Compound

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

[Compound @CompoundVC]

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

[Mackenzie Morehead @mackenziejem]

We just published our latest Monthly Newsletter! Including our two upcoming Research Days on sleep and data factories (RSVP below) and...
- Our research on what comes after HBM and making decisions under life's inherent uncertainty
- What we're reading like tech that makes transcriptions events in the brain over time measurable in the blood + in-context learning in robotics
https://t.co/ROk2w8yTUY
https://t.co/PJ5gKdDQ5A

[Mackenzie Morehead @mackenziejem]

We just confirmed two new speakers!
Stanford researcher on her mechanistic work on brain circuits that drive sleep regulation

And UCSF epidemiologist on her evidence for the link between sleep & AD/PD

You won't find more wisdom about sleep in one room
https://t.co/HUFcDpKxJH

[Anastasis Germanidis @agermanidis]

We crossed $200M ARR last week, doubling from $100M in April.

Runway is the world model company. We power the daily work of more than 60 million creators and 95% of the Fortune 100. From award-winning films and ad campaigns to real-time media applications to generalist robotics. Our largest customers are increasingly licensing our frontier models directly.

As we expand our research in robotics, the wonderful team from Kinetix, a Paris-based research lab, is joining Runway to help drive our efforts there.

Proud of the team for getting us here. Back to building the universal world simulator.

[Anastasis Germanidis @agermanidis]

At the limit, world models will become the RL environments for everything.

Excited to announce GWM Worlds 2, the first world model with a general action space, merging navigation, manipulation and human interaction in one model.

We're already using it to evaluate vision-language models on real-world tasks. We're also working with game developers to prototype new kinds of interactive experiences, powered by a world-prompting format that lets you schedule player actions, dialogue, SFX and world events.

[Mackenzie Morehead @mackenziejem]

We're hosting a Research Day on Ozempic for Sleep!

Last year we published in-depth research on sleep frontiers
We're now bringing together the world's top researchers and entrepreneurs pushing the bounds of both basic science and translation

RSVP here: https://t.co/HUFcDpKxJH

[Wayve @wayve_ai]

London, your ride has arrived. 🇬🇧

Today, Wayve and @Uber launch supervised autonomous rides across all of London (except airports) - the first time the public can experience the Wayve AI Driver and the first autonomous trips available in the UK.

Taking your first ride? Tag us and we’ll send a little thank-you for becoming part of our history. 👋 #RideWithWayve

https://t.co/tiJz33aOls

[Atlas Mankind @atlasmankind]

Introducing: The Brilliant Brain. A weekly series about human intelligence, made with human hands.

Written by Co-Founder and CTO André Marques-Smith, who wanted the brain's most fascinating aspects to be understood by anyone, not just neuroscientists.

[Atlas Mankind @atlasmankind]

Pioneer Edition is limited. Early members shape what comes next.

https://t.co/DxvV83XEjX

[Atlas Mankind @atlasmankind]

Everything begins inside your brain. Every thought. Every decision. Every experience.

And yet the organ responsible for all of it, the physical instrument shaping how you think, react, connect and recover, has remained invisible for as long as humans have existed.

Today, that changes.

The Atlas 1.0 is here. Pre-order now.

[Anastasis Germanidis @agermanidis]

Interfaces that are generated, not coded.

Solaris is our first step toward our vision of end-to-end neural software, where user interfaces are streamed directly onto your screen by a real-time video model, without any intermediate code or HTML/CSS. Today we're releasing a technical report and opening it up for limited testing by the community.

Amazing work by the team, combining the best of our research in general world models with Runway's HCI spirit.

[Serein 🟥 @SereinScripts]

the guys at @CompoundVC write so well that it literally became my last trigger to finally download the Substack app.

i've been aggressively uninstalling apps for the past few months, trying to limit my phone usage to basically just X.

but i found another reason today to finally add a new one.

everyone on their team is a must-follow. and in fact, i beg you to.

it's hard to find people who have such a tasteful degree of culture paired with superb intellectual capacity.

Compound is literally filled with ppl where you actually want to read everything they put out.

[José Maria Macedo @ZeMariaMacedo]

"All venture firms are constantly decaying."

@mhdempsey said this on the pod and it's something I wholeheartedly agree with and spend a lot of time thinking about. Very few firms in venture have brand value that actually persists across sectors and cycles. Everyone else is grinding to reinvent their edge, constantly.

Compound's own original edge was understanding frontier research before anyone else could. Then ChatGPT commoditised that skill almost completely.

His answer on what comes after is below.

[Pear Protocol 🍐 @pear_protocol]

Orchard grew in the dark - it's time we brought it to the light.

Pear is now also integrated with @Lighter_xyz.

[Dr. Shelby @shelbynewsad]

small molecule synthesis is stuck decades behind other modalities

@satomic_ai is making it more engineerable to enable abundance and eventually abstraction.

despite small molecule engineering difficulties, they still are 50% of drug approvals and could be more when Satomic increases the scale and speed of synthesis.

[Dr. Shelby @shelbynewsad]

Data sales is one of the most important areas in AI today. It matters both for improved model performance, realizing true AI world models and especially for deeptech startups that now have a new monetization path.

However, the best way to build companies and durable revenue streams around data sales in deeptech areas is largely unsolved outside of Mercor and Scale.

We @CompoundVC have a very clear thesis for what platform <> data sales alignment looks like in biotech. Namely that companies shouldn't go significantly off their core path to sell data to frontier labs. We also believe that only biologically complex and general platforms make sense as data providers in the long term. This thesis is only one part of the puzzle. There's a whole world of materials, energy, health, and robotics that are still figuring out durable sales too that we want to discuss in depth.

At this Compound Research Day on Data Factories we will have several deeptech companies (including in bio!) showcase their data generation platforms, specifically focusing on data novelty and scale for model training. Operators at frontier and neolabs will also be in attendance and speak. Join us to discuss one of the most consequential areas in AI!

(We're still building out the speaker list so let us know if you'd like to present.)

[Delphi Digital @Delphi_Digital]

Managing Partner at Compound @mhdempsey explains why venture firms have to keep rebuilding their edge.

“Now any person in the world can take an academic paper, put it in ChatGPT and say, ‘Explain this to me like I’m 16.’ That edge is largely gone.”

[Ian Meyer @ianpmeyer]

Satomic is starting a substack! First piece on the future of chemistry and why we're building below:
https://t.co/0AtUXvv8E3

[Michael Dempsey @mhdempsey]

(New Essay) The Forest is Always Dark

On love, investing, and what we need to know about the future.

https://t.co/ikIaioarog

[Dr. Shelby @shelbynewsad]

quantitative drug discovery discussed extensively here -

amazing pod

[nikhil @uninsightful]

unbelievably long @compoundvc and @mhdempsey. i'm sure this will be a great listen

might be a consensus take at this point, but I think compound is well on their way to becoming one of the great, enduring seed (and liquid) firms