Maple VC

Excited to announce our $16.5M fund for Maple 2 to back the Canadian diaspora! techcrunch.com/2021/11/30/map…

Congratulations @MattLoszak and the @AaloAtomics team!

BREAKING: New startup "RentAHuman" allows AI agents to rent humans to perform tasks they cannot physically perform themselves.

we now have an mcp so that lets your openclaw can rent humans! yesterday I rented someone to do my laundry check out: rentahuman.ai/mcp

A lot of people think ANY nuclear reactor is equally good for powering AI data centers, but this isn't true. Product-market fit in nuclear is a real thing. What makes a design optimal? 4 main things: 1️⃣ Strong Fuel Supply Chain. Data centers have demand for 100 GW of new power generation in the next 5 years. That's like creating 100 new cities. The only option is to choose a fuel with a super robust supply chain. This is why Aalo is using LEU UO2, not TRISO, and not HALEU. TRISO and HALEU supply chains are currently super limited, and will take years to build out. Our fuel has a supply chain that can support tens of GW of reactor hardware per year, and eventually hundreds of GW. 2️⃣ Sized for Speed and Availability. Data centers care most about speed of deployment, and high availability. If the reactor is too small, speed of deployment won't matter because the electricity will be too expensive (too much neutron leakage). Too big, and modules won't be easily shippable on normal roads (hindering scalability and speed). Since sodium is so thermally conductive, it allows Aalo to design the ✨most powerful reactor that can still be shipped on the back of a truck✨, by a 2-5x margin compared to water or gas cooled reactors. This was our core design objective. Also, larger reactors will have more expensive N+1 costs to achieve high availability. Aalo's size is optimized for high availability at low incremental cost. 3️⃣ The Price is Right. Data centers have other options for power, not just nuclear. 10-15 c / kWh is the current price range that must be hit. Higher than this, and they will likely go with gas. Aalo's design is on pace to achieve 15 c / kWh first-of-a-kind, and will get below 10 c / kWh within 4 Pods. This cost is enabled by size optimization, fuel, and coolant choice. Other designs that use TRISO (esp w HALEU) will have power costs in the 20-50 c / kWh range. Good for remote diesel, but not for data centers. 4️⃣ Factory Unlocks Scale. Again, data centers are going to command 100 GW of new power generation in the next 5 years, and it will likely keep scaling from there. The only feasible approach to servicing this demand throughout the 2030s is to build large factories NOW that mass-manufacture smaller, transportable modules for the entire power plant, not just the reactor. This will require extreme vertical integration of the right things at the right time, as we scale from 10->100->1,000->10,000 reactors per year. We'll share more specifics on this later. Aalo got started fairly recently, but we've turned this into an advantage: We've been able to tailor our design to the needs of hyperscalers.

Congrats!

One of the most exciting opportunities in tech right now!

A global casino is not enough When I first got into this space, it was for the promise of something that gave every single person on the planet an escape hatch. It gave them the option to escape the traditional system of intermediaries and gatekeepers, of corruption, of misplaced trust, of denial of access. It promised to give us nothing more than the simple ability to own what we own. That what’s yours is… yours, and no one can take it from you or deny you access. Beyond my wildest dreams in 2011 (or frankly even in 2024), this has gone from an escape hatch to an escape raft, not for the individuals but for the system as a whole. In the 15 years since I discovered crypto, we’ve seen more corruption than I care to count, banks fail, currencies fail, and even the best of each batch wildly outperformed by this little mathematical experiment called Bitcoin. The image of a decentralized system used by many, owned by all that expands beyond any given jurisdiction, globally available, globally owned, has become increasingly relevant every day as it has outperformed every global asset and is now valued in the trillions. In proving this, the wool was removed from our eyes, and we saw more than just electronic cash, a trustless system bound by math expanded far beyond ‘digital gold’. It became clear that much of the future world, from lending and savings to identity and contracts, could be housed in the same system. Like most new frontiers, though, the dreamers were the minority. "First come the dreamers, then the bankers, then the salesmen, then the sharks, then the desperate, and then the thieves." - Landman And piece by piece, a better system came to mean a better casino. ‘Fast finance’ regardless of the risk, ‘open access’ even if the contracts were upgradable. Scaling via centralization or multisigs, whatever tradeoff could be made for the incremental millisecond to speed up consumer turnover. Social tokens are hailed as the future of community, and memecoins as the future of investing. We’ve lost sight of what we set out to build, and we’ve lost sight of why it actually matters. One by one, the dreamers fell, disillusioned by the misguided focus on scaling via trade-offs or pulled by the token grant to lend their name and credibility to keep building a better casino. Now, don’t get me wrong, at my core, I am a libertarian, and I appreciate the value of free markets. Each of these things should be able to exist; that is the cost of free systems, just as hearing an opinion I don’t value is the cost of free speech. Somewhere along the way though, the dreamers drank the poisoned wine and came to believe that the end we got was the end we set out for. Like the worst possible case of Stockholm Syndrome, they either convinced themselves that what they did was good or quit the game entirely in disgust. Let me remind you why I am here and what this space has meant to me. I grew up in rural New Hampshire in about as peaceful a time and environment as possible. Despite that, I have seen my former profession banned for profit from Las Vegas lobbyists, payment processors unilaterally cancelled, I’ve been debanked, and I’ve been forced out of multiple homes due to uncertain or outright hostile regulation. I’ve seen the economy blow up, and I’ve had my financial institutions blow up. I’ve watched conmen take billions from those who trusted them. And compared globally, I am one of the lucky ones. We deserve a better system and a freer world. There is no reason why someone should not own their own money, have a basic right to privacy, or be trapped in a failing currency or a corrupt system. Zero is a response to what we want to see in the world and what the world has not given us. Zero is a response to those dreamers who let their vision die, or convinced themselves that 15 tps was enough to serve the rich, and left the rest to multisigs. Zero is planting a stake in the ground, picking the torch back up, and marching forward with the ideals we came here for. Zero will propel our values into the world, not because we hope the existing financial system shares them, but because these principles are so powerful they cannot be ignored. We set out not to replace a single piece of the stack or to capture the tiny fraction captured to date. We set out to change the entire system. A new backend. Globally distributed, globally owned. Permissionless and censorship-resistant. A system open to all. A better system, where mathematical proofs reign supreme.

