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: Mö Foods
Description: Mö Foods produces oat-based cheeses.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Mö Foods recently raised $2.8M in venture capital funding. Mö Foods is a food-tech company developing oat-based dairy alternatives. Specializing in plant-based artisanal cheeses, Mö utilizes proprietary processing techniques to transform oats into a creamy, sustainable alternative to dairy-based cheese.
#2: Amperon
Description: Amperon is a grid forecasting technology provider.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Amperon recently raised undisclosed funding. Amperon is an AI-powered grid analytics platform that provides demand and supply forecasting. Their platform uses a combination of currently available (in depthO weather data combined with proprietary machine learning models.
#3: Hydrosat
Description: Hydrosat provides space-based thermal imagery.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Hydrosat recently raised $60M in venture capital funding. Hydrosat is a space-tech and earth observation company using satellite thermal infrared imagery to monitor land and water temperatures. Measuring thermal surface energy and crop stress, Hydrosat provides intelligence for agriculture, irrigation management, drought monitoring, and climate risk assessment.
#4: GlassPoint
Description: GlassPoint sells solar-generated steam for industrial uses.
Why Is This Company Interesting? GlassPoint recently raised $20M in venture capital funding. GlassPoint is a solar thermal tech company that designs and operates solar steam generators for industrial process heat. This steam is carbon-free and reduces fossil fuel dependence and emissions across major industrial end markets.
#5: Cyclic Materials
Description: Cyclic Materials is a recycling startup.
Why Is This Company Interesting? Cyclic Materials recently raised $75M in venture capital funding. Cyclic Materials is building a circular supply chain for critical materials. The company uses advanced recycling processes to extract and refine high-purity rare earth elements and copper from end-of-life electronics.
Wall Street Journal: A Safer Way to Bet on Nuclear
Uranium enrichment is a key step in making nuclear fuel that nuclear reactors need to run. This operates in a unique, isolated corner of the market surrounded by national security concerns. Only two companies, both in Europe, hold enrichment capacity outside of Russia and China. Investors are seeing this as a way to get exposure to nuclear energy without dealing with the volatility of nuclear developers.
The New York Times: A New Type of Small Nuclear Reactor Gets the Green Light in Tennessee
The Tennessee Valley Authority was granted construction permits this week by the NRC for a small reactor. It’s only the second time U.S. regulators have approved a next-generation commercial reactor. The Tennessee Valley Authority is considering pursuing approval for up to 4 new reactors, designed to be smaller than traditional nuclear power plants.
The New York Times: Six Charts That Show Just How Much We Need A.I.
Do we need AI? Here is one researcher’s view, represented in 6 charts:
Productivity Growth Has Been Stuck Below Its Postwar Pace for 50 Years
Working Less, Earning More
Entering The Computer Era
A.I.’s Early Winners and Losers
The Farm Shock, How Agriculture is Shrinking
Workers’ Slice Shrinks, Profits’ Slice Grows
The Atlantic: America’s Hypocritical Take on Intellectual Property
Many companies want payment for using their work to train AI models. Many have sued the big AI companies, claiming their content was used to train these AI models without consent or permission. This amounts to more than 130 lawsuits against OpenAI, Google, Amazon, and other generative AI players. What should we do next, given that these may soon be considered national security concerns?
Aeon: A Good Skeptic Has More Than Doubt and Less Than Certainty
How tightly should you hold onto your beliefs?
This is a question we face every day, whether we know it or not. In an ideal world, we would know what our beliefs are at all times and understand what we stand for.
“If you hold your beliefs too loosely, you don’t stand for anything. If you hold them too tightly and you become the sort of person no argument can reach.”
Below is the Academic method for practicing skepticism (as related in the article):
Say how confident you are, not just what you think. ‘I believe X’ is nearly useless. ‘I believe X, at about 7 out of 10, and here is what is holding back the other 3’ gives your partner something to work with and gives you somewhere to move in the light of new evidence or better arguments.
Grade your beliefs by how hard you’ve tested them.
Separate your values from your empirical beliefs. That children should not go hungry is a value and may be held firmly. That a particular school-meals program reduces hunger is an empirical claim, to be held only as firmly as the evidence warrants. Conflating the two is what makes people defend failing policies as though their integrity depended on it.
State in advance what would change your mind. If nothing would, you do not have a belief; you have an identity.
Argue the other side properly. The point was not cynicism but that you do not truly know what you believe until you have built the strongest case against it yourself.
Act anyway. The skeptic who treats uncertainty as a reason to postpone action has missed the point entirely. Uncertainty is the permanent condition of humanity; deciding effectively within that is a skill we can all benefit from.
Treat being wrong as data rather than disgrace. If you follow these skeptical rules of thumb, you will change your mind from time to time – or at least ought to. The question is whether you experience that as humiliation or as the method working.
That’s a wrap on this week’s roundup.
Drew Jackson
Founder & Writer
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