setbacks plaguing code-generating AI, particularly around vulnerabilities.

An analysis by GitClear, the developer of the code analytics tool of the same name, found that coding assistants are resulting in more mistaken code being pushed to codebases, creating headaches for software maintainers. Security researchers have warned that generative coding tools tools can amplify existing bugs and exploits in projects. And Stanford researchers have found that developers who accept code recommendations from AI assistants tend to produce less secure code.

Then there’s copyright to worry about.

Augment’s models were undoubtedly trained on publicly available data, like all generative AI models — some of which may’ve been copyrighted or under a restrictive license. Some vendors have argued that fair use doctrine shields them from copyright claims while at the same time rolling out tools to mitigate potential infringement. But that hasn’t stopped coders from filing class action lawsuits over what they allege are open licensing and IP violations.

To all this, Ostrovsky says: “Current AI coding assistants don’t adequately understand the programmer’s intent, improve software quality nor facilitate team productivity, and they don’t properly protect intellectual property. Augment’s engineering team boasts deep AI and systems expertise. We’re poised to bring AI coding assistance innovations to developers and software teams.”

Augment, which is based in Palo Alto, has around 50 employees; Ostrovsky expects that number to double by the end of the year.


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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India's JioCinema launches Rs 29 premium tier featuring ad-free, 4K viewing | TechCrunch

April 25, 2024 1:15 AM0


JioCinema introduced a new monthly subscription plan on Thursday, with the lowest tier costing just 35 cents. The revamp in the pricing strategy comes as the market-leading service seeks to exert greater pressure on rivals including Netflix and Prime Video.

The service — backed by Asia’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani — introduced two monthly tiers: Rs 89 ($1), featuring support for four simultaneous screen access, and Rs 29, with single-screen access. Apart from the simultaneous viewing, both tiers offer identical features, including an ad-free experience, the ability to stream in 4K, and download for offline viewing.

JioCinema Premium subscribers will be able to enjoy the ad-free experience across the platform, including the ongoing popular cricket tournament, the Indian Premier League, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch. JioCinema Premium also includes access to everything else on the platform, which includes a vast library of content from Peacock, HBO, Paramount, and Warner Bros. Discovery.

JioCinema had launched an annual premium tier with the international catalog at 999 Indian rupees last year. Viacom18 is discontinuing the earlier tier, and those who had subscribed to it will be automatically switched over to the new plan, according to a spokesperson.

The service will also continue to offer ad-supported streaming of the cricket tournament at no charge, the spokesperson added.

“The introduction of JioCinema Premium breaks the numerous cost and quality barriers that exist in accessing premium entertainment,” said Kiran Mani, CEO of Viacom18 Digital, in a statement. “With 4K streaming, best-in-class audio, offline viewing and no device restriction all at a customer-centric pricing is sure to democratise access to quality entertainment for all of India.”

This is a developing story. More to follow.


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Tesla launches new Model 3 Performance variant to rev up demand | TechCrunch

April 23, 2024 10:40 PM0


Tesla has officially revealed a new Performance variant of the recently-refreshed Model 3 sedan as the company looks to fight off receding demand.

The new version of the Model 3, which starts at $52,990, has a new active damping system and adaptive suspension for better handling and comfort, 296 miles of battery range and can travel from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 2.9 seconds with 510 horsepower on offer.

Compared to the previous Model 3 Performance, the new version has 32% more peak power and 16% more peak torque, and 5% less drag. It does all this while consuming less energy than its predecessor, according to Tesla. That’s thanks in part to a new-generation drive unit, and also a rear diffuser and spoiler. The front and rear ends of the car have also benefited from a slight facelift, separating it from the other versions of the newly-tweaked Model 3 revealed last year.

The Model 3 Performance still carries with it the wholesale changes made with that recent refresh. That means there’s an ambient light bar wrapping around the cabin interior, better sound dampening and upgraded materials throughout, a stalk-less steering wheel and a new touchscreen display.

