Compound

Compound is a thesis-driven, research-centric investment firm leading seed rounds :: :: What we're currently reading @compoundarxiv | Not called Compound VC

[Compound @CompoundVC]

A bit about us: https://t.co/uBN7qrLG3c

[MoabTx @MoabTherapeutic]

Biotech is being rewritten by two forces: AI and Chinese biotech. The playbook that worked for the last two decades doesn’t anymore. The question of what's worth building has never been harder to answer.

Our take: the next era will be defined by companies that build in the places neither AI nor China can reach alone. We're sharing how we're thinking about it, and what we're building at Moab.

https://t.co/nOzECBKbD0

[Dr. Shelby @shelbynewsad]

Standing room only at the @CompoundVC Idea Factory event!

Ideas at each one of these is better than the last…
> anemia vaccines
> immune system transplants
> multiplex phase 0 for all diseases
> exotic probiotics

Many more … thanks to all that attended!

[Mackenzie Morehead @mackenziejem]

https://t.co/h0dr7KKE7J

[Mackenzie Morehead @mackenziejem]

How to Stop California from Burning Down
Half the most destructive fires in CA history have occurred in the last 10yrs

There's no one silver bullet solution. Capital intensive startups selling to utilities, local gov, fed agencies

And yet surprisingly it feels kind of tractable

[Mackenzie Morehead @mackenziejem]

We just published our latest monthly newsletter that includes research from our @CompoundVC team, our Idea Factory event tomorrow, and what we're reading

Sign up below

[Jonathan Xu @jonxuxu]

We successfully predicted emotion from brain activity, achieving >2x performance to the previous state of the art.

Alljoined collected a dataset of 3,408 videos paired with EEG data across 24 participants, covering happy, sad, fear, anger, disgust, and neutral emotion.

[Harvey Bracken-Smith @harveybsmith_]

I sat down with @mhdempsey, Managing Partner at Compound, one of the first investors in Runway ML before most people knew what generative AI was.

In this episode we talked about:
- How he wrote the first check into Runway ML and why being early is the only edge that truly compounds over time
- Why he sat out the entire 2021 bull run when every other firm was deploying at record speed
- Why tech went from the coolest industry in the world to one of the most hated and what needs to change
- How he has 5X every fund he has run by doing less than almost every other venture firm in America
- Why writing on the internet is the most important thing he has ever done in his career

Michael was thoughtful on everything from thesis driven investing and frontier technology to ethics, responsibility and what the venture industry needs to reckon with before it loses the trust of the world entirely.

The episode is available here:
YouTube: https://t.co/QZd0YB74lR
Spotify: https://t.co/FaHk0XxQRs
Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/drL9hFapH5

If you enjoy the episode, subscribing to Personable and sharing it with one person who would love it is the best thing you can do to support the show.

Harvey

[Alex Kendall @alexgkendall]

Today we’re launching @wayve_ai Labs, dedicated to advancing frontier Embodied AI and accelerating the path to general-purpose intelligence in the physical world.

Nearly a decade ago, Wayve was founded on a contrarian conviction: AI would have its greatest impact when it could perceive, reason and act in the real world. Since then, we’ve pioneered many of our field’s key breakthroughs: the first world model for driving (2018), video generative models for simulation (2022), and vision-language-action models for embodied reasoning (2023).

Over the past decade, we’ve built an organization which brings together the global scale of automotive talent with frontier AI science. Wayve is the best place to work on frontier Embodied AI science, while seeing your work deployed in mass production in the physical world. At Wayve, idea -> global deployment is measured in hours.

Now, our commercial progress enables us to increase our ambition even further. We want to create the best environment for Embodied AI research. Wayve Labs combines global-scale driving data, real-world deployment, and frontier-scale compute to create a uniquely powerful environment for Embodied AI research.

