S&S #8: Subatomic Particles and Satellites

Hello Everybody, 

Happy Tuesday. Hope everyone is gearing up for a good week. 

As always, thank you to my loyal network of 85 subscribers for keeping me motivated. Although we’re a ways off from my goal of 1,000 followers by the end of the year, I still feel humbled that this many people have expressed their interest in reading my ramblings weekly. 

If you want to help me reach that aforementioned goal, please share with any of your techy friends you think might enjoy as well. 

As an update on last week’s promises: The first interview for S&S was conducted yesterday with Kevin Berghoff, CEO of Quantum Diamonds. INCREDIBLY excited to release this one. Stay tuned for it next week. 

This week, we’re going to be doing two brief(er) highlights on a couple of very early companies: GScan and LumenOrbit. 

Before that, though, let’s take a quick look at the rest of the field. 

Seeds of the Week 

Cash Cows 

Between March 11th and March 17th, 75 companies in NA or EU raised seed capital. Of those, the following are our largest raisers: 

Physical Intelligence: There’s not a ton of information on these guys. The only publicly available info is their webpage, which looks like this:

Essentially, they’re building AI models meant to empower robots. Pretty reminiscent of a recent launch video I saw… 

So now we’ve got Figure + Open AI, Optimus from Tesla, 1X, Physical Intelligence, and several more companies, each betting that they’re going to avoid becoming SkyNet. 

Cool!

Anyways, they raised $70M in a deal led by Thrive Capital on March 12th. 

Silbo Telecom: Silbo is your standard fiber optic internet company. Based in Spain, they raised $21.7M from undisclosed investors to launch and fund new operations. 

Adaptive ML: Adaptive ML is a company building out technology that will allow companies to build singular, one-to-one generative AI experiences. Their models use internal company data, user interactions, and human-in-the-loop feedback flows to personalize LLMs to match companies’ unique and specific use cases. They raised $20M in a deal led by Index Ventures on March 11th. 

Interlune: Interlune is attempting to be “the first company to commercialize resources in space… unlock(ing) unprecedented growth and innovation for the betterment of Earth and humankind”. They’re starting by harvesting Helium-3 from the moon, a light stable isotope of helium with two protons and one neutron that is both very rare on Earth and very valuable for emerging technologies like Quantum Computing, Detection of Nuclear Materials, and Clean Energy and fusion reactions. In time, they’ll move on to extracting Earth elements and industrial metals as well. They raised $19.85M from Seven Seven Six on March 13th to further develop the machinery they’ll need to harvest the moon. 

Tastry*: Tastry is building technology that allows winemakers to understand how their wine will be received by consumers based on its chemical makeup; leveraging AI trained on two proprietary data sets of wine chemistry and consumer preferences. Tastry raised $12.4M from UST Global, 3Lines, and SUM Ventures. 

*For anyone who is not my Mom or Dad, no need to read this note. @Mom and Dad, this begins my career as being your guys’ technology consultant. That recommendation will be $50k. Thx.

Other Innovators 

Furno

Blockus

Our Featured Companies of the Week 

This week, I want to touch on two companies that have piqued my interest in this batch. There’s no overarching trend here that both companies play into like normal, I just thought that both deserved a highlight for their own reasons. 

GScan

Let’s start with GScan, a company based in Estonia that recently raised EUR 3M from Markus Villig (Estonian Billionaire and founder of Bolt Technology) and other angels. 

They’ve built out a series of cosmic ray based 3D imaging machines that revolve around something called “Muon Flux Technology”, or MFT. To understand what that means, I think we’d be best served to start with a short refresher on physics. Promise I’ll be quick. 

A Science Lesson

According to the standard model of particle physics, every single observable thing in our universe is composed of or influenced by subatomic particles. 

These particles can be split into two classes: Fermions and Bosons. 

• Fermions: If you’ve ever studied any particle physics, you’re familiar with quarks and leptons, the two fundamental particles making up the larger class of Fermions. Quarks are the building blocks of both protons and neutrons, which make up our atomic nuclei. Together, these make up all matter in our universe. 

• Bosons: Less important to GScan, but equally as important to our science lesson, Bosons influence matter rather than act as the building blocks of it like Fermions. Boson particles carry energy and forces throughout our universe, mediating fundamental forces like electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force. There are five elementary bosons: the Higgs boson (remember this?), photons, gluons, Z boson, and W bosons.

Muons 

To understand exactly what GScan is doing, let’s key in on muons for a second. 

There are several ways for muons to be created, but the most typical is a result of the collision of particles in Earth’s atmosphere with cosmic rays. Despite only having a half-life of around 2.2 microseconds before decaying into electrons or other neutrinos, muons travel at nearly the speed of light, meaning that by the time they cease to exist, they’ve usually already penetrated a mile into Earth’s crust. 

This is no rare occurrence. Approximately one muon hits every square centimeter of Earth every minute at sea level.

MFT 

As muons pass through matter, they lose a certain amount of energy and deflect in semi-predictable ways based on the density and chemical makeup of the material it passes through. 

GScan is leveraging this fundamental principle to create 3D scanning devices that capture the movement and activity of muons as they pass through objects, allowing them to identify and understand the makeup and 3d geometry of anything within their machines. 

Let’s use an example to illustrate this. 

