Shahin Farshchi

@lux_capital, @zoox, @planet, @relativityspace, @vardaspace, @epsilon3inc, @nervanasys, @mosaicml, @CovariantAI, @goformic, $AEVA, Dad/Bear/Pilot

[Shahin Farshchi @Farshchi]

In 2006, I was in my mid-20s, had wound down my company and was doing a postdoctoral scholarship to pay my bills. I had been told that I should raise venture capital for my next startup.

I googled “nanotechnology” and “venture capital,” and the first Google search result was Lux, based in NYC, founded by a couple guys my age, who had funded companies building next-gen lithography, batteries, displays, and longevity.

I was FLOORED. This is at a time when SoLoMo, ad-tech, and “cloud” were all the rage. I didn’t know VCs existed in NYC, or below the age of 40.

I reached out to Pete and Josh offering to help source and diligence asking for nothing but friendship/mentorship in return, as I didn’t even have an idea at the time, and they replied the same day inviting me to spend time with them. No other VC had given such a warm reply to my blind outreach.

Being flat broke, I submitted papers to land speaking slots at conferences in NYC to be able to go out to see them, and the rest is history.

20 years in, I’ve had the fortune of working with talent and being part of the inception and success of amazing companies in fields investors were shunning or simply not paying attention to. I’ve learned so much from working closely with incredible people who have brought different perspectives to the firm.

In 2006, deep tech felt lonely; today the talent is everywhere, but conviction still matters.

It’s a privilege to be part of this next chapter with our fresh $1.5B fund to continue working with founders as they are ideating to pulling together to launching to growing to establishing generational companies accelerating our future with feats of science and engineering.

[Lux Capital @Lux_Capital]

We started Lux in 2000 with a simple conviction: the biggest opportunities lie at the frontier of science and technology that others find too hard, too early, or too confusing. Twenty-five years later, that conviction hasn't changed. What has changed is that the world has caught on.

Now compute, automation, and biology have matured into scalable engineering disciplines, and what was once fringe "deep tech" has become essential infrastructure. New talent, new tools, and new industrial capacity now exist to turn the most cutting-edge technology across the physical, computational, and life sciences into enduring businesses.

For these businesses and founders to become category-defining winners, they need meaningful capital and conviction. That is why we are especially excited to announce our largest fund to date, Lux Ventures IX, a $1.5B commitment to investing in the people turning sci-fi into sci-fact.

Today entire sectors of aerospace, biotech, defense, industrials, transportation and beyond are being reinvented by a new generation of brilliantly ambitious, often irreverent, scientists and engineers. And while markets have changed and capital reshapes around fewer companies and larger checks, our focus on the craft remains constant.

That focus matters because science doesn’t scale itself. The path from a result in the lab, only known to a few, to something durable the entire world will use requires a different kind of partnership. One that deploys the first $100K and the last $100M, that stays through the full arc of company-building, that mobilizes a powerful network of kinetic like-minded founders, and that treats capital as a tool rather than the product.

Forty-four people at Lux now manage $7B, still operating with the same discipline and purpose we had on day one. We find and fund founders others have overlooked, back conviction over consensus, and build alongside these rebels of science and tech at every stage.

We’re grateful to our valued LPs who've partnered with us through multiple cycles, and to the founders who trust us with their life's work. The mission continues, with even greater intensity and momentum.

https://t.co/D6emTydcYK

[Scott Nolan @ScottNolan]

If you want clean compute, it's either solar in space or nuclear on land.

[Neurophos @neurophos]

A pleasure to contribute at @Lux_Capital × @BlackRock's Future of Datacenter & Compute Symposium. We share @andrewdfeldman's opinion: Let prefill racks, like those we're developing at Neurophos, tear through inputs, then hand over to ultra-high-bandwidth decode chips.

Throughput, efficiency, and interactivity: Choose three.

Appreciate you putting it all together, @Farshchi and @tonywkim.

@PatrickTBowen @preston_woo

[Christian Garrett @CGarrett_15]

Europe’s critical industries - from manufacturing to industrials to commercial aerospace and of course defence - consist of some of the best businesses in the world. We want to build a new type of company to scale them up in order strengthen Europe’s defence and industrial foundations. I’ve long long been passionate about what I call Private Equity 3.0, and being half European and born in Italy, there’s no better or more important place to deploy this model. As primes and the winning neo-primes scale to deliver critical platforms for our defence, it’s equally important we scale the rest of the industrial base around them. It also turns out this same dynamic, fragmentation, and lack of scale and technology exists in many other critical industries as well. It won’t be easy, but Onodrim was started to go solve this by building the leading long term and trusted partner across capabilities and industries to the ecosystem. Many more announcements to come soon.

https://t.co/GzCV7QCb50

[Shahin Farshchi @Farshchi]

@CameronLMcCord @Nominal_io @lightspeedvp @insightpartners SO PROUD to be your partner!

[Nominal @Nominal_io]

Nominal just raised $240M at a $3B valuation.

Engineers today are building some of the most ambitious machines humanity has ever seen. They should have AI that’s purpose-built for them.

We started Nominal with a simple observation, that hardware teams needed better ways to work with test data and make decisions from it. Over the past four years, we’ve built software that understands the complex realities of hardware development.

