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🚨A founder and general partner at Toyota’s investor arm, Jim Adler began his career as a Lockheed Martin rocket engineer before eventually becoming an investor. He joins us for VC Wednesdays.🚨 ✒️ How does your background as a rocket engineer help as a VC? When you're investing in deep tech, having a technical background is super helpful. Your natural approach is to ask: Does the technology work? What are its potential pitfalls? Does it violate any fundamental laws of the universe, like the second law of thermodynamics or perpetual motion machines? That’s the first qualifier of any of my investments. I'm a big Charlie Munger fan, who said that think about all the things that can go wrong, address them, and you have a much better chance of things going right. ✒️ What’s your investment thesis and biggest focus areas in 2024? You can’t centrally plan innovation. We believe that the dynamism of the startup ecosystem forges the future. Our mission is discovery, in terms of what's next for Toyota and the market. We invest out of two funds: our frontier fund, which focuses on deep tech, autonomous mobility and robotics; and our climate fund, dealing with things like carbon capture and storage, renewable energy. AI is one of our biggest focus areas across both funds, but the next wave will actually be more valuable than the current generative AI wave. ✒️ How so? I’m in the Yann LeCun-Judea Pearl school of thought, in that there are three rungs of AI — seeing, doing and imagining. We're just in the early innings. What's going to power the next rungs? New computing. So, we're looking at neuromorphic computing. There will be next-gen compute and algorithms that'll be able to do much more with much less energy than today. We have a company called Recogni that provides high throughput and low power for edge inference applications. We’re also thinking about how to use AI to discover new materials for direct air capture and drug discovery, for example, through Orbital Materials. ✒️ Are you still bullish on autonomous vehicles, given their recent adoption challenges? It's been slower than expected, but I am still bullish. At the end of the day, real value to customers, if delivered safely and effectively, will win. The question is timing. We have investments in autonomous forklifts with Third Wave Automation, powering spatial understanding with Slamcore and autonomous vehicles with May Mobility. They are all generating revenue and delivering value to customers, so we feel pretty good about our position in them. ✒️ What’s one investment you regret passing on and why? Not passed on, but one that we didn't get into was Together AI, which is doing distributed computing for AI. We really wanted to get into it, and couldn't because it was oversubscribed. Because our fund is relatively young, and it is deep tech, I'm sure there will be ones I will regret, but they haven't proven themselves yet. #VCWednesdays #vc #venturecapital #startups #TechonLinkedIn

Check out the recent chat between our founder and general partner, Jim Adler, and LinkedIn's Tanya Dua. They dove into Toyota Ventures' thesis, the team's objectives in 2024, thoughts on AI, and more. 👇

Some notable VC deals happening today are reflecting the dynamic nature of the tech industry: - Applied Intuition, an innovative player in autonomous vehicle software, has just secured $250 million in Series E funding, led by Lux Capital. This impressive round catapults the company's valuation to $6 billion. Congrats to the team in California! - Over in New York, Monad Labs is making waves in the crypto world, aiming to raise $200 million at a $3 billion valuation. Paradigm is taking the lead in this round, as reported by Fortune. - Liquid Death from Los Angeles, now boasts a valuation of $1.4 billion after a $67 million investment. It's great to see diverse backers like SuRo Capital Corp, Live Nation Entertainment, and Science supporting such a unique beverage brand. - CarbonCapture Inc., a Los Angeles-based startup pioneering direct air capture technology, has raised an $80 million Series A, with Prime Movers Lab leading the charge. - Bear Robotics from Silicon Valley has garnered $60 million from LG Electronics. Their AI-driven autonomous robots are truly reshaping service industries. - San Francisco's Eclipse Labs is also on a roll, securing $50 million for their ethereum Layer-2 infrastructure projects. Kudos to Placeholder and Hack VC for leading this Series A. - Empathy from New York is doing meaningful work by providing benefits to grieving employees, raising a $47 million Series B led by Index Ventures. - CodaMetrix, leveraging AI for medical coding, just raised a $40 million Series B. Transformation Capital is backing this innovative approach to healthcare. - On the international front, South Africa's Simera Sense, a space-tech firm, secured a €13.5 million investment from NewSpace Capital and Knife Capital. - Lastly, Germany's steadybit has raised a $6 million Series A for its software reliability platform, with Paladin Capital Group leading the way.

