Level Five VC

Venture capital for deep tech deployment. Aerospace | Robotics | Energy

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

🚨Breaking🚨

First ever Deep Tech Deployment Summit to be held on Sept 8th during Deep Tech Week in Washington DC.

Killer speaker lineup and more announcements coming soon. Registration in comments.

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

Decoding consciousness is the final frontier.

[Doris Tsao @doristsao]

12/ What is most exciting is that we have uncovered a signal deep in the brain that richly represents a stimulus you’re not aware of. This finding, in my opinion, makes it tractable to understand how a pattern of neural activity accesses consciousness. The previous dominant idea--that suppressed stimuli become progressively weaker as you go anterior (“fail to ignite”)--left the question of how a representation becomes consciously accessible extremely hard to pin down. Whereas now, with whoppingly clear signals corresponding to both what is and isn’t conscious, we can follow both sets of footprints, to track down the full machinery for generating conscious percepts.

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

Doc Brown would be proud 🤯

[Tesla @Tesla]

Real life, baby

[anabology @anabology]

Being able to very precisely articulate what you want and why you want it has never been more valuable

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

100% agree - it’s materials all the way down

[Mustafa. @oprydai]

study material science;

every serious technology bottleneck eventually collapses into materials.

performance limits.
cost curves.
manufacturing yield.
reliability over time.

all material problems.

better batteries aren’t software problems.
lighter robots aren’t algorithm problems.
faster chips aren’t “ai” problems.

they’re crystal structures.
grain boundaries.
defects.
phase transitions.
stress, fatigue, heat.

engineers who ignore materials design abstractions that fail in the real world.
engineers who understand materials bend reality.

steel built empires.
silicon built the internet.
lithium reshaped energy.
composites reshaped flight.

the next leap won’t come from dashboards.
it’ll come from atoms arranged correctly.

learn how matter behaves.
everything else stacks on top.

[Erika Alden DeBenedictis @erika_alden_d]

Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼

With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars.

To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials.

The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey.

This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier.

It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️

[Ammanichanda @Arkasiraee]

Modern manufacturing robots are far more precise than they look.

A six-axis industrial robot can move a tool through several metres of space and repeatedly bring it back to within a few hundredths of a millimetre. Some precision oriented systems achieve repeatability of around 0.02-0.05 mm.

That precision is one reason mass manufacturing looks the way it does today.

A car body can move through a factory floor while robots weld the same points, drill the same holes and paint complex surfaces with almost identical movements, thousands of times over.

The first industrial robots entered factories in the early 1960s, mostly doing repetitive and dangerous work.
Sixty years later, they can repeat precise movements thousands of times with a consistency that humans simply cannot maintain at industrial scale.

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

Speed is an underrated moat

[Zane Hengsperger @zanehengsperger]

Of the past 312 orders we could fulfill in 48 hours, we won 79.5% of them.

Crazy. I am sure this is true for parts, valves, components, etc. Go build!

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

Next level aura

[Kenneth Cassel @KennethCassel]

why dont any websites feel like this

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

What an incredible week. Honored to be part of the inaugural @deeptechweek in Washington DC. It is clear that something is happening here. DC is becoming a center of gravity for the hard technologies that move civilization forward.

[Andrew Côté @Andercot]

DC Deep Tech Week has officially wrapped.

Across six days, the program drew 3,691 unique registered attendees—including 695 founders—to 26 public events throughout Washington, DC and Northern Virginia.

Twenty-eight startups and 47 organizations presented across a week of founder talks, technical presentations, panels, demonstrations, screenings, roundtables, showcases, startup crawls and community gatherings.

Thank you to the hosts, organizing partners, venues and sponsors who made the week possible:

8090 Industries; Air Force Research Laboratory (@AFResearchLab); AKULAR (@AKULAR_AR); Arlington Economic Development (@AEDBizInvest); Atypical Ventures (@atypicalvc); Auron Solutions; Brave Capital (@brave_cap); Cornell University (@Cornell); Fulcrum Venture Group; HAUS (@deeptechagency); and Hyperstition Incorporated;

JBG SMITH (@jbgsmith); Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (@JHUAPL); KdT Ventures (@KdT_Ventures); Level Five VC (@LevelFiveVC); National Innovation Quarter (@NationalIQ); New Vista Capital (@NewVistaCap); Point72 Ventures (@p72vc); Ramification Laboratories; Red Cell Partners (@RedCellPartners); Squadra Ventures (@squadra_vc); and SRI International (@SRI_Intl);

Station Alpha; The Capital Factory (@CapitalFactory); The Nuclear Company (@TheNuclearCo); VC in DC; Veteran Ventures (@VenturesVeteran); Virtus Innovation Center; WIseCost; Armored Fresh; Statecraft (@statecraft_labs); and Anomalous Heat LLC.

The energy in DC was incredible - there are people shoulder to the wheel at the highest leverage positions in the world accelerating a science fiction future into reality.

See you next year at DC Deep Tech Week 2027, mid September.

https://t.co/BiutkHXpqZ

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

Welcome to the team @FrankVTaylor

[Frank V. Taylor @FrankVTaylor]

New role. Same mission.

