Make Hardware as Nimble as Software
This week: Apollo Moment for Physical AI, flying ferries, real-time BVLOS drones, reversible solid oxide fuel cells, RNG flat datacenter networks, laser fusion, tidal flow, electrocaloric cooling
Shop Talk
Capturing this week’s zeitgeist
The magic of the "Apollo Moment" is about finding a buyer with a non-negotiable physical constraint who is willing to pay any price. That desperate buyer single-handedly seeds an immature technology until the cost curve drops enough for commercial adoption to take over. Diego Prats’ notes in his essay While everyone watches for the “ChatGPT Moment in Robotics”, don’t underrate the “Apollo Moment” that NASA and the military served as patron for integrated circuits. However, during this exact same 1960s Apollo era, the exact same thesis, that government backing or venture capital could bridge the gap for radical new tech with strict constraints, led to massive, historic bets that went completely awry:
The Supersonic Transport (SST) Race: The U.S. government spent over $1 billion on Boeing’s Mach 3 passenger airliner before canceling the program in 1971 due to insurmountable weight issues, soaring costs, and severe sonic boom restrictions.
The “Timesharing” Capital Collapse: Tech conglomerates like Xerox and General Electric lost hundreds of millions betting on premature decentralized computer networks before the underlying software infrastructure and market demand actually existed.
The 1961–1962 “Tron” Bubble: Speculative investors poured millions into any startup with a space-sounding name, resulting in a violent market crash when these companies failed to secure actual buyers with non-negotiable technical constraints.
Commercial Automotive Fuel Cells: Automakers bet heavily that the lightweight hydrogen fuel cells powering Apollo capsules would rapidly replace internal combustion engines, but the costs of space-grade catalysts never declined far enough to be viable.
This is exactly why we launched Constraint Capital. Issue #6 drops tomorrow, where we focus on the high-stakes, unyielding bottlenecks defining the Second Space Age led by companies like SpaceX. Upgrade to a paid subscription today to back our research and power the publication. 👇
How engineer Ernest Eldridge advanced the art of supercharging in the 1920s /IMechE/
Assembly Line
This week’s industrial breakthroughs and frontier technologies of the built world.
🦾🧠 This $440 Million Startup Is Solving Robotics’ Biggest Problem
Meet Generalist, the startup that says the next big leap in robotics won’t come from fancier humanoid hardware. It will come from applying AI scaling principles to physical work, and turning messy everyday tasks into killer training datasets.
🗣️ Jagdeep Singh built QuantumScape and Infinera. His next company Rhoda trains robots to become fully operational by watching YouTube videos — in 10 hours, not 10,000. /CLIMB on YouTube/
⛴️ How Candela’s flying ferries could bring commuters back to the water
At Candela, they make hydrofoiling electric boats and ferries that are the first to combine long range with high speed. Their innovative hydrofoil technology cuts energy use by 80%, creating silent, fast, zero-emission vessels with unmatched efficiency.
Read more at euronews
⛴️ How the NYC Ferry Is Staging a Comeback /Bloomberg on YouTube/
⛏️ What 16 Drones Across 4 Mining Sites Looks Like: Real-Time BVLOS Drone Operations in Queensland
RocketDNA has deployed 16 drones across 8 pads at four BMA sites in Queensland, delivering real-time geospatial intelligence across 80km+ of continuous mining operations.
⛏️ Rock Zero’s new extraction process could unlock the world’s lithium /MIT Technology Review/ which could cut costs and carbon emissions from lithium production.
🔋 Why This Mars Battery Could Beat Lithium-Ion
Noon’s system pulls CO2 from the air and splits it into solid carbon and oxygen using electricity. The oxygen vents back to the atmosphere; the carbon is what stores the energy ... it’s the fuel sitting in the tank. To discharge, the carbon is reoxidized inside a solid oxide fuel cell, recombining with oxygen back into CO2 and releasing electricity as it goes. No net carbon released over a full cycle.
🌬️ China launches offshore wind-powered underwater AI data centre /Techwire Asia/
📐🧠 “Our Goal Is to Build an Electrical Engineer.” (Davide Asnaghi, Co-Founder & CEO of Diode)
Since its founding just two years ago, Diode has landed Physical Intelligence and Saronic as customers and partnered with Anthropic to help Claude become a better electrical engineer. The company’s ultimate ambition: to make hardware as nimble as software.
📐🧠 Itera Exits Stealth With $12M to Bring Real-Time Prototyping to Electronics /Business Wire/
📐🧠 Quanscient raises €10 million to scale its multiphysics simulation platform for the AI era /EU Startups/
Former NASA Robotics Chief: America is building the wrong kind of robots — and China knows it /Fortune/
New Product Introduction
Highlighting new and innovative facilities, processes, products, and services
📶 RNG: Flat Datacenter Networks at Scale
We design and deploy in production the first flat datacenter networks. Our design, called RNG, is based on quasi-random graphs. While the cost and fault-tolerance benefits of such topologies have been long known, their practical realization has been hampered by a lack of scalable routing and cabling approaches. RNG has a new distributed routing protocol that exploits the properties of random graphs to find a large number of edge disjoint paths between pairs of endpoints. It uses a novel passive optical device that internally shuffles cables, which makes its cabling complexity similar to that of fat trees. We show that RNG matches or exceeds the performance of fat trees for a range of traffic patterns, despite being up to 45% cheaper. RNG is now the default datacenter network for most workloads at Amazon.
