.@profjsb is the kind of person this Berkeley spotlight series was made for: a professor who has published hundreds of academic papers, spent decades at the intersection of astronomy, data, and machine learning, and already built and sold an AI startup over a decade before the AI hype curve. Now he’s building @valencyio, and @thehousefund is proud to be backing him. Josh is a Professor of Astronomy at Berkeley, faculty at Berkeley AI Research Lab (aka BAIR), and is founding co-PI of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science. Earlier in his career, he co-founded Wise.io, which used machine learning to help companies make sense of large datasets and was eventually acquired by GE. Valency comes from another problem Josh has spent years around: scientific knowledge is growing much faster than any individual researcher can reasonably keep up with. Valency is building a home for people-centered, AI-accelerated research. AI can help scientists search, synthesize, and reason across enormous amounts of information, but only if those systems have reliable access to the actual scientific record and can stay current as new work is published (in a world where the rate of new papers being published is rapidly accelerating due to AI). Valency is building infrastructure to help connect AI systems directly to that body of knowledge, so researchers can spend less time digging through information and more time using it. Plenty of AI companies are being started because a new technical capability suddenly exists. Josh is coming at this from the opposite direction. He has spent his career as a top researcher and scientist, knows where researchers lose time, and understands the gap between what today’s tools can do and what scientists actually need. Berkeley has a long history of professors turning years of research and domain expertise into companies, and this is a very good example of that path. Excited to see where Josh and the Valency team take this one.