Kicking off our latest @spc cohort of frontier builders. An extraordinarily talented and inspiring group working across computational biology, model alignment, AI quantization, aerospace, manufacturing, and more. They’re starting companies at the most consequential moment I’ve lived through. What a time to build. Let's get to work.

What have you been nerding out on lately? Bring it to SPC After Hours this Thursday. ~20 builders, researchers and tinkerers. Short lightning talks. Strange repos, half-built things, papers, ideas, experiments. Registration link in the comments.

@LongshotSpace is building a cannon that launches payloads to orbit. SPC members spent an afternoon at their facility. Welcome to the future of space launch.

This one was solid @snsf

Loved meeting @shreepoorna365 and the @arctusaerospace team in Bengaluru. They have an inspiring and bold vision to build unmanned airplanes for earth observation. If you are an awesome hardware engineer interested in aerospace in India, please reach out to shreepoorna@arctus.space

Launching Egma - OSS simulation testing for voice agents We've deployed voice agents in regulated industries ourselves & spent hours manually testing on every push. Existing vendors charge an insane 5-20X premium on inference. Egma lets you bring your own API keys. Github👇

Why you’re more likely to find something worth building in a group than alone.

Congratulations COSMIC. This technology development is critical for the nation to achieve high throughput communication from future constellations and for secured communication networks. Good example of academy-industry collaborative research. #SomanathSpeak

A year ago this was three people and a claim nobody wanted to fund. Today we have our first granted US patent. The claim was simple. Astronomy spent a century teaching optics to make pictures. Downlink does not need a picture, it needs photons. Treat light as a signal and the entire cost curve of a ground station changes: many small apertures instead of one giant mirror, with the pointing and tracking doing the hard work. That patent is the first brick in the Optical Highway to the Cosmos. Here is to many more contrarian bets in science and engineering.

QOSMIC has been granted a US patent by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. We've been working toward this for just under a year, and it's a proud day for the whole team. For decades, optical ground stations have been built around one assumption: if you want to collect more light from a satellite, you need a bigger telescope. Past a point, that stopped making sense. Our optical ground station uses an array of phased telescopes acting as one aperture. It's the architecture behind ARGUS, and it turns a ground station from a fixed piece of infrastructure into something modular, that scales with the constellation it serves. Both uplink and downlink. Why this matters now: as satellite data moves from radio to light, the ground has to keep up. The constellations going up need far more data brought down, faster and more efficiently than today's stations can manage. This patent embodies the core of how we solve that. The ground stations of the next era won't look like the ones we have today. This is just the start, and we're moving fast. @Jain_Shrey_ @RohitKR79 @aalokelab @AccelIndia @AccelAtoms @Accel @spc @artparkindia @spc_india @_pagarwal @MBalachand90142 @prateekmehta42 @ankitcc @adityaag @JPBrebner @nayankote

We’re excited to share that @nuance_ai has raised a $50M Series A led by @lightspeedvp, joined by @Accel, @spc, @nvidia, and @definevc! Much of human communication happens beyond words. Before we can speak, we learn to read faces, return smiles, follow gestures, and sense when someone is listening. That visual and emotional vocabulary stays with us for life. At Nuance Labs, we’re building a foundation model that understands and responds to the full spectrum of human emotion. A single full-duplex audio-visual model that sees, listens, and responds in real time, with the natural give-and-take of a conversation with a friend or colleague. We believe the best interface with a machine is the one we’ve practiced since birth. Join us!

What an evening! Was a privilege to host @snsf at SPC India, in conversation with @prateekmehta42. What minus one looks like, will always keep changing. What will not change, is the fact that it's the most critical phase of building. Here's to great ambition.

Looking forward to exchanging ideas with @ankitcc and the @spc_india community. Healthcare is being reimagined in many exciting ways. I hope our conversation encourages more builders to bring their ideas, belief and long-term conviction to the sector. See you there: luma.com/ShashankND

What does it actually take to build at the intersection of Bio × Health × AI? Beyond the models: clinical validation, hospital adoption, proprietary data, pharma, regulation, and the messy reality of care delivery. @ankitcc and I are bringing together a small group for dinner at @spc_india this Tuesday. Building in this space, or know someone who should be in the room? DM me or tag them below.

"I'll believe in AGI, when it solves quantum gravity." A line I wont't forget, from my chat with Prof. Rajesh Gopakumar (theoretical physicist, string theory pioneer, and also, AIR 1 in JEE)! In this conversation he shares his "discover in India" philosophy, and why it's essential for our deep-tech future. Before the rockets, comes the actual rocket science! "We are a many millennia old civilisation. We should be thinking in terms of long-term investments, and that's what will lift the country."

The entire modern economy runs on semiconductors, whose designs are one of the great marvels of engineering and FUs to entropy in human history.  Most of us don’t think a lot about how these chips work; we just enjoy the fruits of their (blazing, miraculous) labors—the software that sits on top and powers nearly everything we do. And for those of us naive CS types whose last experience with EE was learning to build an adder, we assume that the semiconductors beneath our software are “always correct”. Silicon is deterministic, and the bits aren’t ever wrong, right? Turns out it’s not that simple. Chip-design organizations face growing pressure to do more with the same resources. As designs grow more complex, teams must move faster without lowering design quality. In the age of agentic chip design, verification is becoming the bottleneck, and AI cannot transform chip design when design and autonomous verification do not progress hand in hand. Solving this bottleneck before the chips are taped out (let alone shipped) is the work of TENX SEMI.  I’m proud to announce today that @SPC and @KhoslaVentures led TenX’s early funding. We’ve believed in their mission from the start.  The team of CEO SukHwan Lim (former EVP at Samsung, where he ran all US R&D for System LSI semiconductors), Subhasish Mitra (Stanford Professor and EE legend in robust and dependable computing and 3D nanotechnologies), and Shwetabh Verma (Broadcom, Apple, Cadence) is extraordinarily well-positioned for this business. Subhasish’s foundational work transformed formal verification into a scalable, high-throughput reality. By shifting the paradigm toward automated consistency analysis, TenX Semi's autonomous verification platform uncovers bugs (including deep, hard-to-find long-tail bugs) without requiring additional test writing. The result is unprecedented speed and design quality, enabling teams to do far more with the same resources. At a top-ten semiconductor company, TenX Semi's platform uncovered critical bugs in a production design in less than two weeks, which would take many months to accomplish using business-as-usual practices. Today, TenX Semi is advancing chip design by combining autonomous verification with AI-powered bug localization and fixing. In TenX Semi's vision, design and autonomous verification progress hand in hand, and bugs uncovered in the process are fixed autonomously. Special thanks to Tathagata Srimani (T), co-founder and CTO of SPC portfolio company Flucta, for introducing me to the TenX team. Before T was a rising-star Professor at Carnegie Mellon, he studied under Subhasish. The move from simulation to formal verification, and then to optimization and AI-assisted development, heralds an exciting new era for the semiconductor industry, the most critical infrastructure underpinning the entire AI era.