DCVC

Despite the last decade’s progress toward understanding diseases, one stubborn problem persists. While technology now enables the measurement of cellular responses to different interventions, the matrix of possible interventions across proteins, contexts, and tissues is experimentally intractable. That makes biotech R&D and even clinical testing a risky, costly process of trial and error, with failure as the norm.

We are excited to announce that Luis Bacalao has joined DCVC as Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel. Luis has been in venture capital since 2016, when he joined Khosla Ventures as Assistant General Counsel. He then served as General Counsel of Y Combinator’s Continuity Fund before returning to Khosla Ventures as an Operating Partner focusing on special projects.

Tom Linebarger ran Cummins for a decade, capping thirty years at the hundred-year-old power giant. When a leader like that leaves to run a company a fraction of the size, it says something about where electric power is headed. Recently, Mainspring Energy named Tom its new CEO. “I’ve spent my career guiding Cummins through multiple technology inflections, and I know what it looks like when a solution is about to become indispensable,” Tom told us.

The United States has long been the cradle of quantum innovation. American laboratories birthed the first superconducting qubits and gave us Shor’s algorithm. Yet the history of other transformational computing technologies has raised a troubling question: Will the U.S. merely invent the quantum era, or will we actually manufacture it?

When I first heard someone say ​“nuclear renaissance” about what is happening right now I cringed and said, ​“Don’t jinx us,” but I may have to change my tune. What is happening in the nuclear energy sector today is unprecedented, or at the least hasn’t happened in 60 years, and I am excited. Radiant, a company we back, is turning on a full-scale, full power reactor soon in the DOME facility at Idaho National Laboratory.

Geopolitical unrest; fragile supply chains; water shortages; aging and brittle infrastructure; runaway healthcare costs; labor shortages in skilled technical roles; the scramble to find electricity for data centers; climate instability. When you add all these forces together, they make for a volatile economy where planning for the future is a challenge.

Our fourth annual Deep Tech Opportunities Report reflects our partnership’s determination of the most compelling opportunities across deep tech — from energy, computing and AI, quantum, and manufacturing to drug discovery, robotics, and defense. This year’s theme — ​“Back to Fundamentals in an Age of Exponential Change” — is a direct response to intensifying unpredictability and the need across industries for a reset in core areas of technology.

DCVC Deep Tech Week Salon, featuring a panel discussion with Zack Bogue, Naveen Rao (Co-Founder & CEO, Unconventional AI), and Nicholas Flanders (Co-Founder & CEO, Twelve). Friends of DCVC, It was a big quarter for DCVC.

Ever since the genomics revolution revealed how reliant the human organism is on its microscopic microbial cohabitants, the microbiome has been medicine’s most elusive frontier, promising better health if only we could untangle the trillions of interactions that influence nearly every facet of our physiology. But until now, effective medicines that harness the microbiome have been rare.

Friends of DCVC, Our portfolio companies had a busy quarter attracting major new funding (about $2 billion in aggregate), securing key commercial partnerships, and scaling fundamental technologies needed to accelerate AI, defense, energy, quantum, agriculture, medicine, and more. Behind each piece of news below is dazzling technology spun from a flywheel of proprietary data, deep compute, and insight derived from a given product’s contact with the real world.