I’ve joined @LevelFiveVC to invest in deep tech deployment that moves civilization forward.

Build. Ship. Make the future better. Let’s go 🚀

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

@zanehengsperger @noxmetals 🤘Metal AF. Ship it!

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

Who is out there working on driving down the cost of titanium processing? DM’s open

[Object Zero @Object_Zero_]

Titanium

… Does. Not. Corrode.

Obviously we continue to build and fabricate the vast majority of our buildings, equipment and working assets from steel. Steel is an incredibly versatile material, we are very good at using steel. Steel is great.

Steel corrodes

Things that are made of steel are temporary, the Forth Bridge (my pfp) is a cantilever rail bridge built in 1883. It was constructed from 51,000 tonnes of steel.

The Forth Bridge is painted from end to end every two years, and it takes two years to paint the bridge. The bridge is perpetually being painted to protect it from corrosion and that’s why it is still standing after 143 years.

Titanium does not corrode, in fact it is so inert that titanium is used for medical implants. There are people walking around with titanium plates in their skull. Quite a staggering feat of corrosion resistance.

If a society really wanted to build lasting monuments we would use stone and titanium.

1,000 years from now the only surviving buildings of this era will be the ones that did not use steel. In many countries the suburbs are more durably constructed than the metropolitan centres.

We don’t use titanium because it is expensive, and it is expensive because we still rely on the Kroll process to process titanium ore.

200 years ago aluminium used to be very expensive, kings and queens would use aluminium cutlery as a display of opulence.

Today we figured out how to process aluminium very cheaply and now we make 1 billion aluminium cans every day.

Titanium is still stuck in the expensive-to-process phase, even though it is the 9th most abundant element on earth.

Soon someone is going to solve titanium processing and the aesthetic of every city will change dramatically and things will start feeling very futuristic.

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

@Arkasiraee @aphysicist “Synchronous Inertia” would be a great band name

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

@billythalheimer @regentcraft @LCSelby Time to ship 🚢, let’s go!

[Billy Thalheimer @billythalheimer]

Announcing @regentcraft's $240M Series B to bring our Seaglider manufacturing facility online and deliver them to our military and commercial customers. Lets go!!

Could not have asked for better co-leads between Mare Liberum (@lcselby) and AE Ventures, bringing vast experience and connectivity across maritime and aerospace. Its not easy building in either of these sectors, so their backing is amazing validation for the business.

So excited to be partnering with @ereborbank on the financing. @PalmerLuckey and the team are absolutely putting their money where their mouth is on backing the next generation of American industry and defense technologies.

Access to this $120M in debt unlocks significant manufacturing purchases across tooling and equipment to stay on track for first Seagliders out of the factory by end of next year. We have a quarter-million feet of factory floor to fill.

This is a major growth moment for REGENT. To date, we've largely been focused on prototyping. Seagliders are the first new mode of transportation since the helicopter, and its taken a lot of engineering and test to get here.

Now we are focused to getting Seagliders into the hands of our customers, whether it is contested logistics and MEDEVAC missions in the Indo-Pacific, or commuter service to New York or Miami. The growth of the order book over the past year has been amazing.

It's a huge moment for us, but we're keeping our heads down and working. We are on the eve of flying our full-scale, human-safe Viceroy Seaglider prototype. Investors in our Series B got deeply involved in our technology development and testing campaigns and gained conviction in REGENT to unlock this fundraise even before Viceroy has flown.

I must say, it's awesome to see this team - even while celebrating this Series B - remain so locked in on flight.

Thank you to our existing investors who doubled down on us like @_edgegroup / SDF, @GiantStepVC, @LockheedMartin, @caffeinatedcap/@tonsing, @JAL_Official_jp, @mcuban, @foundersfund/@zebulgar, East X, and @Future_Planet.

And excited for all the new support with @DCVC, iGrow, @BalnordVC, @VanderbiltU, and Inceptional.

Massive day for REGENT. Next steps: flight, production, deliveries!

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

Huge accomplishment @ActinideInc and a major step forward to securing domestic production capacity for the critical materials that power everything from cancer drugs to nuclear reactors. Let’s go 🚀

[Eric Olszewski 🇺🇸 @EricOlsz]

This week, @ActinideInc became the first startup in history to enrich uranium, producing HALEU, the fuel for next-gen and small modular reactors.

We did it using Endurance, a particle accelerator that we designed and built in Texas.

Endurance usually produces enriched Yb-176, a precursor for cancer therapies worth roughly $30,000 per gram.

After a bulk Yb-176 delivery on July 30, we reconfigured Endurance for uranium.

[Goose @megagoose11]

New sleek transport stand design with… orange lights?

[Level Five VC @LevelFiveVC]

@YIMBYLAND Nice! Looks like it belongs there. How long did it take to permit / build?

[Furqan Rydhan @FurqanR]

Robotics reminds me of building PCs in the 90s.

Also pretty cool how i can buy a serious arm for 1k now.

[Doug Crown @Bellagiotime]

Kelly Johnson with his Masterpiece.