Elon Musk's entrepreneurial odyssey continues to make strides across diverse sectors. Neuralink crafts interfaces to connect the human brain with technology, potentially transforming healthcare and computing. SpaceX propels us into a new space era, working on making life multi-planetary. Tesla leads the charge towards a sustainable energy future with its electric vehicles and solar products. The Boring Company is redefining urban transport with its low-cost, fast-to-build underground transportation networks. And X (formerly Twitter) is set to explore new frontiers in social networking under Musk's unique vision. Each venture is a testament to Musk's unyielding pursuit of innovation. #Entrepreneurship #FutureTech #Visionary

Re-reading a modern classic, and I keep thinking: not only is VC (& angel investing) one of the most rational things to do, it’s an exciting & emotionally rewarding pursuit, as it aims to make a true difference - and at scale. Here’s to the crazy ones, both founders and investors! P.S. Dear Europe, it’s now or never. If ‘we’ don’t shift from a focus on budgeting & legislating to a focus on investing & innovating - in areas such as machine intelligence, robotics, quantum computing & 4D design - relative prosperity will suffer in the decades ahead. The only constant is (accelerating) change. Wouldn’t you agree, Michael Jackson? Sebastian Mallaby #venturecapital #vc #startups

Intersect 23: Venture Capital Fireside Marc Andreesen (General Partner, Andreesen Horowitz) 💡Key Insights - cars are becoming rolling computers which creates explosion of capabilites, similar to other industries in the past - vehicle OEMs will become Computer and Software companies - OEMs need to accelerate transition or risk obsolescence - vertical vs horizontal integration tradeoffs need to be made along with industry cycle - challenges in hiring top people with Software backgrounds into OEMs - full autonomous enables new.types of cars for: taxis, office, lounge, party, sleep - Gen AI is transformative due to, foundational neural-net research for 80 years, democratized access for everyone, pace of evolution - foundational model startups, are hiring top researchers, building compute infrastructure, and sourcing big data - thousands of startups are building layers on top of foundational models - autonomous systems are switching from traditional AI/ML to full deep-learning approaches - companies that have the full intelligence, perception, robotics stack, can build humanoid robots - Gen AI regulations need to consider economic-development, geopolitics, reasonable societal risks

**Elon Musk: A Visionary Trailblazer** In the realm of modern innovation, one name stands out as a symbol of relentless determination and groundbreaking success – Elon Musk. Born in South Africa in 1971, Musk's journey to success is a testament to his audacious vision and unwavering commitment to changing the world. From co-founding Zip2, an early online city guide, to revolutionizing the online payment industry with X.com, which later became PayPal, Musk's early ventures laid the foundation for his future endeavors. However, it was his unyielding ambition to tackle global issues that truly set him apart. In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX with the ambitious goal of making space travel more accessible and ultimately enabling human colonization of Mars. Despite numerous setbacks and skeptics, Musk persisted, and SpaceX has since become a major player in the aerospace industry, achieving milestones like the first privately funded spacecraft to reach orbit. Not content with conquering space, Musk turned his attention to the automotive industry. In 2008, he took the helm of Tesla Motors, aiming to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Musk's vision for electric vehicles has not only transformed the automobile industry but has also made electric cars aspirational and desirable on a global scale. Musk's ventures extend beyond Earth and its immediate surroundings. In 2016, he co-founded Neuralink, a company dedicated to developing brain–machine interface technologies, with the goal of merging the human brain with artificial intelligence. Additionally, he founded The Boring Company, focusing on tunnel construction and infrastructure to alleviate traffic congestion. Elon Musk's life is a narrative of relentless innovation, overcoming challenges, and striving for a future that often seemed impossible. His story serves as an inspiration to aspiring entrepreneurs and dreamers, reminding us all that audacity and persistence can lead to groundbreaking achievements that reshape the course of history. 📞 [01123424842] 🌐 [https://shgroup-eg.com]

So why the humanoid shape? Surely robotics should not be constrained to our rather limiting form? The answer may be that the current world was built for humans and therefore the easiest way to interface with our built environment (and other humans) is in humanoid form. Whether a humanoid robot is more or less frightening to humans than a Sci Fi version is probably related to the UI it takes on (think Disney bot vs. doomsday Bot). I’ve been saying for a while that the next frontier for surgical robots is not a surgeon robot but rather a surgical assistant robot. Let’s see! DOCSF: Digital Orthopaedics Conference San Francisco (DOCSF) will get into this in October. #digitalhealth #digitalorthopaedics #roboticsurgery Daniel Kraft, MD Fabrizio Billi

As we Version One Ventures spend more time on different areas in deep tech, we’ll share what we consider when evaluating investments. This thread/post focuses on what we think about with respect to autonomy/robotics: 1) Vertical Integration 2) Vertical vs Horizontal 3) Understanding the true purpose of automation 4) Business model *** Vertical integration: this is not a straightforward decision for founders given the capital intensity of hardware, but should be guided by maximum value capture to get to defensibility over time. Vertical vs Horizontal. We skew towards solving a specific problem for a specific customer first. It’s important to be good at one thing to gain scale and grow quickly… but of course, there is a risk that it might be too specific or narrow and limit upside. Understanding the purpose of automation. It’s super trendy these days to “automate all the things”, but is it worth? For example, how does it compare to labor costs? Business model. Different customers even within the same industry will prefer different payment schedules (CapEx vs OpEx or a mix of both as an example) as Robot-as-a-Service / selling work is still a relatively new concept. All this to say, we are excited about investing in more robotics startups so if you have a bold mission for autonomy and the world, please reach out! angela at versionone dot vc Blog post in comments section.