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In 2006, I was in my mid-20s, had wound down my company and was doing a postdoctoral scholarship to pay my bills. I had been told that I should raise venture capital for my next startup.
I googled “nanotechnology” and “venture capital,” and the first Google search result was Lux, based in NYC, founded by a couple guys my age, who had funded companies building next-gen lithography, batteries, displays, and longevity.
I was FLOORED. This is at a time when SoLoMo, ad-tech, and “cloud” were all the rage. I didn’t know VCs existed in NYC, or below the age of 40.
I reached out to Pete and Josh offering to help source and diligence asking for nothing but friendship/mentorship in return, as I didn’t even have an idea at the time, and they replied the same day inviting me to spend time with them. No other VC had given such a warm reply to my blind outreach.
Being flat broke, I submitted papers to land speaking slots at conferences in NYC to be able to go out to see them, and the rest is history.
20 years in, I’ve had the fortune of working with talent and being part of the inception and success of amazing companies in fields investors were shunning or simply not paying attention to. I’ve learned so much from working closely with incredible people who have brought different perspectives to the firm.
In 2006, deep tech felt lonely; today the talent is everywhere, but conviction still matters.
It’s a privilege to be part of this next chapter with our fresh $1.5B fund to continue working with founders as they are ideating to pulling together to launching to growing to establishing generational companies accelerating our future with feats of science and engineering.
I googled “nanotechnology” and “venture capital,” and the first Google search result was Lux, based in NYC, founded by a couple guys my age, who had funded companies building next-gen lithography, batteries, displays, and longevity.
I was FLOORED. This is at a time when SoLoMo, ad-tech, and “cloud” were all the rage. I didn’t know VCs existed in NYC, or below the age of 40.
I reached out to Pete and Josh offering to help source and diligence asking for nothing but friendship/mentorship in return, as I didn’t even have an idea at the time, and they replied the same day inviting me to spend time with them. No other VC had given such a warm reply to my blind outreach.
Being flat broke, I submitted papers to land speaking slots at conferences in NYC to be able to go out to see them, and the rest is history.
20 years in, I’ve had the fortune of working with talent and being part of the inception and success of amazing companies in fields investors were shunning or simply not paying attention to. I’ve learned so much from working closely with incredible people who have brought different perspectives to the firm.
In 2006, deep tech felt lonely; today the talent is everywhere, but conviction still matters.
It’s a privilege to be part of this next chapter with our fresh $1.5B fund to continue working with founders as they are ideating to pulling together to launching to growing to establishing generational companies accelerating our future with feats of science and engineering.
We started Lux in 2000 with a simple conviction: the biggest opportunities lie at the frontier of science and technology that others find too hard, too early, or too confusing. Twenty-five years later, that conviction hasn't changed. What has changed is that the world has caught on.
Now compute, automation, and biology have matured into scalable engineering disciplines, and what was once fringe "deep tech" has become essential infrastructure. New talent, new tools, and new industrial capacity now exist to turn the most cutting-edge technology across the physical, computational, and life sciences into enduring businesses.
For these businesses and founders to become category-defining winners, they need meaningful capital and conviction. That is why we are especially excited to announce our largest fund to date, Lux Ventures IX, a $1.5B commitment to investing in the people turning sci-fi into sci-fact.
Today entire sectors of aerospace, biotech, defense, industrials, transportation and beyond are being reinvented by a new generation of brilliantly ambitious, often irreverent, scientists and engineers. And while markets have changed and capital reshapes around fewer companies and larger checks, our focus on the craft remains constant.
That focus matters because science doesn’t scale itself. The path from a result in the lab, only known to a few, to something durable the entire world will use requires a different kind of partnership. One that deploys the first $100K and the last $100M, that stays through the full arc of company-building, that mobilizes a powerful network of kinetic like-minded founders, and that treats capital as a tool rather than the product.
Forty-four people at Lux now manage $7B, still operating with the same discipline and purpose we had on day one. We find and fund founders others have overlooked, back conviction over consensus, and build alongside these rebels of science and tech at every stage.
We’re grateful to our valued LPs who've partnered with us through multiple cycles, and to the founders who trust us with their life's work. The mission continues, with even greater intensity and momentum.
luxcapital.com/news/announcin…
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Even when startups fail, that brilliant human capital fuels the next generation of industry-defining giants
Today it's space, compute, reindustrialization, and AI
Excited for where the talent plans to head to next!
