We're throwing a party at DC Deep Tech week!
Join HAUS and our friends Red Cell Partners, Fulcrum Venture Group, and Point72 Ventures for an evening of networking and drinks with leading investors, founders, and operators in the national security and defense tech ecosystems as part of DC Deep Tech Week.
“We're U.S.-aligned, so our funds are U.S.-based technology investments that are nationally oriented and help the nation. And that's not only defense tech. It includes economic growth, workforce development, and job creation. If you add up the capital that the U.S. has allocated, not including the Department of Defense, it's about $1.7 trillion sitting in the CHIPS Act, the IRA, NASA's budget, the FDA, ARPA-H, and ARPA-E. That dwarfs any amount of venture capital, no matter how big the funds are. We knew that money needed a shepherd to direct it to the best opportunities. So AFF basically sits between government entities and our portfolio company startups and helps them get capital, access to policy, and work with governments.”
“Actinide, an advanced materials company that designs, builds, and operates its own isotope separation machines, has become the first startup in history to produce high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU). The enrichment was performed on the company's first-generation calutron, which, weeks earlier, was producing Actinide’s flagship commercial product: enriched ytterbium-176, delivered to Oklo Isotopes.
There is no end-to-end domestic supply chain for HALEU-based fuel: the Department of Energy says that most advanced reactor designs require HALEU, yet there is currently zero available from domestic suppliers. While conventional centrifuge enrichment is able to produce enriched uranium hexafluoride gas, this still must be converted into solid form before fuel fabrication - a process for which the United States has zero commercial capacity. The Department of Energy contracted six companies in 2024 to build out that deconversion capacity, but Actinide’s technology bypasses the bottleneck entirely by producing solid HALEU directly.”
Two humanoid robots broke Usain Bolt’s record for the 100-meter dash last Saturday. One (shown here) ran the course in 9.47 seconds, and the other managed to do so in just 9.39 seconds. (Image: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
“The World Humanoid Robot Games is back for a second year, and the bots are just as unsettling and impressive as they are ridiculous and unwieldy. On the first day of the Games, two humanoid robots beat Usain Bolt’s world record for the 100-meter dash—before crashing into a padded wall. Still, this five-day extravaganza showcases how far and how rapidly humanoid robots have come in even the 12 months since last year’s Games.
The Games are taking place in Beijing and feature 51 events, including kickboxing, table tennis and soccer. Chinese companies produce the majority of humanoid robots, but machines representing 16 countries are participating in the Games this year, including Germany, Japan and the U.S.” (via Scientific American)
NIST is selling Peanut Butter for $415.33 per jar / Quantum battery upends the rules of charging / Silicon Valley is in denial in face of widespread backlash / The mechanics of the Nepali flash flood / Overcooked? Why robotic pizza makers are failing / A startup claims it's found a drug to make your blood young / A New Framework for How the Brain Compresses Our Noisy World / US battery startups have found a lifeline in defense / Robot brain builders are pushing out of their GPT-2 era / US seizes domains of Chinese botnet used to hack NASA, Justice Department, and the Senate / Amazon just tripled its order of Nvidia chips over 'surging demand' / The Unlikely Place at the Center of China's AI Boom / The inside story on why OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face / Don't Ask States to Become Nuclear Waste Dumps. Make Them Partners in Solving the Problem / Inside Moderna and Merck's cancer vaccine triumph / Lady Gaga and her fiancé launch a biotech startup
