More than $15 billion changed hands in the silicon photonics sector between late 2025 and mid-2026. That figure includes NVIDIA's $4 billion split between Coherent and Lumentum, Marvell's $3.25 billion acquisition of Celestial AI, Ayar Labs pulling in $500 million in a Series E,
A detailed recap from the Drumbeat Capital event at Deep Tech Week SF, with a focus on the Robotics & Advanced Manufacturing panel. Drumbeat Capital kicked off Deep Tech Week SF 2026 yesterday with a packed half-day event titled The Global State of Deep Tech. For those unfamiliar, Drumbeat
SAN FRANCISCO · JUN 3, 2026. Vision Lab, a startup founded by MIT and Stanford researchers, today announced the close of its $6M seed round, led by Race Capital, with continued participation from Y Combinator and new institutional backers including Foothill Ventures and 500 Global. The company provides real-world industrial
James Kujareevanich is the co-founder and CEO of Vision Lab, a company building the data infrastructure for physical AI - going into factories around the world, capturing first-person video of real operators performing real tasks, and turning that into structured training data for frontier labs and robotics companies. They
Per BLS data from December 2025, there were 433,000 unfilled manufacturing job openings across the US. Deloitte and the National Association of Manufacturers project that number could reach 2.1 million by 2030, at a potential cost of $1 trillion that year alone. The skilled machinists who've
Mike Xia is the co-founder and CEO of Anvil Robotics, a company building what they call the foundry for physical AI. They make the hardware, software, and data tools that let robotics teams go from zero to model training in days instead of months. They've shipped over
A field guide for anyone trying to understand silicon photonics, the OFC conference, and why this $20 billion industry is about to get a lot more interesting. Every March, roughly 12,000 engineers, executives, and investors descend on a convention center for OFC - the Optical Fiber Communication Conference. It'
A development video the HYPR team posted received almost 1 million views on X, along with 2K+ likes and 500+ bookmarks. On Instagram, the same video generated 5K+ likes, 1K+ shares, and 100+ reposts. For an account that normally receives around 20 likes per post, this was a significant response
Arjun Subramaniam is the Founder and CEO of Factory Intelligence, a physical AI company training tactile foundation models for the real world. He's personally toured more than 70 factories deploying robots, and his co-founder Mike Strope spent 15 years in packaging, including a president seat at a
Jared O'Leary is the CEO and co-founder of SirenOpt, a deep tech company building the manufacturing intelligence layer for advanced materials production. Their technology came out of a decade of plasma physics research at UC Berkeley - and they're already deployed at Tier-1 manufacturers across
From ImageNet to Marble — everything she's been building, saying, and arguing for Last issue we went deep on Yann LeCun and JEPA. This time we're covering the researcher the New York Times once dubbed the "Godmother of AI" — Fei-Fei Li. The connection isn&
Everything he's been researching, saying, and building — and why it matters If you've been watching the AI space closely this past year, you know that while the rest of Silicon Valley races to build bigger language models, Yann LeCun — Turing Award winner, co-inventor of convolutional