Alpaca VC

Next week: an afternoon of conversations we can't wait to have about the path to AGI and what's next, featuring a special lineup of speakers, panelists, and founders bringing unique offerings, activations and surprises. If you're a founder interested in joining us in person in New York for this event, reach out below: https://lnkd.in/eXNRA5eU

Congratulations to Joseph Reth, Dr. Eike Gerhardt, Lawrence Callahan and the entire Autopoiesis Sciences team on this milestone news. We're proud to be on the journey with you. The Rundown: Autopoiesis is building autonomous scientific superintelligence to accelerate breakthrough discoveries. Their AI systems autonomously design and conduct experiments, learn from results, and iterate toward findings in chemistry, materials science, and other research domains, collapsing the cycle time on the kinds of work that have historically been bottlenecked by human throughput rather than ideas. They sit in Alpaca VC's Agent + Human Coordination pillar, which is the coordination-layer bet inside the Aquarius Economy thesis. The short version of that pillar: intelligence is getting cheap, but the plumbing that lets intelligence actually run experiments, make decisions, and compound results is still mostly missing. We believe Autopoiesis is building that plumbing for science itself, which is about as high-ceiling as the category gets.

Turns out discovery is different than retrieval! The distinction can’t be overstated. Joseph and Eike have been on a mission to build AI that, alongside humans, discovers solutions to science’s and the material world’s hardest problems, and from the moment we met them, we knew they were not the standard young opportunist but rather a deeply convicted team able to attract away top talent to join their fight. Human and agentic coordination is a core pillar of our investment thesis at Alpaca VC and we are thrilled to have backed Autopoiesis as the Neo lab unblocking that coordination problem. Congratulations on the announcement, and hopefully now Eike can upgrade from his air mattress in the office 💕

As the global streetwear market approaches $400 billion, independent brands and creators are increasingly shaping the future of fashion. Following an incredible weekend connecting with hundreds of brands at UNFAZED in Atlanta, we’re heading to ComplexCon 2026 in LA this October. 👀 Read the full announcement: https://lnkd.in/eGE8P4m6 Today, Tapstitch powers 50,000+ brands and creators worldwide, has fulfilled 4M+ garments, and offers 1,000+ fashion-forward styles. And we’re just getting started. We’re investing in the technology, production infrastructure, partnerships, and communities powering the next generation of fashion brands. The future of fashion is creator-led, global, and on-demand—and we’re building the infrastructure behind it. 📍 Don't miss us at ComplexCon, October 3–4: https://lnkd.in/daG_zVwd #Tapstitch #FashionOnDemand #IndependentFashion #Streetwear

Most nuclear startups spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars designing a reactor from scratch. Applied Atomics just leapt over its peers. Congratulations to Ben Kellie and the entire Applied Atomics team on securing an exclusive land-based license for BWXT's mPower small modular reactor technology. Alpaca VC is proud to be on the journey with you. mPower comes with a decade of engineering work and hundreds of millions of dollars of prior R&D already behind it. By licensing a proven design instead of building one from zero, Applied Atomics leapfrogs years of development timeline that most companies their size and stage simply can't shortcut, no matter how much capital they raise. The reactor is designed to deliver 195 MW of electricity per unit, manufactured in a factory and shipped like conventional equipment. With domestic power demand set to grow at its fastest rate in a generation, this kind of speed matters. We believe this is what deployment-first execution looks like. Get the full rundown ⤵️ https://lnkd.in/ejrPCRtf

Anyone who actually reads is craving the messy human voice. Fight me. I am cringing at the last nine months of posting, quite honestly. “the insight that broke me” “this is genuinely interesting” “the uncomfortable truth?” “this realization changed everything.” Staccato AI-edited click bait that means nothing and give posts a particular paint thinner / chemical quality. I am so sick of putting my words into AI and it creating this terrible word soup that, on the one hand, is more coherent than the word vomit I fed it, and is so much easier to edit/publish than to hand craft, but on the other hand, is so laden with familiar tropes and rhetoric that it becomes gross to digest. A very yucky soup, indeed. I have become so disillusioned in the AI cognitive offloading that I have decided to go back to the words from my own pen. Slower, but better.

Dropping our monthly roundup of news from Alpaca VC portfolio companies alongside opportunities for early stage founders and a selection of open jobs from the Herd. Read the latest edition of The Rundown for: 🦙 Herd news from Kashable, Intramotev, Chicory, EV Realty + more 🦙 Founder resources including awards + events 🦙 A handful of new roles open in the portfolio

What happens when your AI model is moving faster than the labs processing your data? If you're EARTH AI, you build your own labs. Highlighted in TechCrunch, Earth AI CEO Roman Teslyuk and his team have been using AI to identify promising critical mineral deposits in parts of Australia where no one thought to look. The models have been working all along. But five-month lab turnaround times were slowing down the feedback loop between drilling and the next decision. Their solution: vertically integrating, bringing sample processing in-house to cut that timeline from five months to five days. This is exactly the kind of high-agency execution we believe can fundamentally shift foundational industries. We believe the critical minerals supply chain is one of the most important infrastructure problems of this decade, and solving it requires teams willing to rebuild the entire stack when the existing one isn't fast enough. We're proud to be on the journey with you, Earth AI. Get the full rundown below. https://lnkd.in/gJHeBVKr

Congratulations to Rishi Kumar, Einat Steklov and the entire Kashable team on closing your $60M Series C, led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives. We've been proud to back Kashable since the early days, and watching this team grow is one of the best parts of this job. The thesis is simple and powerful: financial stress is one of the biggest drags on workforce productivity, and most employers don't have a great tool to address it. Kashable gives them one: affordable credit delivered as an employee benefit, with repayment built directly into payroll. We believe it's responsible, practical, and it works. Get the full rundown ⤵️