When you go to the airport and put your bag through security, standard bag scanners leverage X-Ray technology to create images of the contents of luggage. While X-Rays are capable of understanding and identifying the density of materials, they are not able to differentiate between water and liquid explosives with similar densities (which is why you have to pour your water out before you go through). 

GScan’s MFT is powered by a proprietary algorithm that watches how muons interact with everything within the scanner. Based on how the muons change direction as they pass through materials, GScan can distinguish both chemical compositions and geometric shapes, meaning that it can both differentiate between a water bottle full of water and an explosive and pick out a crate full of illegal weapons in a truck full of identical crates of fruit. 

Their devices produce a 3D internal geometric reconstruction of every scanned item with up to 1mm accuracy, which can revolutionize security workflows in airports, border checkpoints, and other critical defense areas, while also serving use cases in areas like construction through condition assessment of structures.

GScan is releasing a portable scanner for nondestructive infrastructure inspection, and three stationary scanners (small, medium, and large) for security applications. 

Here’s a quick video to visualize what it looks like irl.

LumenOrbit

To finish, let’s take a look at Lumen Orbit. 

I want to start by highlighting the absolutely stacked resumes of the founders. 

Co-Founder/CEO: Philip Johnston 

• MPA, Harvard 

• MBA, Wharton 

• MA Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, Columbia

• 2x Founder 

• Ex McKinsey 

Co-Founder/CTO: Ezra Feilden 

• PhD Materials Engineering, Imperial College London

• 10+ years of experience with satellite design at a subsidiary of Airbus Defense and Space, where he worked on missions including NASA’s lunar Pathfinder 

Co-Founder/Chief Engineer: Adi Oltean 

• BS Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest 

• BS Chemistry, University Politehnica Bucharest

• 3x Founder 

• Ex Principal Software Engineer at SpaceX, where he worked on Starlink 

• Ex Software Engineer at Microsoft, where he spent 20 years and filed 25 (TWENTY FIVE) unique patents

Does that make you feel as bad about yourself as it makes me? 

Many early-stage investors place a significant amount of weight on team strength when making decisions. In this case, I’m not sure you can find a stronger team for what they’re doing. 

Satellite Constellations 

Lumen Orbit is building a network of low-earth orbit satellites to provide in-orbit cloud computing and data relays for higher-altitude satellites. 

The idea came from the founding team’s shared experience of challenges with downlink speeds in the space industry. 

Satellites in space transmit a ton of data down to Earth for various purposes. Currently, this involves the satellite accumulating data on board and transmitting signals to antennas on ground stations on Earth during a pass-over. At the ground station, this data is processed and interpreted. Speaking generally, the transmission of data is most efficient only when a satellite is passing over the ground station. 

When speaking on this process, Fielden made it clear where the issues lay: 

“I’ve been there in the control room when we’ve been commissioning a few different satellites and I saw this problem first hand, having to wait for two or three hours until the next pass over the ground station and in those short windows being able to downlink a few hundred kilobytes of data… That really hammered it home how disconnected most of our satellites are most of the time”

Their solution? 

A constellation of 300 low-earth orbit satellites that act as an “in orbit ground station”. This solves the transmission gap issue, thereby reducing latency for data transmission and enabling close to real-time data analysis. 

Rather than sending data to ground stations, high-altitude satellites will send the Lumen Orbit constellation the raw collected data. Each of Lumen’s low-orbit satellites is equipped with an onboard GPU, where AI models will extract insights from the data locally, sending only the relevant insights and analysis to ground stations. Each satellite will be connected to the next, and theoretically, there will always be a satellite in the constellation close enough to a ground station to send data efficiently, meaning no gaps in transmission. 

Lumen is partnering with Ansys and Solidworks to design and develop their satellites, and they’re in the process of filing applications with the Federal Communications Commission and the International Telecommunication Union to permit deployment. 

They aren’t slated to launch their first satellite until May 2025, when it will reach orbit aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9, but they already have $30M of MOUs (memorandums of understanding) with clients for when they’re ready to commercialize. 

The $2.4M seed round will be used to launch their prototype, and investors in the 3x oversubscribed round include Nebular, Caffeinated Capital, Plug and Play, Everywhere Ventures, Tiny.vc, Sterling Road, Pareto Holdings, Foreword Ventures, 20 angel investors, and four Sequoia Scouts.

Sequoia Scout Fund 

One more thing before I leave you. 

For those unaware of what Sequoia’s Scout Fund is — over a decade ago, Sequoia Capital launched what was the first scout program by a large VC. 

The primary motive was to expand their reach into areas they might not have as easy access to. The thesis? Founders know founders, and oftentimes have inside industry information that makes them: 

1. More knowledgeable on early-stage happenings than most 

2. More likely to have a relationship with founders that need early-stage capital 

Scouts are usually founders in Sequoia’s portfolio or inside industry experts, and each scout is given a certain amount of money (usually $100k) to deploy on behalf of Sequoia. 

I don’t want to take anything away from one of the most successful VC firms of all time, but it’s important to note that several of Seqoia’s biggest wins came from their scout fund, including Uber, Dropbox, Thumbtack, and Stripe. 

More than 230 companies that have received checks from Sequoia Scouts have gone on to raise a combined $6B in follow-on financing. 

All that to say Lumen Orbit is in good company, and based on their mission, it’s no surprise there were four different Scouts involved in the seed round. 

Thanks for reading everyone. See you in a couple of days for the first-ever S&S Consumer Product push.