NVTC Newsletter No. 3
Happy Tech Tuesday, and welcome to the NVTC weekly newsletter! Here you’ll find recent updates from the tech world, insightful articles related to startups and highlights from NV portfolio companies.
THIS WEEK’S FEATURES ⚡
⭐ Unlearn – Digital twins and a new direction for clinical trials.
⭐ Big Apple – Apple enters the satellite market.
⭐ Positive Energy – Recycling batteries and replicating blowholes.
⭐ No Laughing Matter – Progress in human/robot relationships.
🌐 What the Hack – Uber is in desperate need of security engineers.
My questions for you: what would you have done as a hacker in Uber’s internal system? What would you comment to expose yourself to everyone? Send back an email with your reply!
STARTUP HIGHLIGHT 🎢
You probably have some virtual version of yourself, whether that be on social media, email, or even a personal website. But have you ever wondered what your digital twin would look like?
Unlearn knows exactly what your digital twin would look like. As freaky as it sounds, wait to call 911 until you hear the amazing things the company is accomplishing. Unlearn’s goal is to create a service that processes historical clinical trial datasets to build disease-specific machine learning models. In turn, these models could be used to create digital twins with corresponding virtual medical records, enabling more efficient clinical trials.
Unlearn is the first company to ever do this, and today, it works with pharma sponsors, biotech companies, and academic institutions to optimize clinical studies. A key result of this groundbreaking technology is it reduces the size of control arms in trials. This eases the enrollment bottleneck that drives up time and cost. With Unlearn’s technology, patients get more access to potentially beneficial treatment instead of a placebo.
NEWS & ARTICLES 📖
Apple continues on its quest for world domination. To enable the new iPhone 14’s functionality for sending emergency messages via satellite, Apple partnered with Globalstar. Globalstar is one of the many companies now building satellite constellations to eliminate connectivity dead zones.
Automotive companies are betting that metal from recycled batteries is vital to developing EVs. One startup operating in this space is Ascend Elements, which just received over $300 million in funding from investors like Jaguar Land Rover and SK Group. The Inflation Reduction Act added to this momentum. Electric car consumer tax credits depend on the source of each car battery’s material.
Great news: the grocery shopping experience is about to become a lot less painful. Instacart is launching “Caper Cart,” a smart cart that detects items placed in it and checks them off a virtual list. This cart will be supplied to “Connected Stores” and will allow smaller grocery stores to compete with retail giants like Amazon and Walmart.
Wave Swell Energy is investigating the ocean’s potential as a source of renewable energy. The company developed a turbine that is powered by gusts of wind generated from waves rising and falling. This “artificial blowhole” just completed a one-year-long test run with relatively high success, seeing promising efficiency and availability results.
Japanese scientists are engaging in some funny business. New research focuses on teaching robots to laugh the right way at the right time. These upgrades to conversational AI are the next step in robots’ abilities to detect emotions and process open-ended human commands.
Adobe announced it will acquire Figma for $20 billion, making it the second largest private tech acquisition behind Facebook’s WhatsApp acquisition. However, the deal is contentious because Adobe and Figma are direct competitors. The acquisition could strip consumers of choices, and regulators are unlikely to stand for it.
REDDIT HIGHLIGHT 📈
Uber was hacked this week. Here’s what Reddit has to say about it:
So did all of Uber’s security engineers flee the country, or did Uber not have any security engineers to begin with? In any case, it seems like a pricey mistake for a company that hasn’t turned a profit yet.
Here’s a new challenge for NVTC: hack into Lyft’s slack. Someone has to even the scoreboard.
OUTRO
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