Altara

Forward Deployed Food Daily Hard Tech Headlines: - Biosphere secured a U.S. Army OTA agreement worth up to $9M to develop a forward-deployable biomanufacturing system that produces protein rations from air, water, and energy. The system aims to enable “on-site production of 2,800 calories per person per day for up to 18 warfighters,” with plans to scale to 250 personnel. - Stone Power has launched. The LA startup is building an American-made large natural gas turbine platform and secured a pre-seed round backed by Forward Deployed Venture Capital and Boost VC. - Altara has launched with $7M in seed funding to build agentic R&D software for the physical world, led by Greylock Partners. - @magratheametals raised a $24M Series A led by Resource Technology Partners and Balerion Space Ventures. The SF startup develops technology to create magnesium metal from seawater and brine. - Waiv Robotics raised a $7.5M seed round and launched out of stealth. The startup is developing an autonomous platform to enable drone landings at sea in rough conditions. - @maniacvc has backed Western Chemicals, the El Segundo energy startup turning wastewater into fuel (pre-seed round). - QuantWare raised a €152M Series B. The Netherlands-based startup develops superconducting quantum processors, and the round was co-led by Intel Capital and FORWARD.one. - Mexico Infrastructure Partners (MIP Real Assets) plans to deploy $12B across the country to develop critical infrastructure, including data centers, energy, and highways. - Norway has joined the U.S.-led Pax Silica initiative, adding sovereign wealth and critical mineral resources to the allied push to secure semiconductor and rare earth supply chains. - QNB Group is participating in debt financing to help build out a sustainable fuel plant in Egypt, with a target output of up to 200K biofuel tonnes per year. - Ornadyne (YC P26) has launched out of Y Combinator to build bird-like drones for military reconnaissance. - Eridale has launched to build robotics-first restaurants. The startup is developing robotics infrastructure designed to lower operating costs and make high-quality food more accessible. - Atalanta secured a partnership with Idaho National Laboratory to help accelerate advanced nuclear reactor deployment using AI. - @anduriltech has announced key partners for its Space Force Golden Dome missile defense work, including Impulse Space, Inversion Space, K2 Space, Sandia National Laboratories, and Voyager Technologies. - @GallatinAI, Inc. took first place at Cerebral Valley’s National Security Hackathon with an agentic radio agent built on Palantir’s Maven Smart System in 24 hours. - GUGLI Corporation has opened its new HQ in San Marcos, Texas, which includes a 20K sq ft manufacturing facility (pictured below). The startup develops critical monitoring technology for emergency responder radio coverage, and the new facility will support its talent pipeline with Texas State University.

@AtomsNotBits Thank you for the shoutout!

Altara secures $7M to bridge the data gap that’s slowing down physical sciences techcrunch.com/2026/05/05/alt…

we're entering the era of AI for the physical sciences: @altaratech comes out of stealth today with a scientific intelligence platform that helps R&D teams go from data to insights in minutes. They're already working teams across semiconductor, battery, and advanced materials to accelerate the process from experimentation to commercialization. Their agents ingest and reason across the complex, multimodal data: semiconductor wafer maps, high-resolution inspection data like SEM images, large-scale instrument time series data, scattered spreadsheets, unstructured research documents, and domain-specific legacy systems – all without requiring years-long migrations to new systems of record. We at @GreylockVC led their $7M seed, alongside our friends at @neo, @BoxGroup, @Liquid2V and incredible angels like @JeffDean and execs at OpenAI and AMD. @catherinehyeo and @evatuecke are building an exceptional team (ex-NVIDIA, SpaceX, Applied Intuition, Jane Street, Microsoft, Warp, ++) in SF. If you want to work on one of the hardest and most consequential problems in technology, check out their careers page

Introducing @altaratech, built to accelerate the physical sciences from data to breakthrough. The industries shaping the physical world — semiconductors, batteries, advanced materials — sit on decades of valuable data that has never been fully within reach. Altara is the infrastructure built to unlock it. Founded by @evatuecke and @catherinehyeo, two outlier founders bringing deep scientific fluency and AI expertise to one of the hardest problems in technology. Read more on our investment from our blog greylock.com/portfolio-news… cc @CorinneMRiley

Excited to share what I’ve been working on since Microsoft AI: autonomous science at @altaratech. If we want AI to keep scaling, it has to learn to hill-climb compute and energy through real-world, experimentally verifiable discovery

Introducing Altara: the scientific intelligence platform for the physical world. Today @evatuecke and I are excited to announce our $7M seed led by @GreylockVC, joined by @Neo, @BoxGroup, @Liquid2V, and angel investors including @JeffDean and leadership from OpenAI & AMD. We’re already working with early customers in semiconductors, batteries, and advanced materials. More below.