Now we’re building the Hardware Intelligence Platform that gives engineers increased visibility into complex physical systems, helps them make better decisions, and ultimately gets their products into the real world faster. It brings together the systems, data, intelligence, and applications hardware engineering requires to meet the AI moment.

Our Series C was led by @Lightspeedvp and co-led by @Insightpartners, with participation from Lux Capital, Sequoia, General Catalyst, Founders Fund, Avenir, Lockheed Martin Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, M13, DE Shaw Ventures, Deployment Capital, Avra, Red Glass Ventures, Carpenter Capital, Audacious, PSP, Overmatch Ventures, XYZ, Haystack, and Brave Capital.

Thank you to our customers, partners, team, and every hardware engineer building on Nominal.

Read more here → https://t.co/LEnefGOx9V

[Shahin Farshchi @Farshchi]

Even when startups fail, that brilliant human capital fuels the next generation of industry-defining giants

Today it's space, compute, reindustrialization, and AI

Excited for where the talent plans to head to next!

Fantastic conversation with a great group @FSIStanford: https://t.co/xbt5EpcQcC

[Josh Wolfe @wolfejosh]

This is the best political commentary ever.

[Shahin Farshchi @Farshchi]

@traestephens @mttgrmm @PalmerLuckey @SchimpfBrian Grimm looking pretty lethal

[Julie Shin Choi (she/her) @juliechoi]

Great catching up with @NaveenGRao and @Farshchi at the Future of Datacenter and Compute conference.

Frontier computing FTW ⚡️

[Dan Wright @danwrightSF]

Great conversation this morning at the Space and Defense Investor Summit in LA. Thank you @itsmoislam and team for hosting a terrific event, and to my friend Dan Gray and others joining today.

Distributed compute is the answer for America, its communities, and allies. Full-stack modular data centers manufactured at speed and deployed where the energy already lives. This is how we win – all of the benefits of data centers with none of the drawbacks.

[Nick Dorsey @Midnight_Captl]

At the Four Seasons in Palo Alto this morning for the Lux Summit

@andrewdfeldman speaking about how moratoriums on data centers will lead to >50% of Cerebras’ deployed capacity to end up outside the U.S.

He also thinks deployed capacity is going to go up in value significantly

[Philip Johnston @PhilipJohnston]

Thanks @tonywkim and @Farshchi for having me to join the panel on orbital data centers with Dan Roelker, great discussion on a prescient day! 🙏🚀
@BlackRock @Lux_Capital @Starcloud_

[Nominal @Nominal_io]

Right now, @aerovironment are scaling production at pace to meet the demands of their customers.

Their CTO, Scott Bowman, on connecting every lesson from test, production, and the field, so engineers and AI models start from what the team already knows.

[Shahin Farshchi @Farshchi]

Our eyes, ears, taste, touch, and smell have served as incredible neural interfaces, allowing to humanity to interact with subatomic particles to distant galaxies.

Sure, reading directly from neurons would be great, but I'm optimistic that we can build some amazing BCI by getting creative with our existing senses:

[Greg Kubin @kubeans]

Shahin Farshchi at Lux Capital likes to say neural interfaces have been "5 years away" for 20 years. So what's changed?

He joins us on Business Trip to discuss opportunities in neuro.

We get into his BCI investing framework, voice as an interface, and how he spots the next tech wave early.

https://t.co/70lMnvAQXC

@Farshchi @Lux_Capital

[Starcap @Starcap_xyz]

Space already gave us global communications and GPS.

The next wave, says @Farshchi of @Lux_Capital, is what you can only make in orbit, starting with pharmaceuticals. Lux co-led @VardaSpace's Series D.

[Josh Wolfe @wolfejosh]

👀 WOW

Ryan @ryanjdaniels + Lux family co Crosby @crosbylegal are playing to win
https://t.co/aOmGaNhw62

[Shahin Farshchi @Farshchi]

@bznotes @adarshkulkarni @FoundryRobotics Respect!

[Saman Farid @samanfarid]

It was fun to document what we've been learning about building robot deployments that ACTUALLY work, and what the path to true improvement is with @haomiaoh -- backed by experience deploying robots in hundreds of factories, we now know the balance to strike between generalizability and performance.

[Shahin Farshchi @Farshchi]

Proud to be partnering with @lumaril supercharging the physical world with AI, with a focus on our industrial base:

[Lumaril @lumaril]

Today we’re launching Lumaril.

We’re an industrial autonomy company helping America’s existing factories run at their true capacity, with more production and less waste.

The US is home to hundreds of thousands of plants, run by senior operators with decades of tacit knowledge. Much of it is unwritten, and a growing wave of retirements is taking it out the door.

If we let these facilities go dark, we don't just lose great companies and the towns that depend on them. We lose the living blueprints for making the goods and materials this country can’t afford to do without.

Reindustrialization won’t come from new factories alone. The plants we already have are great American businesses, built over generations, with enormous potential to grow. We believe helping them scale is the fastest path to restoring industrial capacity.

[Shahin Farshchi @Farshchi]

Datacenters in space? I was a huge skeptic. Then @BaijuBhatt told me he's building a world-class team to beat the heat (thermal management problem), and building the rockets to put them in orbit himself:

[Baiju Bhatt @BaijuBhatt]

Tune in this evening, I'm sitting down with @ShawnRyan762 to unveil @CowboySpaceCorp's rocket architecture.

Watch here, 6:30PM PT: https://t.co/PLVYOIZSBP