Tag: Deep Tech
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Blixt
(Crossposted to the USV blog) Existing electrical infrastructure is ill-suited to our current needs. It was developed for a world where we simply sent firm AC power from centralized power plants to end-customers. Today, however, electricity flows multi-directionally, as both AC and DC, and more intermittently. As we continue to…
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Vertically Integrated and AI-First
Crossposted from the USV blog A new pattern is emerging that we are excited about at USV: entrepreneurs are upgrading physical industries with an AI-first and vertically integrated approach. Instead of selling software to industry incumbents, startups are increasingly deciding to use their technical know-how to compete head-on. We think…
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Making Energy Programmable
(crossposted from the USV blog) We’ve previously written about the storage gap. The proliferation of solar has led to an abundance of energy when the sun is out and a dearth of energy when it’s not. Batteries help address this gap by storing excess energy in times of plenty and…
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Power Electronics 101
I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of the grid, which I think will look increasingly decentralized and multi-directional. Power electronics, or devices that manipulate power with semiconductors, are a critical part of that story. They offer greater control and flexibility to facilitate the expanding variety of…
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New Gadgets
Growing up, the tech hardware landscape was highly polytheistic. I had a Gameboy for games, an iPod for music, a camera for pictures, and a phone for communication. Then the smart phone collapsed all of that into a single device, and so for most of my adult life, the only…
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New Cities
I think new city projects are fascinating. Although it’s definitely hard to start a new community from scratch (especially from the top-down), greater experimentation can help unearth better ways to live together that we can all learn from and might push existing cities to improve lest their residents move away.…
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Climate Tech Policy And The Inflation Reduction Act
This week is Climate Week in New York. There’s been an awesome density of interesting founders, policy people, and other investors in the city, and I’ve had an absolute blast meeting everyone. Today we hosted an event at USV on the impact of the IRA on climate tech startups. Sophie…
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Is Deep Tech More Capital Intensive?
Something exciting about investing in deep tech startups is that the playbooks are still unwritten. It’s still a fairly small world with people trying a diversity of strategies that will be tested by the market and refined in the coming years. One thing I’ve found basically every investor agrees on,…