Last movers often win the biggest markets. Proud backer of @LayerZero_Core as they continue building the infrastructure that could power the final generation of blockchain architecture.

@Clay is one of six companies that are a part of Frontier, @OpenAI's new enterprise platform that helps companies build, deploy, and manage AI agents across their organization. We help companies put OpenAI's models to work across growth, sales, marketing, and revenue operations by sourcing the best data and putting it into action for any GTM use case. OpenAI itself uses Clay for this, powering their own enterprise GTM motion. GTM teams can use OpenAI and Clay together in many ways to grow: ▪️ RevOps and GTM engineering teams can turn their CRM into a living entity. One that automatically refreshes, dedupes, and surfaces accounts that are ready to buy ▪️ Sales teams can score companies showing buying signals, pull verified contacts, generate personalized messaging, and sync everything to their CRM ▪️ Marketing teams can build targeted audiences and ship relevant creative campaigns, from ads to landing pages to email ▪️ Recruiting teams can find candidates with specific technical backgrounds and reach out with context matching their career trajectory This program is highly selective; OpenAI chose a small group of companies they believe are essential to how enterprises will use AI in practice. Read more on their blog: openai.com/index/introduc…

Can’t wait for the rest of the world to discover @guap_app.

Second tender in nine months at a $5B valuation. @clay is built different! @kareemamin and @vxanand are building a once-in-a-generation company. 🚀 Grateful to have witnessed the journey from day one 🙏

A “compute desk” is a signal that compute is no longer treated as a background IT expense. It’s being treated like a scarce, volatile, strategic commodity, closer to energy, freight, and semiconductors than traditional cloud procurement. However, there's much work to be done to enable such market to exist.

AI cost overruns aren’t a model problem, they’re a pricing and finance problem GPU pricing is becoming the real signal for AI economics, and most teams are flying blind Proud to see our take featured on why compute needs real financial infrastructure, not more dashboards computerworld.com/article/410433…

Forbes article here: forbes.com/sites/martinac… Blog post here: finny.com/blog/finny-rai…

FINNY has raised $17M Series A led by @Venrock. We're building the organic growth engine for financial advisors - helping them find the right clients at the right time, with the right message. 400+ firms. 50x growth. Just getting started.

Huge congrats to @Eden__Ovadia, @victoria_toli & Theo — cofounders of @FINNYAI — on their $17M Series A at $150M post led by @Venrock! 🎉 FINNY is making financial advice more accessible by solving the real “hair-on-fire” problem for RIAs: growth. 📈 50x revenue since January. 🚀 Proud early backers. 🇨🇦 Forbes: forbes.com/sites/martinac… Maple blog: maplevc.com/blog-posts/fir… Company post below 👇 finny.com/blog/finny-rai…

Today, Aalo shipped its first 5 nuclear modules out of our factory in Austin, Texas. This small step is the beginning of something that will become routine within a few years, at 1000x the scale. The modules are now en-route to Idaho, where we'll achieve criticality by July 4th. We'll take this power plant (not just a test reactor) to full power operation in the months that follow, and power what we believe will be the world's first co-built nuclear plant and data center. 2 years ago, we were a 2 person company. Today, we're 100 people strong, and we have line-of-sight on achieving criticality on a reactor that we've built from scratch, within 3 years from founding. We moved into this 40,000 sqft warehouse shell around 1 year ago, and turned it into a pilot factory to demonstrate what we believe the future of nuclear mass manufacturing will become. Huge shout out to the team for all the late nights and incredible effort that went into this. Just the beginning! @AaloAtomics @yasir_fission