Deep Future

Implementing Science Fiction

Pablos

KLIR Sky

When you see a smokestack, you are seeing life sustaining forces at work. Power plants that heat homes in winter; mills making materials to build those homes; factories making the refrigerators inside them to keep food from spoiling. Yet this is not what comes to mind. Rather, we see toxic fumes, smog, pollution, sickness & damage.

Both of these stories are true and for modern humans, reconciling them has been elusive. We’ve admonished generations of children to reduce consumption, but they are no more successful at it than we are. We’ve vilified the leaders of these companies, while continuing to buy more and more of what they produce. We’ve crafted clever platitudes about circular economies and sustainability; placated ourselves separating plastic bottles, only to burn more gas recycling them than if we had made fresh plastic.

Energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form to another. A smokestack is just spitting out the results of a transformation. We got something we wanted – usually heat from burning something – but that stuff coming out the smokestack is a mix of valuable gasses we are just throwing away. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

KLIR Sky invented a way to capture the fumes & freeze them to cryogenic temperatures before they go out the smokestack. Gasses liquify at different cold temperatures. So with a series of machines, they can separate CO2, Oxygen, Nitrogen, Methane, Hydrogen and other valuable gasses. These get pumped into trucks and sold into industrial markets. KLIR Sky integrates for free and splits the profits with the owner of the smokestack. Sometimes they can make more money from this than whatever business needed the smokestack in the first place.

I worked on my first carbon sequestration project in 2006, when I thought carbon caps were coming from governments. They have arrived way too little and way too late to make a meaningful difference. There are innumerable technologies that can capture CO2 but aren’t economically viable to scale. What does scale, is business. If you want to sequester carbon dioxide, the best thing to do is keep from emitting it in the first place.

The world can’t and won’t stop all of these industrial activities. We shouldn’t. Humanity relies on them. What we can do is turn the waste into something people will pay for, no carbon caps, no accounting shell games, no philanthropy, just good business turning pollution into profit.

Deep Future is proud to be one of their first investors and you can join too.

Applied Physics

[About a quarter of our investments are things that we don’t want to talk about in their early stages.  Still, we’d like to keep our LPs appraised of what we’re doing.  If you ever want to know more about one of the companies we are invested in, just reach out and we can have a deeper discussion.]

Today we completed an investment in Applied Physics.  This unique group of physicists has invented a staggering variety of breakthroughs based on unique insights.  They have a broad portfolio of patents in various industries and technologies, including aerospace, radar & surveillance, data enhancement, superconductors, and even a novel way to target & kill cells.  Some of these will be spun out or get on an IP licensing track.  The company has already secured a significant DoD contract for defensive sensing technology.

While very little beyond their research on Warp Drive is shared publicly, I’ve been on the inside for a while and have a great deal of confidence in the commercial potential here.  I cannot wait to share more and will reach out as soon as we are cleared to do so.

Marvel Labs

Automated Manufacturing with Unprecedented Reductions in Cost, Carbon Emissions & Labor.

Until the 1980s most of our stuff was “Made in America.” Then, we got drunk on the low cost labor in Asia and started having everything made halfway around the world. If you live anywhere else, the story is probably similar

Unethical labor practices, supply chain fragility, long product cycles, extraordinary carbon emissions from shipping, I won’t drag you through all the problems, but they are huge and growing. Deglobalization, geopolitical tension, general pandemonium are all pushing us to reshore manufacturing to the United States and elsewhere, but how?

The only conceivable ways to make stuff in the world’s wealthiest country are: import people, or import robots. What sounds better to you?

Factory automation as we know it has been a huge boon. When you want to make a hub cap, you buy a machine that presses metal, you make a custom tool for the shape you want, then you amortize the cost of that machine over a zillion units. Want a bigger hubcap? Start over.

Modern automation with robotics allows us to build programmable tools. A 3D printer is the best example, it never has to make the same thing twice. Want a hubcap? Draw it in CAD and click print. Want a bigger one? No problem. Want a coffee mug, a pair of sunglasses, a bicycle, just click print. You amortize the cost of the the machine over a zillion units but now you get the flexibility to change your mind every day, or whenever your customer changes their mind.

3D printing for manufacturing has largely been overhyped and failed to be put to good use. There’s two big reasons for this. First, 3D printers usually print one pixel at a time. Like Matisse painting with tiny dots, this is slow. Second, these printers need high quality input materials which are expensive. A the end of all that, you are usually competing with injection molding, which is about the lowest cost way of making anything.

One exception is the 3D printers that print with powdered metal. These kind of print “a layer at a time” instead of “a pixel at a time,” which means they’re much faster. Metal parts tend to be higher value and so this is starting to work industrially.

Marvel Labs invented a way to use the powdered metal type of printer, but their input material is used coffee grounds. They’re printing sinks and light fixtures and bicycles out of biomass they get paid to haul away from Starbucks. They print parts and then powder coat or metalize them. You wouldn’t know they’re made of coffee, but these parts can be made on demand, anywhere in the world, with nearly full automation. This manufacturing process is lower cost than doing it in Asia for many durable goods.