Chinese university builds 3D chip design tool tailored to Huawei’s ‘LogicFolding’ architecture — 3D design delivers increased performance and better thermal management /Tom’s Hardware/
🖨️💡 High-efficiency multi-scale holographic volumetric 3D printing with a phase light modulator
✍️ Authors: Maria Isabel Álvarez-Castaño, Riccardo Rizzo, Viola Sgarminato, et. al.
Light-based 3D printing with photocurable resins enables the rapid fabrication of complex structures with high resolution and fidelity. Tomographic Volumetric Additive Manufacturing (TVAM) employs a digital micromirror device (DMD) to project amplitude light patterns into rotating resin volumes, producing 3D geometries through photopolymerization. Typically, the light projection efficiency in such binary amplitude modulator-based systems is below a few percent. Recent advancements introduced phase encoding in TVAM using binary amplitude modulators and the Lee Hologram method, increasing axial control and boosting light efficiency to about 10%. In this work, we present the first 3D printing platform utilizing a phase light modulator (PLM), based on an array of micro-electro-mechanical piston mirrors. Compared to amplitude encoding, phase encoding with the PLM yields a 70-fold increase in laser power efficiency. By coupling this efficient light engine with a speckle reduction method in holographic volumetric additive manufacturing (HoloVAM), we experimentally demonstrate printing 3D objects across different scales from hundreds of micrometers to centimeters and with various materials from acrylate-based resins to soft hydrogels, including cell-laden hydrogels with a concentration of 1 million cells per mL. Micro-CT revealed a as the smallest positive feature printed. Moreover, we introduce the use of gelatin Thiol/Norbornene as a material for printing with the Holographic VAM technique, which allows us to print large-scale objects (up to within 2 minutes using only a 150 mW laser diode. The PLM opens up new avenues in volumetric AM for holographic techniques using low-cost single-mode laser diodes.
Read more at Light: Science & Applications
Business Transactions
This week’s top funding events, acquisitions, and partnerships across industrial value chains.
💰🚛 Backed by Prologis and the American Bureau of Shipping, the $200M TMV Logistics fund will tap in to growing interest in supply-chain efficiency and resilience /WSJ/
🤝 Autodesk to acquire MaintainX, advancing unified platform in operations /PR Newswire/ in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $3.6 billion.
🇩🇪⚡ Focused Energy Raises $240 Million in Series A Financing
Focused Energy, the world’s leading laser fusion company, has raised $240 million in a Series A financing round, making it the largest fully secured Series A financing in the global fusion industry to date. In addition to RWE, the investors include the Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation SPRIND, the European Innovation Council Fund, and the previous lead investor, Prime Movers Lab.
The new capital is to be invested into the former RWE power plant site in Biblis, Hesse. Using the site’s infrastructure and RWE’s power plant expertise, Focused Energy aims to accelerate fusion system development and establish Biblis as a blueprint for industrial laser fusion.
Read more at Business Wire
🇺🇸⚡ Thea Energy Raises $100 Million Series B Funding to Build Scalable Fusion Power Plants /GlobeNewswire/
🇬🇧🌊 Caudal Energy lands €4.9 million to develop predictable renewable power from tidal flow /EU Startups/
🇨🇭🚀 Stellar Alpina Raises CHF 3.5M to Build Detonation-Based Propulsion for Mobility After Launch
The Zurich-based startup is developing compact rotating detonation rocket engines (RDRE’s) to make movement between orbits faster, smaller, and more efficient. Just 82 days after incorporation, Stellar Alpina completed Europe’s first known commercial RDRE hotfire campaign, turning a deep-tech concept into tested hardware at exceptional speed. The CHF 3.5 million, approximately USD 4.5 million pre-seed round is led by Founderful, Switzerland’s leading pre-seed venture fund, with participation from LP&E.
Read more at GlobeNewswire
🇩🇪🧊 Qurie: €2.2 Million Raised For Electrocaloric Refrigeration Systems
Qurie, a Freiburg-based startup developing next-generation electrocaloric cooling systems, has secured €2.2 million in Seed funding. The round was jointly backed by HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), Technology Transfer Fund TT49, and Aepikur GmbH.
The company is developing electrocaloric refrigeration systems that operate without compressors, refrigerants, or pressure build-up. Qurie said its technology is designed to deliver quieter, more efficient, and more sustainable cooling solutions compared to conventional refrigeration systems.
The company’s technology is targeting the HVAC market as the industry faces increasing regulatory, technological, and economic pressures to transition toward cleaner and more energy-efficient systems. Qurie’s approach is based on electrocaloric cooling technology, which aims to eliminate the need for traditional refrigerants and compressor-based architectures.
Read more at Pulse 2.0
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