Tesla is launching the new Model 3 Performance at a time when the company is coming off one of its worst quarters for deliveries in recent memory, having dropped 20% compared to the fourth quarter of 2023. The impact of that disappointing first quarter is set to be revealed Tuesday when the company publishes its financial results after the market closes.

Tesla is also just one week removed from announcing sweeping layoffs of more than 10% to its global workforce, with the cuts affecting seemingly all corners of the company.

Orders placed Tuesday, at least at the time of publication, show an estimated delivery window of May/June 2024 in North America.


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Amazon launches a new grocery delivery subscription in the U.S | TechCrunch

April 23, 2024 4:01 PM0


Amazon said today that it has launched a new grocery delivery subscription for Prime Members and customers with an EBT (Electronic Benefit Transfer) in the U.S. across 3,500 cities and towns.

The company started testing grocery delivery in three locations last year, including Denver, Colorado; Sacramento, California; and Columbus, Ohio

The subscription costs $9.99 per month for Amazon Prime users and $4.99 per month for Amazon-registered EBT card holders.

The company said that with this subscription, users can avail of free delivery for grocery orders over $35 across Amazon Fresh, Whole Foods Market, and other local grocery and specialty retailers on the Amazon site. Users will get a 30-day free trial before paying up.

the story is developing…

 

 


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Robotic Automations

Ecosia launches a cross-platform browser, starts an affiliate link program | TechCrunch

April 22, 2024 12:45 PM0


Tree planting search engine Ecosia launched a new cross-platform browser today to increase its online footprint.

The new browser, available for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android, is built on top of Chromium. That’s why there aren’t many feature differences from Chrome. The company sees that as a good thing as people might be tempted to switch over without letting go of their web browsing routine. However, you can customize the landing page and remove sections — such as top sites or climate impact — that are not to your liking.

Image Credits: Ecosia

Michael Metcalf, Ecosia’s chief product officer, told TechCrunch over a call that the company built a browser to expand its sustainable presence.

“The main reason we are building a browser is because we want to go where our users are and start to expand the footprint of where they can be sustainable. Right now, our main use case is around search, but we want to expand into parts of browsing experiences,” Metcalf said.

Ecosia is also starting an affiliate shopping program with the launch of this new browser. Users will see links to shopping sites like Amazon, eBay, and Decathlon under the sponsored links section.

The company said all the money earned through affiliate revenues will go towards planting trees and backing other green projects. Through this kind of investment, Ecosia has committed to generating 25Wh of clean energy per user each day they browse.

Metcalf said that while the company promotes lower consumption, it is aware that people shop frequently, and with the affiliate program, they have an opportunity to give back.

In the future, the company wants to improve the affiliate shopping interface, integrate its AI chatbot, and add more customization to the browser.

It’s tough to ask people to change their browsers, so the company aims to target its current user base of 20 million initially, along with marketing targeted towards casual green users. The company said that it was happy with the retention rate in its early beta testing. However, it doesn’t have any data on whether there was any impact on the amount of Ecosia searches when a user switches to the company’s browser.

Ecosia made a few structural changes to its search engine last year. After years of using Bing as a sole search provider, the company started experimenting with Google search in markets like Canada, New Zealand, Brazil, and the Philippines. The company uses System1, which syndicates search results from Microsoft Bing, Startpage, and Info.com in other geographies.

Earlier this year, Ecosia also crossed the mark of planting more than 200 million trees across 95,000 locations worldwide.

Ecosia adds a train travel search tool powered by Omio


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Robotic Automations

Seraphim Space launches second VC fund with nine investments already under its belt | TechCrunch

April 22, 2024 11:33 AM0


Seraphim Space, the UK-based space tech investment group is formally launching its second VC fund following its first close with limited partners including Airbus, TechCrunch learned exclusively. The early stage fund will build a global portfolio of 30 startups that will be backed at the seed and Series A stages.

CEO and manager Mark Boggett declined to disclose the percentage reached and fund’s targeted size, but said it should be larger than Seraphim Space’s 2017 £70 million VC fund (around $90 million at the time.)