I got to help Makerbot create the first consumer 3D printer 15 years ago. I have dozens of patents in 3D printing, and I’ve long been pessimistic about the economics of using these machines in manufacturing. Marvel Labs founder Jake Miller instantly won me over with the potential for this technology – and the products they make sequester carbon & keep biomass out of landfills as a free bonus.

Deep Future is proud to be their first investor.  With a backlog of purchase orders, this team is going straight into production. If you know people who want to build the future of manufacturing in the Middle East, Europe or Asia – or companies who want to produce products with this new capability – please reach out and we’ll connect them to Marvel Labs.

Lace Lithography

Hyperbole fails me when trying to describe the importance of computer chips to the world today. Everything made possible by computers relies on chips. Chips rely on transistors. Transistors rely on silicon. Silicon relies on Lithography.

Lithography the process of putting an image onto the surface of the silicon. Pretty much like the way a silkscreen puts  “Team Building Exercise 1999” on a T-shirt. Except that this image has to be the highest resolution, with the smallest microscopic features, of anything humans produce.

“Moore’s Law” usually refers to increasing transistor density. Basically, how can we make transistors half as big as they were 18 months ago? Every time we figure that out, computers get twice as powerful.

The state of the art uses Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) light to do the lithography. The machine that can do this cost $50 billion to develop. It has 500,000 parts. Only the Large Hadron Collider is more complicated. To buy one costs $250 million and you’ll be stuck on a waiting list that is $40 billion long. The machine comes from ASML in the Netherlands and they don’t have a single competitor, in the entire world.

That machine shoots a tiny ball of molten tin into a vacuum and blasts it with two lasers. This produces a flash of 13.5 nanometer ultraviolet light that gets aimed at the surface of a silicon wafer. You are looking at the pinnacle of human engineering achievement. Now you know how the chip for your iPhone is made.

ASML advanced from 193nm to 13.5nm light to make this possible, but there’s a problem. The diffraction limit of 13.5 nanometer light was set by either God or Issac Newton and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t print features smaller than that and there’s no practical way to do lithography with a shorter wavelength. When people say that Moore’s Law is over, this is why. We can’t keep making smaller transistors.

The semiconductor industry knows this, so they’ve tried to solve the problem by handing it over to the marketing department where the laws of physics don’t apply. You’ve seen them progress from 45nm to 30nm to 20nm over the last decade, then all of the sudden, 12nm, 7nm, 5nm & soon 3nm chips are coming. Well guess what, it is all just marketing bullshit.

This measurement in chips used to be half the distance between the centers of two features. Once marketing took over, they started measuring half the distance between the edges of two features. Instant improvement! Then they started measuring other random stuff. Other kinds of improvements in chip design helped to gloss over the fact that we are no longer able to shrink the size of transistors by 50% every 18 months anymore.

Today, there are extraordinary geopolitical machinations to control chip production. The U.S. has new tariffs and export controls akin to those for fighter jets and ICBMs (both are largely made of chips anyway). Access to chip production is as critical to superpowers as oil.

So what is Lace Lithography? I can’t tell you. Yet. But this is the technology that can go well beyond Extreme UV and put Moore’s Law back on track. ASML is worth $300 billion. Lace Lithography will be their successor.

Along with Vsquared, Runa & Future Ventures, we are their first investors.

DMAT

How did the Romans build the Pantheon?  Made of non-reinforced concrete – it remains standing after 2000 years, in a seismic zone – while our concrete with steel rebar struggles to last a century. No one has been able to figure it out for two millennia, but this team at MIT just solved the mystery and recently published about it in Science.

The implications are staggering.  They can make stronger, self healing concrete. It can be lower cost and is a very easy change to existing production operations, this is not true for any other significant advancement we’ve seen in cement.  Even more exciting, this radically reduces the carbon emissions from making cement, which is the largest offender of all construction materials, almost 9% of global CO2 emissions and growing.

We are their first investors.

CreateMe

The global fashion industry produces 2.1 billion tonnes of GHG emissions annually – more than aviation & shipping combined.

Worse, 20% of global freshwater pollution is from making clothes.  Soon, wars will be fought over water.

About 150 billion garments were produced in the last year. 30% of them will never be worn by a human.  Imagine if we drove ⅓ of all the cars ever manufactured directly from the factory to a landfill.

This $1.7TT industry is built on low cost labor in the poorest countries overproducing with speculative manufacturing – creating garments long before finding out if anyone actually wants them.

We’ve backed CreateMe to flip the script.  They wait until somebody clicks “buy now” before manufacturing on-demand and shipping out the next day.  Using advanced automation, they can produce high quality, low cost garments close to the consumer.

CreateMe is much further along than most of the companies we invest in, but this is an important use of technology that is near and dear to my heart.  Before starting Deep Future, I spent years of nights & weekends working on this very problem.  CreateMe is taking this vision even further – rearchitecting the industry to bring H&M, Adidas & LVMH into the future, but without the greenwashing.  Those are all current customers.

CreateMe already has strong revenue and a world class team developing automation technology that has done it before in electronics and semiconductor.  They need talent and will take on their first strategic investors this year – please think about who could be a good match for them and reach out to Michael or I.