Fantastic conversation with a great group @FSIStanford: youtube.com/watch?v=CF8ZsJ…
Today it's space, compute, reindustrialization, and AI
Excited for where the talent plans to head to next!
Fantastic conversation with a great group @FSIStanford: youtube.com/watch?v=CF8ZsJ…
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
Great catching up with @NaveenGRao and @Farshchi at the Future of Datacenter and Compute conference.
Frontier computing FTW ⚡️
Frontier computing FTW ⚡️
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
Great conversation this morning at the Space and Defense Investor Summit in LA. Thank you @itsmoislam and team for hosting a terrific event, and to my friend Dan Gray and others joining today.
Distributed compute is the answer for America, its communities, and allies. centers manufactured at speed and deployed where the energy already lives. This is how we win – all of the benefits of data centers with none of the drawbacks.
Distributed compute is the answer for America, its communities, and allies. centers manufactured at speed and deployed where the energy already lives. This is how we win – all of the benefits of data centers with none of the drawbacks.
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
At the Four Seasons in Palo Alto this morning for the Lux Summit
@andrewdfeldman speaking about how moratoriums on data centers will lead to >50% of Cerebras’ deployed capacity to end up outside the U.S.
He also thinks deployed capacity is going to go up in value significantly
@andrewdfeldman speaking about how moratoriums on data centers will lead to >50% of Cerebras’ deployed capacity to end up outside the U.S.
He also thinks deployed capacity is going to go up in value significantly
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
Thanks @tonywkim and @Farshchi for having me to join the panel on orbital data centers with Dan Roelker, great discussion on a prescient day! 🙏🚀
@BlackRock @Lux_Capital @Starcloud_
@BlackRock @Lux_Capital @Starcloud_
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
Right now, @aerovironment are scaling production at pace to meet the demands of their customers.
Their CTO, Scott Bowman, on connecting every lesson from test, production, and the field, so engineers and AI models start from what the team already knows.
Their CTO, Scott Bowman, on connecting every lesson from test, production, and the field, so engineers and AI models start from what the team already knows.
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Our eyes, ears, taste, touch, and smell have served as incredible neural interfaces, allowing to humanity to interact with subatomic particles to distant galaxies.
Sure, reading directly from neurons would be great, but I'm optimistic that we can build some amazing BCI by getting creative with our existing senses:
Sure, reading directly from neurons would be great, but I'm optimistic that we can build some amazing BCI by getting creative with our existing senses:
Shahin Farshchi at Lux Capital likes to say neural interfaces have been "5 years away" for 20 years. So what's changed?
He joins us on Business Trip to discuss opportunities in neuro.
We get into his BCI investing framework, voice as an interface, and how he spots the next tech wave early.
businesstrip.fm/1173518/episod…
@Farshchi @Lux_Capital
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
Space already gave us global communications and GPS.
The next wave, says @Farshchi of @Lux_Capital, is what you can only make in orbit, starting with pharmaceuticals. Lux co-led @VardaSpace's Series D.
The next wave, says @Farshchi of @Lux_Capital, is what you can only make in orbit, starting with pharmaceuticals. Lux co-led @VardaSpace's Series D.
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
👀 WOW
Ryan @ryanjdaniels + Lux family co Crosby @crosbylegal are playing to win
theinformation.com/articles/legal…
Ryan @ryanjdaniels + Lux family co Crosby @crosbylegal are playing to win
theinformation.com/articles/legal…
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
It was fun to document what we've been learning about building robot deployments that ACTUALLY work, and what the path to true improvement is with @haomiaoh -- backed by experience deploying robots in hundreds of factories, we now know the balance to strike between rformance.
Our ceo and founder @samanfarid on the best way to get to general purpose robots that don't suck.
Thanks @AnneliesGamble for the collaboration!
Read it:
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Proud to be partnering with @lumaril supercharging the physical world with AI, with a focus on our industrial base:
Today we’re launching Lumaril.
We’re an industrial autonomy company helping America’s existing factories run at their true capacity, with more production and less waste.
The US is home to hundreds of thousands of plants, run by senior operators with decades of tacit knowledge. , and a growing wave of retirements is taking it out the door.