Like its predecessor, Seraphim’s second VC fund, SSV II, is backed by major players from the aerospace sector looking to keep up with innovation.

This time around, Seraphim will also be operating in a busier and more competitive market.

Investors have become increasingly aware of space startups and the broader market, which could be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035, up from $630 billion in 2023, according to a recent report by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey. The number of funds willing to invest in space tech has increased compared to 2017, including both generalists and specialists such as Space Capital, SpaceFund, Starbridge Venture Capital and Starburst Aerospace.

Seraphim Space hopes to stand out with its track record.Its first fund returned three times the original investment, which helped dispel the cliché that space investment is “super high risk and super long term,” Boggett said.

Returns from its last fund were partly fueled by five exits — the trade sale of chip company UltraSoC to Siemens and four IPOs: Arqit, AST SpaceMobile, Nightingale and Spire Global.

Satellite constellation operator Spire Global to go public via $1.6 billion SPAC

However, today’s public market is a different world compared to 2021, especially for tech listings. This affects both Seraphim Space’s portfolio companies that went public and the investment group itself.

The firm’s growth fund Seraphim Space Investment Trust (SSIT) listed on the London Stock Exchange in July 2021 with £250 million in gross proceeds (some $300 million at the time.) After an all-time low in July 2023, its market cap is now £130 million, or $162 million, despite the fact that SSTI’s largest holding, ICEYE, became EBITDA profitable last year.

These market conditions forced the cash-strapped SSTI to focus on follow-on investments rather than new deals, and suggested that getting funding through the LSE for early-stage, non-profitable bets would be even harder.

“With VC funds, we’re able to make mistakes and have failures and high levels of risk over a longer period of time than the public market is comfortable with,” Boggett told TechCrunch. And while it didn’t help that SSIT was trading at a markdown, its existence has been helpful in other ways.

Through an approach known as a warehouse arrangement, SSIT funded the nine investments that SSV II already made before its first close. This helped show prospective limited partners that its investment thesis goes beyond what space is usually conflated with such as. launching rockets and satellites.

Wide space

The market growth anticipated by the World Economic Forum reflects that space tech has applications in other industries.

“All of the big trends that are underway are really being enhanced by space,” Boggett said, likening it to AI in the sense that “it’s really an enhancing capability, a facilitating capability for every other sector.”

The application of AI to space data is one of main themes SSV II will invest in. In fact, it already has done so by backing insurtech startup Delos and carbon credit verification platform Renoster. Both companies use large troves of data and modeling to address issues related to climate change.

Seraphim Space’s enthusiasm for companies like Delos is two-fold: the tech could have a real impact beyond monitoring and they have the potential for high valuations (and returns).

“They’re addressing some of the biggest problems that we are faced with.”

The fund’s third area of focus will be in-orbit computing. It sounds a bit more abstract, but also has the potential to have an impact on sectors such as agriculture and infrastructure. For instance, this category includes Aethero, a company that develops edge computers that would eventually support autonomous decision-making on orbit.

SSV II is also targeting space-enabled communications, with one portfolio company so far: Hubble Network, which wants to connect a billion devices through a space-based Bluetooth network. Its CEO, Alex Haro, knows a thing or two about locators: He previously co-founded Life360, which acquired Tile in 2021.

Hubble Network wants to connect a billion devices with space-based Bluetooth network

SSV II’s fourth theme, microgravity for science, reminded us of a company outside of its portfolio: Varda Space Industries, which is making orbital drug manufacturing a reality, and raised a $90 million Series B round a few weeks after its first capsule returned from orbit. Biopharma aside, other applications include research around new materials, Boggett said.

Defense isn’t highlighted as an investment theme, despite its recent tailwinds among funds, but Boggett acknowledged its ubiquity in space tech.

“The vast majority of space companies are dual use companies,” he said. But, he quickly added, “the bigger market opportunity is in the commercial market as they move into the broader underlying sectors.”


Software Development in Sri Lanka

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