The Saturday Morning Newsletter #103
Evolutionary Mismatch, Federal Cuts for Wildfire Fighters, and Developing New Crop Varieties
This Week I’m Tracking: 10 developments across the sectors shaping our future
Reading Time: 5 minutes of curated insights
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Let’s dive in.
#1: Quaise Energy
Description: Quaise Energy is a developer of geothermal energy drilling tech.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Quaise Energy recently raised $114M in venture capital funding. Quaise is a clean energy startup developing deep geothermal technology. By utilizing high-power millimeter-wave beam drilling, Quaise melts through rock to access superhot, deep geothermal heat and repurpose existing fossil-fuel power plant infrastructure.
#2: TaiSan
Description: TaiSan is a battery materials startup.
Why Is This Company Interesting? TaiSan recently raised $4.7M in venture capital funding. TaiSan is developing quasi-solid-state sodium-ion batteries. Using a non-flammable polymer electrolyte and abundant raw materials, its technology eliminates lithium dependencies to deliver lower costs, enhanced safety, and seamless integration with existing battery manufacturing.
#3: Proxima Fusion
Description: Proxima Fusion is a developer of stellarator-based fusion power plants.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Proxima Fusion recently raised $470M in venture capital funding. Proxima is a fusion energy startup spun out of the Max Planck Institute. The company combines advanced stellarator magnetic confinement, high-temperature superconductors, and computational physics to design scalable, grid-ready clean fusion power plants.
#4: Aardaia
Description: Aardaia is a developer of new crop varieties from wild plants.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Aardaia recently raised $5M in venture capital funding. Aardaia is an agtech startup focused on domesticating wild plant species to create high-yield, resilient crops for the future. Its primary focus is the aardaker crop, which combines high tuber yields with nitrogen-fixing legume biology to supply sustainable plant protein without synthetic fertilizers.
#5: Ranchbot
Description: Ranchbot is a water-management tech developer for farms and livestock.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Ranchbot recently raised $15M in venture capital funding. Ranchbot is an agricultural IoT company providing satellite-connected remote monitoring systems for livestock ranches. Its sensors monitor water tanks, pipelines, and troughs in real time, reducing fuel costs, labor hours, and livestock risk for farmers.
The New York Times: Federal Job Cuts Are Making Wildfires Harder to Fight
At the start of an intense wildfire season, federal officials announced a 15% decrease in “hotshot” teams, the elite squads that fight complex blazes in the most rugged areas. Firefighters keep requesting help but wait days or weeks while fires get out of hand, causing incredible damage and costing taxpayers more.
Pitchbook: Why Defensibility is The Hook for VC Data Center Investments
The AI infrastructure boom has increased rapidly at a staggering pace. Nvidia signed memorandums of understanding with 6 large asset managers and investment banks to raise the capital to fund AI factories. AI infrastructure shows no signs of slowing, with VCs backing that buildout by funding the semiconductors that power it.
Lider Legal: Intellectual Property as a Strategic Asset
When companies want to grow, they often don’t prioritize maintaining and developing intellectual property through their growth stages. These processes often get postponed until they become real problems—by then, it’s too late. Proactively protecting and enforcing IP is critical to the growth of IP-powered companies.
New Trader U: The Top 10 Philosophy Books That Everyone Should Read
Here are 10 great philosophy books that offer a strong entry point.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
The Republic by Plato
Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder
Asia Research News: Modern Life May Be Outpacing the Human Mind
Over millions of years, the human brain evolved to perceive a world of familiar faces, immediate threats, and small social groups. But the world as it currently stands is changing far faster than biology can keep pace.
This constantly diverging dynamic may help explain much of the stress, loneliness, and constant comparison people experience today.
This phenomenon is known as evolutionary mismatch, which describes what happens when human instincts shaped in one environment are forced to operate in a very different one. For instance, humans evolved in smaller, close-knit groups, where danger, belonging, status, relationships, and trust were read through familiar people and face-to-face interactions.
Now, those same instincts are being triggered in dense cities, digital platforms, unequal societies, and constant pressures. The end result that we feel is constant confusion, where responses that once made evolutionary sense can feel out of place.
I think this research is incredibly important and can explain a large portion of the out-of-whack behavior people feel these days—we simply weren’t bred for it. I’m super interested to see where this field goes.
That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.
Drew Jackson
Founder & Writer
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Next Deep Dive: Carrots, Sticks, and Kilowatts - August 19th, 2026
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