How Deep Tech Is Shaping Our Future
Our world has undergone disruption at an unprecedented scale over the past few years. The global pandemic exposed very deep flaws in our current systems, but also opened up exciting opportunities for innovation and advancement. As nations and global communities recover from the pandemic and reinvent themselves for the new realities, Tech must also reinvent itself to shape our future by serving as the force multiplier for “Good.”
→ COVID-19 and the continuing prospect of future zoonotic infectious diseases jumping from animals to humans
→ Climate change accelerating: heat waves, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, drought
→ Geopolitical pressures focused on critical strategic technologies and resources such as semiconductors, AI and data, sustainable energy, food, and materials
→ Cyberattacks accelerating against consumers, enterprises, and key infrastructure
→ The dramatic boom and bust cycles of web3/crypto
At the same time, we continue to see rapid advances and disruptions in science and technology. Some recent examples include:
→ Quantum Computing: multiple demonstrations of “quantum supremacy” and R&D grade quantum computers, as part of an international race between nation states
→ The Data Tsunami: according to Statista, total global data creation reached 64 zettabytes (64 billion terabytes) in 2020, and is projected to grow almost 3x by 2025. This data explosion creates many opportunities to accelerate innovation, but also highlights key bottlenecks that we must overcome for scalable compute, protection of privacy, and sustainable energy use.
→ Next Gen AI: the rise of new AI technologies such as large
language models and text-to-image generative AI are forcing us to rethink the possibilities and dangers of AI for our societies.→ Data Driven Healthcare: we are in the midst of a revolution in biology and healthcare driven by the Data Flywheel, which has led to incredible advances in computational drug discovery, RNA therapeutics, stem cell therapeutics, personalized medicine, and synthetic biology
All these changes combine to drive accelerating demand for e-commerce, mobility, and virtual engagement (communication, entertainment, education, work); energy and food security; and health/environmental/physical security, so that we have the freedom and flexibility to navigate a constantly changing environment.
We at Walden Catalyst Ventures are partnering with world-class entrepreneurs to build Deep Tech infrastructure technologies and platforms to shape our future. These include:
→ Foundational hardware technologies that enable compute and harness the power of Open Source and Ecosystems to scale beyond Moore’s Law
→ Infrastructure software platforms that scale, democratize, and safeguard data and AI
→ Web3 infrastructure technologies that scale decentralized apps
→ Biology 2.0: data platforms that drive the convergence of Biology + Technology