Every era of technology gets a mafia. This one builds rockets, batteries, robots, and reactors. Its founders come from four companies: Anduril. Neuralink. Tesla. SpaceX. What makes these companies startup factories? Meet the ANTS mafia.

As AI gets better at understanding biology, there’s a huge risk it could be used to engineer dangerous pathogens, worse than anything we’ve seen to date. And there’s a dangerous asymmetry. A malicious actor can prepare to launch an engineered pandemic for years. But once an outbreak begins, we don’t have much time to stop an exponentially spreading virus. Red Queen Bio turns that asymmetry on its head. They use AI to predict the what most dangerous pathogens we might experience in the age of AI are and then IN ADVANCE design antibodies to protect us from them. They can do this against whole virus families, potentially covering virus types we haven't encountered yet. If that works, we could have medicines ready before the next threat emerges. Designed, manufactured, even stockpiled. They're working to make antibodies bind more tightly, so smaller doses could protect more people. This is important because a medicine becomes good pandemic defense only if we can manufacture and deliver it at enormous scale. The ambition is to put these defenses in government stockpiles and develop new ones fast enough to stop emerging threats. They have the classic improvement loop in their work. AI designs antibodies —> they produce and test them —> the results improve the models —> the models design better antibodies. We should absolutely try to prevent AI from ever being misused this way. But guardrails aren’t 100%. The countermeasures Red Queen Bio is designing give us a way to fight back when prevention fails. At @fiftyyears we're proud to have seeded @redqueenbio, who have now raised $36M, with OpenAI as a lead investor. AI could accelerate the invention of biological threats, so we need to use AI to accelerate our defenses even faster. Wouldn't it be grand if we could build an immune system for civilization, one with defenses against viruses that haven't even been invented yet? If we had the cure for the next pandemic even before the first patient was infected? That's what Red Queen Bio is building. Read the WSJ story: wsj.com/health/this-startup-…

Behind the scenes of our first film, Indispensable. We had so much fun making this!

Fifty Years just crossed $1 billion in gains. Most of that is still unrealized. But for a kid who grew up on food stamps, literally counting pennies, it’s a pretty cool milestone.

Now that everyone is finally paying attention, resharing our AI Alignment request for startups from a year ago. All of this still needed!

The next PayPal Mafia is building in atoms. Meet the ANTS. Anduril, Neuralink, Tesla, and SpaceX. Why are these 4 companies spinning out so many founders? To find out, we traveled the country for 2 weeks to film founders who came out of them. piped.video/xbE4_85WS4I

Damn our ANTS Mafia documentary just hit 100K views on YouTube. What makes Anduril, Neuralink, Tesla, and SpaceX such great training grounds for founders? Find out in under 10 minutes: piped.video/xbE4_85WS4I

ANTS BUILD!!!

We’ve been backing deep tech startups for over a decade. Recently we noticed something strange. A huge number of the best founders are coming out of the same 4 companies: Anduril, Neuralink, Tesla, SpaceX. We started calling them The ANTS. We wanted to know what made these companies such great startup factories, so we flew across the country to talk with these founders.

What a great look into mission driven building .

Start building and never stop going for the gap. 🏎️💨

onepot CORE 2 Triangulum is live: 30B compounds, 16 transformations, including multicomponent and multistep chemistry for the first time. two price tiers, $250 or $375 per compound, and available at onepot.ai/ or via api. see onepot.ai/blog/core-v2 for more

Gordian Progress Report: Summer 2026 Our drug discovery machine has now captured the the effects of 1,327 targets in living diseased tissue across six disease areas, nearly the same number the global biomedical research community has reported over the past 20 years. It includes: - 352 in MASH - 304 in obesity - 290 in heart failure - 168 in osteoarthritis - 203 in PPF We just expanded to chronic kidney disease, and are on track to triple the number of targets with in vivo causal validation data by the end of next year. Instead of picking winners first and validating them later, we generate the evidence first and then pick the winners. We do this with Mosaic Screening, which lets us test hundreds of perturbations in living disease tissue, resolve their causal effects on disease at scale, and then select the best targets for conversion to drug candidates. This is how we found a new drug candidate for osteoarthritis, Omen 13, in a large mammal model of natural disease, and we're moving it into the clinic. As we apply the machine to more diseases, we can compare the causal maps between diseases to find potential multimorbidity drugs. See how our cure engine has grown in our Summer 2026 progress report here: blog.gordian.bio/p/gordian-p…

Introducing BioSecBench-Function, a verifiable benchmark for testing whether AI agents can infer the functional properties of viruses, bacteria, and toxins from data. Opus 5 with Claude Code leads in endpoint pass rate (50.4%), while Grok 4.6 with Grok Build leads in overall pass rate (44%) when refusals are counted as failures. The benchmark contains 111 deterministic evaluations spanning viral, bacterial, and toxin systems. It covers five primary threat axes: transmissibility, immune escape, virulence or toxicity, drug resistance, and persistence or fitness. Each evaluation is grounded in a published study or dataset and reviewed by domain experts. Tasks draw on deep mutational scanning, Tite-Seq, surface plasmon resonance, X-ray crystallography, free-energy calculations, and related assays. Agents receive the relevant data and produce structured answers graded against study-derived ground truth.

