DFJ Growth

Splashdown confirmed! Congratulations to the entire SpaceX team on the 13th flight test of Starship!

We’re proud to support the United States Space Force as part of the NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 program. By on-ramping Helios, Impulse will be the first-ever upper stage provider to serve as a prime on the program. Read more here: impulsespace.com/updates/impuls…

It’s time for a new six-month update from our CEO and Co-founder @BobMumgaard. Here at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, we’re now firing up more and more support systems for our SPARC tokamak in anticipation of a moment we call DDR — that’s dry dress rehearsal, not Dance Dance Revolution. Dry dress rehearsal will exercise all the supporting hardware that surrounds the tokamak itself, like cryogenics to cool SPARC’s magnets, the power system to supply those magnets’ electricity, and the radio-frequency (RF) system to help heat the plasma. It’s all the necessary equipment that’ll enable us to confine and control SPARC’s superhot plasma so we can generate net fusion energy, an achievement called Q>1. “We operate the entire plant, just minus the tokamak,” Mumgaard says. In the video, Bob also discusses how dry dress rehearsal is occurring in parallel with SPARC assembly, and shares other recent progress: ⚡️The publication of five peer-reviewed papers setting the physics foundation for our ARC power plant and showing how we’ll use SPARC to inform the ARC design ⚡️Our application to connect our first ARC plant to the electricity grid in Virginia ⚡️Our work in Singapore, Korea, Japan, the United Kingdom, and Europe to ensure fusion is successful globally Watch the video to hear from Bob and see the latest look inside our SPARC facility and magnet factory. #FusionEnergy #Energy #SPARC

Another important step towards our goal of stitching together every platform, even the ones built decades ago.

And here is an interview I did with @JordanNanos covering a bit of what we have done and where we are going: youtube.com/watch?v=B8O3pL…

We are now @SpaceXAI.

Our Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer, Rob Lehman, joined the @DefenseScoop CTRL+ALT+DEFENSE podcast for a conversation on what moments like the recent Corsair rescue by the @USNavy mean for the future of maritime autonomy, and on building up the industrial base required to deliver autonomous systems at speed and scale. Listen to the full episode here: defensescoop.com/radio/the-u-s-…

Chris Lattner @clattner_llvm created LLVM, Clang, Swift, and MLIR — infrastructure behind modern software and AI. Most people would stop there. He started @Modular instead. Now @Qualcomm is acquiring the company. His founder story → dfjgrowth.com/founders/chris…

Anduril delivered a month’s worth of Pulsars in less than a week. These systems were immediately deployed in active operations. Anduril builds with the knowledge that demand will not announce itself in advance. We win by absorbing surges at scale and growing output at speed. This same line once produced 500 Pulsars per year. Now it ships twice as many. Deterrence is a production problem, and we're focused on the factory to solve it.

Today, Modular announced an agreement to be acquired by @Qualcomm. We founded Modular to build a unified compute platform for the world, and unlock a more open, efficient, and hardware-independent future for AI. With Qualcomm, we can bring that vision to more developers, enterprises, and hardware platforms— faster. Modular co-founder and CEO @clattner_llvm explains our continued commitment to our mission: youtube.com/watch?v=RvEwWl…

We’re excited to announce that Modular has entered an agreement to be acquired by @Qualcomm. The future of unified compute has never been stronger. Read the full announcement: modular.com/blog/qualcomm-…

A huge congratulations to @Modular on the agreement to be acquired by @Qualcomm! From our very first meetings with @clattner_llvm and @iamtimdavis we had conviction this was the right, one-of-a-kind team with the bold and strategic vision to build a unified compute platform for AI. This combination only accelerates their journey to unlock a more open, hardware-independent future. From our entire team at @dfjgrowth: congratulations on the milestone and we can't wait to see what is ahead! 🔥

