Brain-inspired frontier training chips, generative fashion intelligence, space cannons
This week we hosted our largest Demo Faire to date. Over 25 SPC companies demoed live in San Francisco in front of a packed room of investors and builders. Demos ranged from hypersonic space launchers, wildfire sensors, generative fashion intelligence, AI agents doing enterprise work, to new chemical building blocks for medicine previously thought to be impossible.
Read about the companies who demoed this week:
Hardware
** Captify:** Captify’s AI captioning glasses display heads up, real-time captions, enabling the deaf and hard of hearing community to connect more fully with loved ones and the world.
** Chip Motors:** Autonomy splits driving in two, the long haul and daily life. Chip is the vehicle for daily life, fun and easy to drive today and built for full autonomy from day one.
** Dentronic:** Dentronic is building AI-powered robotic assistants for dentistry, starting with Dexor, a chair-mounted robotic assistant for suction, retraction, and hands-free procedural support.
** Human Computer Lab:** Human Computer Lab is building delightful robot characters like LeLamp to pioneer how people will live with robots at home.
** Longshot:** Longshot has built the largest gun in the world, and the first hypersonic ground launcher to send cargo to space.
** Vitrus:** Vitrus is creating the AI infrastructure that turns robot development into a programmable process, scaling from autonomous workcells to entire factories.
Deep Tech
** Aurum Systems:** Fleets of robots are being deployed in every environment too dangerous or remote for humans, but the software to develop, coordinate, and maintain them is fragmented and bespoke. Aurum is the unifying software layer that lets operators and developers ship, field, and manage autonomous systems in mission-critical industries like defense, space, and energy.
** Duplex AI:** Duplex AI is building natural, full-duplex voice AI for enterprises. They’ve developed a new architecture that delivers state-of-the-art naturalness and intelligence while maintaining a competitive cost compared to traditional cascaded systems.
** Externa:** Nature gave us only 20 amino acids to build proteins, and every protein drug designed today, even with ML, is still limited to that same alphabet. Externa’s platform adds hundreds of new chemical building blocks to proteins, so they can engineer drugs that match the disease instead of settling for what nature handed us.
** First Contact:** Making robots useful in the real world through scalable tactile hardware and software.
** Leafy Lab:** The semiconductor industry generates over trillions of chips annually, yet the increasing complexity of chip design creates a major bottleneck. Leafy Lab builds agents to automate and optimize design to reduce development cycles by half.
** Lys:** Harness the power of your mind to bend AI to your will and embody your fullest potential. Lys Technologies provides you the humanistic path to the merge.
** Nyquis:** Nyquis detects utility-caused wildfires before they ignite. It’s the hair-on-fire problem that gets our sensors onto every distribution feeder, and that same data layer becomes the operating system utilities use to run the grid.
** Pillar Space Systems:** Space will unlock the next breakthroughs in chips, medicine, and materials, but today producing any of them at scale means building a satellite, making a small batch of product, and throwing the satellite away. Pillar is building reusable satellites that stay in orbit and make manufacturing in space possible at scale. It’s built by the only commercial team that’s ever successfully docked and undocked two spacecraft in orbit.
** Preseen:** Preseen is an AI forecasting platform that helps organizations anticipate important events before they happen. Our agents analyze complex signals, generate calibrated probabilities, and continuously update forecasts as new information emerges.
** Ranvier Systems:** We’re building hardware for training event-based foundation models. We discovered the algorithm unlocking the brain’s 100x efficiency-advantage over current hardware and are optimizing chips that will use it to deliver cheap and abundant AGI.
Consumer
** Dollhouse:** Interactive shows generated from a single sentence, the screenplay, characters, voices, and video are all produced for you, then each viewer shapes where the story goes.
** Scriben:** Scriben captures the spoken context software never sees and compounds it into memory that powers agentic workflows, drafted emails, CRM updates, team knowledge.
** Manna AI:** Manna AI is building Dreem, an AI-native entertainment platform where creators turn story ideas into watchable, playable, and remixable story worlds. We help creators create, distribute, and monetize original IP while giving audiences a new way to watch, play, and participate in stories.
** Weave:** Reshaping fashion productivity: an intelligent engine from natural language commands to garment delivery.
B2B
** AI Theresa:** AI Theresa is a self-evolving AI FDE, an expert engineer that embeds in your company, learns how it really runs, and fixes what your team can’t. She compounds like a career, gaining company-specific expertise while learning across every deployment.
** Alhena:** Alhena is building personal shopping agents for every shopper. We work with brands and help them deploy these personal shopping agents on their websites.
** Asymptote Labs:** As AI agents move into production workflows, enterprises are missing a reliable system of record for agent behavior across their environment. Asymptote’s platform gives security teams continuous visibility and guardrails over AI agents wherever they run.
** Butterbase:** Butterbase replaces the duct-taped stack a services firm runs on today: the CRM, the support desk, the ticketing, and the person syncing them all.
** Kay:** Kay is the Agentic Process Outsourcer (APO) for insurance operations. They deploy reliable browser agents that can handle any repetitive workflow, end-to-end, within days.
** Noto:** 2-4% of all household spend is on children’s extracurricular enrichment like music and tutoring. Noto is the AI operating system for these businesses.