EXCLUSIVE: 8VC leads $16M Lazarus round to build modular supercritical CO₂ turbines for America’s data center buildout. Today, @LazarusEnergy, the Hawthorne-based startup, has secured an oversubscribed $16M seed round led by @8vc, with additional investment from Marlinspike, DST Global, Neuron Power Ventures, and @relentless_inv, as well as follow-up investment from @fiftyyears and @sidedoor_vc. The company is betting that a new turbine architecture can help solve one of the biggest constraints on America’s data center buildout, power. Supercritical carbon dioxide could decide America’s AI sovereignty. CO₂ crosses into the supercritical phase above 31.1°C and 73.8 bar, where liquid and gas collapse into a single fluid with liquid-like density and gas-like flow. It plays a special role in closed-loop Brayton cycle turbines, which could become core to data center power generation. Turbines are becoming increasingly important for data centers as power demand exceeds grid capacity and operators look for reliable on-site power. The traditional turbine market is behind, with wait times exceeding 5 to 7 years and OEMs even turning down new orders because capacity is maxed out. Lazarus is attempting to shift the supply curve. The LA startup was founded by George Kitromelides (CEO) and Luke Malcolm (CTO), both formerly on the propulsion team at Anduril, alongside team members from Siemens Energy, Williams International, and Ursa Major. The startup is developing turbines that enable a forward-deployable power plant fitting inside a shipping container. “Supercritical CO₂ lets you reduce the size of your components significantly,” according to George Kitromelides (CEO), thus enabling the distributed form factor. Traditional turbines are optimized for specific heat sources. Lazarus designed its system to be heat-source agnostic, allowing it to convert heat from nearly any major energy source into electricity. Lazarus has created a natural edge. It can serve today’s data center market with proven inputs like natural gas while remaining positioned for future heat sources like small modular reactors. Deployment is another edge. Traditional turbine players can require months or years of construction to set up on-site, while Lazarus’ platform is fully assembled at its facility and requires zero on-site construction. In areas like nuclear, this can be key. Luke Malcolm (CTO) states, “SMRs are supposed to be compact, modular, deployable power. And when you build your compact reactor and then spend a year building all your steam infrastructure on-site, that kind of defeats the whole purpose.” Lazarus is focused on two end markets, data centers as the beachhead market and small modular nuclear reactors as the secondary market, both with unique business models. In the data center market, “The OEMs are straight up rejecting new orders. They’re turning customers away because they just can’t keep up with demand,” according to George Kitromelides (CEO). Lazarus wants to provide power-as-a-service in the data center market, where it would own and operate the asset instead of the data center operator incurring CapEx. Additionally, the own-and-operate/PPA model allows Lazarus to generate significantly more long-term revenue than a one-time equipment sale. Under a power purchase agreement (PPA), customers pay for the electricity generated by the system over time rather than purchasing the power infrastructure upfront. Lastly, behind-the-meter power is surging as data centers seek dedicated, off-grid generation to avoid grid delays and secure reliable power. Lazarus enables that by delivering compact on-site power systems built for data center demand. On the nuclear side, Lazarus would integrate with SMR companies to supply the power cycle, with nuclear heat going into the Lazarus cycle and electricity coming out. This model would focus on selling units to reactor companies, followed by multi-year maintenance contracts. Lazarus is developing a true picks-and-shovels play for the AI power gold rush. But the broader opportunity extends well beyond data centers. As the forward-deployed stack expands across compute, manufacturing, medical units, and logistics, compact containerized power could become critical infrastructure for Department of War installations, remote mining operations, disaster response, and any site where reliable power needs to move closer to the edge. The team of six full-time engineers is focused on firing a 1-megawatt sub-module of its system by late this year or early next year. The system will be powered by natural gas. Additionally, the startup has secured an MOU with a nuclear customer and has received strong interest from the data center market.

PSA for Boston-area biosecurity folks: This Thurs, Aug 27th, @LatchBio & @FiftyYears are hosting a big biosecurity shingdig in Cambridge, MA. The schedule includes three lightning talks, looks like a pretty cool event! @RADVACproject @HoekstraTweets luma.com/bcv72bwf

Join the most ambitious community in deep tech • @plasmidsaurus, ultra-fast sequencing to accelerate science • @boltz, foundational AI for biology and chemistry • @Powerhouse_Bio, making human mitochondria superhuman • @SailClippership, autonomous sailboats • @Lightmill, laser milling metal • @ElectroflowTech, electrochemistry to make lithium abundant • @FloatCargo, long-haul cargo with airships + more 5050 helped them start. 535 scientists and engineers. 115 companies started. 96% successfully raised. Learn how to build with us: fiftyyears.com/5050

We're designing implants to live inside the body for decades. Accelerated lifetime testing compresses years of testing into weeks; it validates that our devices can survive in vivo conditions long term.

Ok you all really wanted to know who this is so I asked the founders if I could share. It's VALID. And they're hiring. validtx.com