Humanoids, drones, cybersecurity, model-memory research
May brought new fundraises, new research, and a packed calendar across SF, NYC, and Bangalore.
If you’re interested in joining SPC, apply here.
Events at SPC
In NYC, Soleio hosted a Design Chat with Dylan Babbs, SPC alum and current CTO at ** Profound**. In Bangalore we hosted -
1 to Razorpay, where
Harshil Mathur unpacked the challenge of building payments infrastructure at planetary scale, and
with
-1 to Space,actual astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla.
In SF, ** Demo Night** showcased explorations at the edge of what’s possible: model memory research, tactile hardware-software interfaces, and new operating systems for an agentic world.
The month closed with the ** SPC Embodied AI Hackathon,** where teams designed and completed a challenge to bring intelligence into the physical world involving manipulation, locomotion, simulation, or flight, with bonus points for collaboration. We ran SPC as a fully-stocked robotics lab including humanoids, drones, SO-101 arms, and 3D printers. From the
Desktop Robot Assistant, which moved a candy bar using voice agents, VLMs, and ACT policies, to the
autonomous drone that tracks your squatsand coaches your form in real-time, many teams had end-to-end policies running on real hardware by the end of the weekend.
Member Updates
Product Launches & Company News
Cognitionraised over $1B in a Series Dat a $26B valuation led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC.Recursiveraised $650Mat a $4.65B valuation led by GV and Greycroft, building AI that recursively improves itself via open-ended algorithms.Voriraised $22M in a Series Bto build the self-driving OS for grocery stores, processing over $500M in payments across 55 cities.Goodfire launchedSilico, a platform for building AI models with the precision of written software.VMax publishedPopuLoRA, research on co-evolving LLM populations for reasoning self-play.Asymptote Labs open-sourcedAgent Beacon, a tool for AI agent security.
Personal Projects, Explorations & Publications
Rex releasedPathOn Robotics, showing a custom navigation stack running on a Unitree Go2.Arya published a piece ondebugging multi-agent systems, with a follow-upcase study on iterative refinement.Jake shared adirectory of 12,000+ open-source STEP partsfor mechanical and electrical engineering, and releasedtext-to-cadfor generating 3D models in coding agents.
Coming Up
Recent Content
We released new conversations with ** Nikesh Arora** (Palo Alto Networks),
(Luma AI), and Amit Jain(tldraw) covering everything from why the most defensible AI companies are building world models, to the infinite canvas as a use case for agents, to the cybersecurity crisis ahead.
Steve RuizThanks for reading! The work continues.