Thrilled to congratulate @clattner_llvm, @iamtimdavis, and the exceptional @Modular team on their agreement to be acquired by Qualcomm. At @DFJgrowth, we backed Modular based on our belief in their mission to solve one of AI's hardest problems: heterogeneous fragmentation across the hardware and software stack. By building AI’s unified compute layer and acting as the hypervisor for AI, they are making "write once, run anywhere" a reality for developers globally. Chris and Tim are a rare, powerhouse combination of world-class technical depth and relentless product execution. It’s been a privilege to partner with them through this chapter, and we can't wait to see how they accelerate and scale their infrastructure next alongside the team at Qualcomm. To the next epoch! 🔥

I'm excited to share that Qualcomm is acquiring Modular: this will accelerate our path to unifying accelerated compute with an open platform. This will also mark a new era in open software development for Qualcomm. 👇

Open weight models are more than just an open source story. They are the AI era equivalent to cloud repatriation: a shift from abstraction-first to workload-specific infrastructure. In the early days of cloud, startups no longer had to buy servers, forecast capacity, rack machines, wire networking, or turn uncertainty into capex. Infrastructure became an API. That changed the cost and pace of company formation. Frontier model APIs are playing a similar role today. They let teams build without managing GPUs, inference infrastructure, model serving, or reliability. For most startups, that is the right starting point. But as AI products scale, the abstraction tax becomes visible: token costs, latency, rate limits, model behavior changes, data control, and vendor dependency. That does not mean every company should run open weight models. It means some workloads eventually become predictable, expensive, sensitive, or strategic enough to justify moving down the stack. Where is this all headed? The future AI stack is likely to be hybrid and workload placement will be paramount. open.substack.com/pub/signalproc…

Maritime autonomy presents a fundamentally different challenge than building autonomy for land or air applications. In a recent conversation with @IrregWarfare, our Co-founder and CTO @Vbob202 discusses why operational data, rapid iteration, and software-driven development are critical to advancing maritime autonomy, and why production capacity will be just as important as technological innovation in defining the future of maritime power. Learn more: irregularwarfare.org/cto-of-saronic…

Strong, Custom Components for Drone Design, Manufacturing, and Piloting with the Formlabs Fuse X1 The Fuse X1 enables next-day delivery of large parts with minimal stitching or gluing requirements and at a lower cost, reducing labor while accelerating innovation. It also offers outstanding cost efficiency per part and industry-leading throughput for end-use production, making SLS 3D printing a competitive alternative to injection molding across an even broader range of applications. Read more about the X1 here: formlabs.com/3d-printers/fu…

So how do you confine a superhot, 100M°C fusion plasma? With superstrong magnets, of course. 🧲 We've now installed three of the 18 toroidal field (TF) magnets needed for our SPARC fusion demonstration machine. TF magnets are one of the three major magnet types we'll use in SPARC (the others being the poloidal field and central solenoid magnets) to corral the plasma once the machine is operating. Because plasma is made up of charged particles, it responds to a magnetic field. It's a technique refined over dozens of earlier tokamaks built around the world that manage this highly energetic cloud of particles that's hotter than the center of the sun. #SPARC #Magnets #FusionEnergy

XBOW is changing the world! We’re thrilled to announce that XBOW has been named a winner of @FastCompany's 2026 World Changing Ideas Awards in the Business Products & Services category. “This year’s honorees are turning bold ideas into tangible solutions and addressing urgent global challenges with creativity and rigor,” said Fast Company Editor-in-Chief Brendan Vaughan. XBOW was built around a simple idea: offensive security should be continuous, autonomous, and grounded in proof. Not more alerts. Not more noise. Real vulnerabilities, exploit-validated and prioritized by autonomous agents. This recognition reflects the work of our partners, customers, and research team, who believe the future of security is autonomous offense. Explore the award and the companies recognized alongside us: bit.ly/4epnGca #FCWorldChangingIdeas

Congratulations to @elonmusk, @Gwynne_Shotwell and the incredible @SpaceX team on their historic IPO. An amazing story of vision, grit, and execution built over the past 24 years. It has been an honor for @DFJgrowth to be part of the journey since 2009 and watch one of the great company-building stories of our time unfold. To the stars!💫