If we let these facilities go dark, we don't just lose great companies and the towns that depend on them. We lose the living blueprints for making the goods and materials this country can’t afford to do without.
Reindustrialization won’t come from new factories alone. The plants we already have are great American businesses, built over generations, with enormous potential to grow. We believe helping them scale is the fastest path to restoring industrial capacity.
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Datacenters in space? I was a huge skeptic. Then @BaijuBhatt told me he's building a world-class team to beat the heat (thermal management problem), and building the rockets to put them in orbit himself:
Tune in this evening, I'm sitting down with @ShawnRyan762 to unveil @CowboySpaceCorp's rocket architecture.
Watch here, 6:30PM PT: x.com/i/broadcasts/1…
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
The pace of innovation from this team is incredible. Keep pushing @mirendil!
Introducing Fern, Mirendil’s first model: pretrained from scratch, with up to 10M tokens of context!
That’s ~0.5M lines of code (roughly Megatron-LM scale) or days of an agent’s work, all in context at once.
Its first version, Fern 0.1, had a short round of post-training 🚢
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
We're excited to announce our intent to acquire @NeuReality_AI ! They have built a fantastic engineering team that enables us @unconvAI to just go faster. Welcome NeuReality team!
Unconventional AI has reached a definitive agreement to acquire @NeuReality_AI , whose team and technology will play a central role in advancing our mission to make AI compute radically more efficient.
Unconventional is building a 4-dimensional substrate targeting a 1,000x te efficiency over conventional architectures. Reaching that target requires co-design across device physics, silicon architecture, and the models themselves. @NeuReality_AI brings seven years of work on purpose-built AI inference silicon and infrastructure, plus an engineering team spanning system architecture, silicon design, and AI systems software. Together that materially compresses our timeline to production systems, and it establishes our engineering presence in Israel.
We're excited to welcome @MosheTanach , @tzshmueli , @YossiKasus , @LiorKhermosh , @iritfast83 , and the NeuReality team to Unconventional. Together we'll build a next substrate for intelligence, and the systems to put it into production.
Learn more: unconv.ai/blog/unconvent…
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
Lux family co @goformic 🤖💪
Formic raised $50M in Series B funding.
100+ facilities. 30+ states. 99.6% uptime. Now scaling physical AI onto real factory floors.
read it in @axios -
axios.com/pro/all-deals/…
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Building packaging, interconnect, fab capacity and balance of system is now as important for chip companies as designing the chip itself
Meanwhile @Cognichip is pushing chip design toward software speed
Proud to share the stage with semi investor greats at CASPA’s CEO Summit.
Meanwhile @Cognichip is pushing chip design toward software speed
Proud to share the stage with semi investor greats at CASPA’s CEO Summit.
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Shahin Farshchi retweeted
Everyone wants to show robot demos. —- some of us ship robots to customers on a daily basis. —- physical AI isn’t coming - ITS HERE. Still lots of unsolved problems in robotics, but the fundamentals are in place. We felt like this was the right time to raise a bit more capital to task expansion and deployment.
Formic raised $50M in Series B funding.
100+ facilities. 30+ states. 99.6% uptime. Now scaling physical AI onto real factory floors.
read it in @axios -
axios.com/pro/all-deals/…
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Physical AI is only useful when its deployed
@goformic was one of the first, and now boasts 750K hours of live production across 100+ factories and warehouses
Proud that @samanfarid chose us as his early partner, and excited for their fresh capital infusion:
@goformic was one of the first, and now boasts 750K hours of live production across 100+ factories and warehouses
Proud that @samanfarid chose us as his early partner, and excited for their fresh capital infusion:
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Coding models that run on your MacBook Pro have never been this powerful. Big props to @Recursive_SI on Flint, pushing the Pareto frontier with a model largely built by their own Eureka Machine. Go @RichardSocher
Introducing Flint, @Recursive_SI’s first model: a fast local coding model built with our automated research system, the Eureka Machine.
• Best-in-class fast local coding
• Up to 2x faster than comparable models: 125+ tokens/sec on a MacBook Pro, 150+ on RTX Spark
• Built from hs
Private, unmetered intelligence on your own machine. Open weights available now on @huggingface, run it locally on your favorite framework or try it for free on @opencode or @pidotdev.
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