[Orbital Industries @Orbital_Ind]

Today, we’re pleased to announce we’ve raised $50 million in Series B funding led by @pluralplatform

This round also includes existing and previous investors NVentures (NVIDIA), @radicalvcfund, @CompoundVC and @FlyVC. The raise scales our AI engine for the physical economy and builds next-generation data centre hardware.

Orbital Industries builds hardware from the atoms up, addressing the physical constraints of AI infrastructure.

Through @OrbitalITGlobal, our commercial brand for data centre infrastructure, our first products tackle bottlenecks in cooling and deployment, with a non-toxic fluid for next-generation GPUs and modular infrastructure that drastically cuts build times.

Read more about the round: https://t.co/TrlhNVuqYI

[Ian Hogarth @soundboy]

16/ And do read @jeremyakahn’s profile of Orbital in @Fortune today: https://t.co/TopAcwaCuE

[Ian Hogarth @soundboy]

1/ I'm really excited to share that Plural is leading @Orbital_Ind's $50m Series B round

Orbital is using AI to discover and design novel compounds from the atoms up, then engineering the products that exploit them directly.

[Michael Dempsey @mhdempsey]

4 more from an early summer evening at compound

[Mackenzie Morehead @mackenziejem]

One of the most interesting aspects of solar + batteries is it's moving the world slowly towards fractals of decentralization
It's economically viable to be independent at the nation-, community-, all the way to household-level. Anywhere on earth.
Regardless of what resources happen to be underfoot as a manufacturing plant can be spun up anywhere
Huge implications on geopolitics

[Dr. Shelby @shelbynewsad]

We're running a @CompoundVC Research Day on BioML Frontiers in SF on June 23.

Not only are we seeing new model architectures, net new data sources, but we're also seeing new ambitions of BioML from:
- generating de novo viruses
- to making fully fledged human tissues
- to creating foundation model companies from consumer diagnostic data

We've written extensively about this previously and to further our work at Compound in creating legibility of new futures, business models, and progress, we're excited to showcase and host those at the BioML Frontier.

​Please join us for a morning of rapid-fire presentations, dreaming, and downright impressive hillclimbs.

​We have a couple spots open for speakers if being on the BioML Frontier resonates with you and your team.

(Link below for registration. This will be a small, curated event.)

​Thanks to @runwayml for hosting this event at your space!

[The Graph @graphprotocol]

AI agents need to pay for things. That's a harder problem than it sounds. If an agent pays $0.0001 for a data query but the gas fee is $0.05, the economics fail entirely.

GraphTally, the trust-minimized micropayment system built by core developers on The Graph, has been live on the network since late 2024 and directly shaped the x402 specification to solve exactly this problem.

[Scott Stephenson @deepgramscott]

In 10 years, typing on a keyboard all day will look absurd.

For decades, humans learned how to communicate with computers.

Now computers are finally learning how to communicate with humans.

Once Voice AI becomes truly real-time, reliable, and deeply contextual, typing will starts to feel inefficient.

Not nostalgic -- inefficient.

[smac @0xsmac]

NEW POST (Let The Bubble Wash Over You)

some thoughts on market structure and what the new financial regime looks like including:

> convective weather systems
> the reality of rolling bubbles
> how did we end up here
> what does it mean for the future

link to full piece below

[Mackenzie Morehead @mackenziejem]

Cycles pushes forward the original vision of crypto, doing what btc did for payments for debt. It's an open clearing network that minimizes the total debt in the system/economy. Imo it's one of the boldest and positive ideas within finance

[Alex Kendall @alexgkendall]

I'm in Detroit today for some big news!

Excited to work with @Stellantis to integrate our @wayve_ai Driver into their vehicles, starting in North America in 2028.

Stellantis’ scale + Wayve’s global AI = magic for customers.

[Cycles @cyclesmoney]

We’ve raised $8.7M to bring clearing to the masses. Our new round was led by Blockchange to work on the most powerful idea in finance.

It’s not just about moving money faster & cheaper; it’s about moving less while doing more.