We don’t need to scream. We don’t need to cross lines. We don’t need to sell our soul. We just want to build something worth using.

Meet Roger, the humanoid purpose-built to protect human life in the most dangerous jobs across energy and public safety. The experts stay safe and in control. Roger goes in. No full autonomy needed. Roger takes the risk. They get the job done. Idea to walking in 5 months.

Today we’re announcing we’ve raised $20M in seed financing led by @QuietCapital , with participation from @GradientVC , @haystackvc and @CompoundVC and other amazing folks to build the verification layer for AI-driven biology. We are also delighted to be welcoming @vqctran who is joining us from @GoogleDeepMind as a co-founder. AI is not going to cure all diseases without a verification substrate - a scalable environment where models can test predictions and learn against living human biology. AI is becoming increasingly capable of generating biological hypotheses, therapeutic candidates and experimental designs. But generating ideas is advancing much faster than our ability to test what those ideas will actually do in human biology. Existing systems force a tradeoff: the most biologically relevant approaches are slow and expensive, while faster in vitro and computational systems often lack the fidelity needed to capture human response. Polyphron’s bet is that tissue is the fastest, cheapest, most parallelizable verification substrate that still contains the biology that matters and we believe the path to biological superintelligence runs through closed-loop interaction with these living and simulated human systems. Thank you to @axios for covering the announcement. Link to our new website in the thread.

Data sales is one of the most important areas in AI today. It matters both for improved model performance, realizing true AI world models and especially for deeptech startups that now have a new monetization path. However, the best way to build companies and durable revenue streams around data sales in deeptech areas is largely unsolved outside of Mercor and Scale. We @CompoundVC have a very clear thesis for what platform <> data sales alignment looks like in biotech. Namely that companies shouldn't go significantly off their core path to sell data to frontier labs. We also believe that only biologically complex and general platforms make sense as data providers in the long term. This thesis is only one part of the puzzle. There's a whole world of materials, energy, health, and robotics that are still figuring out durable sales too that we want to discuss in depth. At this Compound Research Day on Data Factories we will have several deeptech companies (including in bio!) showcase their data generation platforms, specifically focusing on data novelty and scale for model training. Operators at frontier and neolabs will also be in attendance and speak. Join us to discuss one of the most consequential areas in AI! (We're still building out the speaker list so let us know if you'd like to present.)