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Marvel Labs

Automated Manufacturing with Unprecedented Reductions in Costs, 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, here in the United States 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 keep biomass out of landfills as a free bonus.

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 America, 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.

Virtus Solis

It is important to first understand that We are all made of energy.

Solar panels have been improving and hold great potential but they are rendered useless by the relentless and uncannily predictable onslaught of night. There’s a simple way to fix this – put the solar panels in space.

Space solar is an idea that has been around for decades, but it is laughably expensive to launch enough solar panels on rockets for anyone to take it seriously. Still, the idea is enticing, because solar panels orbiting Earth get sun 24×7, 365 days a year. They receive 8 times as much energy as terrestrial panels. They can beam power down to Earth anywhere on the planet using radio waves, even in the middle of the night, during a snowstorm – right through clouds. No need for the miraculous breakthrough energy storage that wind & solar farms on Earth require.

What about safety? Beam forming technology makes it possible to send a diffuse beam of radio waves to a large antenna on the ground. The 10GHz band can’t penetrate your skin for more than a millimeter. I’ve stood in front of this beam and at most you can detect a slight warmth, much less than standing in the sunshine. Humans should never end up in the path of the beam, but if they do there is little to no health risk.

What about the ridiculous cost? Even uncontested in the private space launch market, SpaceX has gotten launch cost down 20x from the Space Shuttle. They’re at $2300 per kilogram. This idea gets irresistably cost effective at about $300 per kilogram. The SpaceX target for Starship is $20 per kilogram. In something measured in years, not decades, space solar will become the lowest cost baseload energy anywhere on Earth. It will also be the primary economic driver for private space launch.

Why Virtus Solis? Most of what we’ve seen elsewhere is still in research but we are thrilled with this team’s focus on commercializing this technology as fast as possible. The engineering team is ambitious but humble and practical. They’ve consistently impressed us with better answers than we expected to our hardest technical questions. You can learn more from their blog.

Descycle

The creation and destruction of electronics is a nasty yet unavoidable business. The creation involves mining for metals and the destruction entails polluting the environment. This is a growing global problem. What if there were a non-toxic, low-energy, scalable, and less expensive process to extract these metals out of the earth and electronics waste?

We’re thrilled to be working with Descycle, a clean technology company developing “Green” metals processing based on a novel class of chemistry, Deep Eutectic Solvents (DES) – simply mixtures of salts without water, in which metals behave differently than in water-based systems. Battery metals (e.g. nickel, copper, cobalt, rare earths, etc.); precious metals (e.g. gold, silver, palladium, etc.) can all be extracted through this process. This technology can obviate the use of pollutive smelters, toxic chemicals, and strong acids in metals processing.

Descycle has teamed up with mining companies and data center decommissioning partners to be the first-mover in many of these markets. The value of the positive environmental impact alone is hard to quantify. What is much easier to quantify is the value of the gold, palladium, etc. that is guaranteed to be in the e-waste. One ton of printed circuit boards will yield 253 grams of gold, 62 grams of. Palladium, and 1.2 grams of silver. We know this because we put in there. Mining a ton of stone might yield 9 grams of gold on a good day but we always strike gold in electronics waste.

We’ve known the Descycle geologists and management team for over 10 years. They have a long track record in finance and mining and are also investors in Descycle. There’s also great potential that eutectic processes possess in extracting iron, zinc, aluminum, arsenic, mercury, lead, chromium, and sulphur from contaminated environments. We’re elated to join Descycle in addressing one of the world’s biggest problems.

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