Happy Holidays 2023
We wish you a joyful holiday season and a Happy New Year!
As we approach the end of 2023, we are excited to update you on the most recent developments at Walden Catalyst. This includes insights from the 2023 European Deep Tech Report, along with updates from our portfolio and team.
Walden Catalyst helps early-stage companies in the U.S., Europe, and Israel build the next generation of category-defining businesses in deep tech.
In Europe we have invested in two promising companies: Peptone, focusing on the discovery of novel therapeutics against intrinsically disordered targets, and ANYbotics, revolutionizing industrial inspection with its four-legged robotic workforce.
We believe in Europe's cutting-edge research in deep tech, and Walden Catalyst proudly maintains strong affiliations with prominent research institutions such as ETH, Cambridge, and others. Our conviction in the potential of our deep tech thesis remains steadfast, as we aim to cultivate robust companies within Europe that have the capacity to emerge as global leaders.
We trust you'll find this information engaging and informative.
European Deep Tech Report
This report aims to better establish:
- What Deep Tech actually is
- How Europe’s ecosystem works
- What it’s lacking
- How it can compete and what desirable policy goals might be.
“Europe is home to many iconic consumer tech companies – Skype, Spotify and Klarna to name a few. But only a handful of Deep Tech global category leaders have emerged from Europe so far (...). We believe the European ecosystem contains many of the ingredients required to create the next generation of global category leaders in Deep Tech: namely, world class academia and technical talent, a growing number of experienced operators, smart early-stage funding, and strong public support. To make it happen, more late-stage, Deep Tech focused capital should be directed to this asset class. We are fully committed to playing our part in the growth of the European Deep Tech ecosystem and could not be more excited about the potential ahead.” Young Sohn, Founding Managing Partner WCV
Portfolio News
Galileo:
Introducing the LLM Hallucination Index
Many enterprise teams have already successfully deployed LLMs in production, and many others have committed to deploying Generative AI products in 2024. However, for enterprise AI teams, the biggest hurdle to deploying production-ready Generative AI products remains the fear of model hallucinations – a catch-all phrase for when the model generates text that is incorrect or fabricated. There can be several reasons for this, such as a lack of the model’s capacity to memorize all of the information it was fed, training data errors, and outdated training data.
The Hallucination Index offers a structured approach to assess and measure hallucinations as an endeavor to help teams build more trustworthy GenAI applications.
AI21 Labs:
AI21 Labs completes $208 million oversubscribed Series C round that values the company at $1.4 billion
“We’re extremely grateful for the support of our investors who believe in our deep technology expertise. This funding will enable AI21 to increase mindshare that one size doesn’t fit all, as enterprises look for unique partners that understand their specific needs. Mass deployment of AI requires deep understanding of high-performance language models that can deliver better value and impact. Our approach is about designing AI with purpose, making it significantly more efficient than building from scratch, and much more cost effective” Ori Goshen, Co-founder & CEO of AI21 Labs
ArteraAI:
ArteraAI validates its prognostic model in advanced prostate cancer
“The successful validation of this model marks an exciting moment in prostate cancer treatment for patients and clinicians. Effective prognostication for advanced prostate cancer patients is essential; it not only empowers clinicians to make informed treatment decisions, but also enables patients to actively engage in shared decision-making for their care." said Dr. Charles Parker, Clinical Research Training Fellow at the UCL Cancer Institute.
Opaque Systems:
How to hide sensitive data from LLMs
Opaque Systems launched an early access program for OpaquePrompts. OpaquePrompts serves as a privacy layer around LLMs, enabling you to hide personal and sensitive data from large language model (LLM) providers.
New generative AI tools are popping up left and right, and for good reason. Some believe it to be the biggest thing since the internet. While new LLM applications, LLMOps tools, and even LLM providers are being built at an incredible rate, there has thus far been a far smaller emphasis on privacy tools for LLMs. This, to us, is almost paradoxical. For LLMs to provide value, they must be able to operate on all data, but today’s policies and regulations dictate what data can and cannot be shared with and retained by third-party providers. While such regulations are critical to protecting our privacy, they create enormous friction for data teams.
Peptone:
Nature Biotechnology's Academic Spinout 2022
Nature Biotechnology’s annual survey highlights academic start ups that are, among other things, correcting misfolded or disordered proteins, creating second-generation GPCR agonists, building a new gene delivery platform and mining cancer genomes for novel targets.
Combining experimental and computational tools, this company is targeting disordered regions of proteins previously thought to be undruggable.
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