The Information Age was a consequence of two developments: the ability to work with information programmatically and the democratization of that capability. We are now entering a similar period in biology. We can now program life itself with the ever cheaper tools of synthetic biology. We believe this era of programmable biology will spark a new wave of entrepreneurs who push the limits of what biology can do.

How would you create a system that offers more healthcare, to more people, at lower prices and high quality? What if you designed it purely around the needs of patients? This question drove Dr. Adam Oskowitz and Matt Pavelle to build Doctronic. Not just another healthcare app, but a first-principles reimagining of direct-to-consumer care in an AI-native world. They've created a system offering private, personalized care available 24/7 across all states, powered by better information processin...

A quiet insurgency is rewiring our world. We're hitting a critical moment when the inefficiency of constant AC/DC conversion is becoming too convoluted to ignore, especially as data centers strain capacity, renewable projects multiply, and extreme weather events exposes grid vulnerabilities. We've been forcing fundamentally 21st-century DC technologies (like solar panels, EVs, and computing devices) through a 19th-century AC system, and we're long overdue for a change. Consider the path elect...

AI represents something fundamental and powerful: an entirely new computing paradigm that will reshape how we work, learn, and interact. But today's AI landscape offers limited options: either access AI models through commercial APIs or use "open source" models released by large tech companies. Neither approach fully addresses the opportunity for broader participation in AI development. As we wrote in our recent Four Futures post on where AI might head, we believe that there is an opportunity...

When we invested in 3Box Labs in 2021, we expressed a thesis that the future of data infrastructure would move from siloed, proprietary databases to open, composable data networks. We saw how this shift would enable developers to build data-rich applications more quickly by leveraging existing networks of data and standards. Today, that vision takes another step forward with the launch of Recall, a project born from the recent merger of 3Box Labs and Textile. Recall extends the concept of com...

John von Neumann famously postulated the idea of a Universal Constructor, a machine that could build anything, itself included. While that may forever remain elusive, our cells contain marvelous constructors called Ribosomes, which assemble all the proteins for us based on reading programming instructions. In one of the most important scientific breakthroughs we have not only learned how to read and decode those instructions but also to write them. This makes cells programmable and is usherin...

The dramatic reduction in the cost of solar energy means we can cheaply produce clean power– but only when the sun is out. Batteries are a natural companion to solar, capable of soaking up surplus energy when the sun is shining, and using that energy or feeding it back to the grid at night. Fortunately, batteries are following a similar reduction in cost to solar, coming down 90% in the last decade alone. As batteries continue down the cost curve, they’re becoming increasingly attractive as a...

Electric vehicles are a prime example of how electricity will be used in more complex ways as we electrify everything to reduce carbon emissions. As batteries, they enable shifting electricity usage in time, and as vehicles, they enable shifting usage in space. At USV, we’ve been interested in facilitating this future of more programmable energy. The EV opportunity today is especially attractive for commercial fleets. They have predictable routes, are sensitive to maintenance costs, and can s...

Over the last decade, there has been a proliferation of new blockchains and onchain assets. This trend is just accelerating as our online world is increasingly built on blockchain rails. Today, creating new chains and tokens is cheaper, faster, and safer than ever. While this fragmentation of chains and assets has enabled diversity and scale in the blockchain ecosystem, it has also made development across it complex. A future of hundreds of chains – each with their own unique assets – require...

What a time to be building! Writing computer code has never been easier. We now have AI models that have memorized every conceivable API and can assist us or even write code for us outright. Especially the more recent so-called “reasoning models” have taken another big step in this direction. At the same time, hardware has become incredibly performant. There are now 1U servers that come with 2 processors with 144 cores each, 96 MB of Cache and 2 TB of RAM and 244 TB of SSD disk space all for ...