Ahren

We are in the midst of technological shifts at a pace faster than ever before. Calculus VC capitalizes on these shifts to deliver returns and impact. We invest in the Series A and Series B stages of startups in the below sectors: FUTURE OF COMPUTING AND AI Continued advancements in AI will demand new developments in hardware and software. New computing materials and interfaces may emerge. Computing power may be more distributed, and the world will be infinitely more connected. These and more, are our areas of interest: Intelligence beyond language: We expect AI to understand quantitative models and physical phenomenon just as well as it understands language. Large Quantitiative Models are a focus for us. New hardware, materials, and architectures: We expect that demand for computing power will grow exponentially. Quantum computing, as well as distributed computing are expected to grow. We expect advancements in computing materials beyond silicon. Immersive and neural interfaces: These interfaces already exist, we expect they will become more mainstream. Spatial computing, integrating the physical world with digital environments may be our future. COMPUTATIONAL LIFE SCIENCES AND HEALTHTECH Breakthroughs in biology, materials, sensors, and data science are converging to redefine healthcare. Precision and personalization will take center stage as AI enhances how we detect, monitor, and treat disease. Areas of interest include: AI-First Therapeutics and Discovery Platforms: ML-powered platforms designing drugs and biologics via simulation, predictive modeling, and data-rich experimentation. Infrastructure for Programmable Biology: Tools that make biology engineerable – lab automation, bioinformatics, 3D bioprinting, next-gen diagnostics and R&D devices. Continuous, Data-Driven and Personalized Care: Wearables, medical devices, and diagnostics to deliver patient-centric care. These models turn users into real-time data streams, enabling adaptive treatment and personalized interventions. ADVANCED INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGIES As we expand the frontiers of possibility, we expect industry to evolve with intelligence, autonomy and environmental sustainability at its core. Areas of focus include: AI and automation in industry: Intelligent machines will optimize production, reduce waste, and enable new workflows. From predictive maintenance to robotic manufacturing, automation will power the next industrial revolution. We support startups enabling this vision. Land, ocean, and space transport and communications: We are interested in advanced materials, robotics, sensors, systems and software that will unlock new frontiers from deep-sea mapping to planetary missions. Resource efficiency: Building the future will demand large reserves of energy and natural resources. Technologies that can serve our energy, food, water, and agricultural needs while supporting a better planet are of interest to us.

Vsquared Ventures backs entrepreneurs engineering the seemingly impossible. We are early-stage investors in deep-tech companies tackling society's most pressing challenges, with an emphasis on quantum and novel computing, green energy, robotics, Al/ML, new space, synthetic biology, and healthcare. Our team of founders, academics, operators and innovators has invested in over 30 companies to date and built one of Europe's strongest deep-tech portfolios, forging alliances with key players in industry, research, and a global startup ecosystem along the way. The companies we've partnered with so far include Isar Aerospace, IOM, Zama, The Exploration Company, and Custom Cells.

We have invested in more than 90 companies since 2016, including Pinterest, Compass, Hippo, Ro, Carta, Dutchie, Anduril, Varda Space Industries, Ghost, Front, Esusu, OKCredit, and Unqork. Additionally, through our subsidiary fund, New Slate Ventures, we have financed films, documentaries, and limited series that have been acquired by Apple, Netflix, and Disney. Based in New York City, we invest globally. Backstory Sinai Capital Partners was founded in 2017. We raised $100 million and built a talented team of young investors with offices in New York, Palo Alto, and Los Angeles. We made over 90 investments, realized 11 exits, and achieved a 1X return on our first fund within two years. In 2019, we raised $100 million for a subsidiary of Sinai Capital called New Slate Ventures, with the goal of supplying the many players in the streaming wars with independent content. Our films, series, and documentaries won Academy Award nominations, Golden Globes, Grammy’s, and Emmy’s, and were acquired by the likes of Apple, Disney, and Netflix for multiples of their cost. As a solo GP, I believe boutique, disciplined, early-stage funds with effective managers will generate the best returns for investors in this forthcoming innovation cycle. Throughout my career I’ve nurtured relationships across Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Washington DC, and Hollywood, and aim to leverage this access on behalf of the founders I support. Where to Now? We’re currently in the midst of the greatest acceleration of technological progress since 2010 and the advent of mobile/social computing. New frameworks for problem solving are emerging daily aided by artificial intelligence, CRISPR technologies, climate manipulation, and several other radical new fields previously dismissed as science fiction. When we started Sinai, the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley was that “hardware was hard” and that software investments provided much better risk-adjusted opportunities. That assumption is becoming less credible in the current venture capital landscape, with space exploration, brain computer interfaces, driverless electric vehicles, autonomous warfare drones, and nuclear fusion companies all appearing to be increasingly within reach, with potentially transformational impacts on civilization. Sinai’s new focus will be on these harder technical problems, as we believe this is where the majority of the value creation for this next venture cycle will emerge. While we still welcome revenue generating SaaS businesses, its become clearer to us that the best returns come from the most non-obvious ideas in undefined markets and categories. Some of our latest investments include Anduril, Varda, Galvanick, Rangeview, Factory.AI, Science.IO, and several others. We seek to invest in 5-10 companies each year, with average check sizes ranging between $1-5M depending on stage. We’re happy to lead seed rounds where we have high conviction, but prefer to collaborate with our friends at top funds across the globe. We are geographically agnostic, but are most active in New York, San Francisco, Miami, London, and the South Bay of Los Angeles.

Lingotto’s Innovation Fund is a new $600mm+ AUM crossover (public & private) fund focused on making concentrated and long-term investments in companies operating at the cutting edge of technological and business-model innovation. Core to our investment thesis is the fact that market returns are dominated by extreme structural winners – we seek to identify decades-long secular trends and the management teams best positioned to capitalize on them in the early years. The senior team has a notable history of private investments including: OpenAI, SpaceX, Alibaba, Coupang, Stripe, Databricks, Spotify, Airbnb, Tempus, Recursion, Ginkgo Bioworks, Palantir, Epic Games, Joby Aviation, Indigo, Aira, Humane, H2 Green Steel. The Innovation Fund is co-managed by James Anderson (CIO & Managing Partner) and Morgan Samet (Co-Head & Managing Partner). James has over 40 years of investment experience – most recently as a Partner at Baillie Gifford, where he managed over £100bn in AUM throughout his tenure. As head of the firm’s flagship fund, the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, he delivered a +1,555% return vs. +354% for the FTSE all-world benchmark (between April 2000 and March 2022). He was instrumental in the firm’s move into private investing starting with Alibaba in 2012. Morgan has over 19 years of experience in private and public market investing. She has previously worked at Belfer Management, Pzena Investment Management, Thomas H. Lee Partners, and Goldman Sachs. She received her MBA from Harvard Business School. The Innovation Fund is a part of Lingotto, a $4.5bn+ investment management company supported with permanent capital from Exor and additional external LPs. Exor is one of Europe’s largest publicly traded holding companies. Its assets include companies like Stellantis (Fiat, Chrysler, Citroen), Ferrari, Philips, Juventus Football Club, the Economist and Christian Louboutin. Exor’s CEO is John Elkann (Chairman of Ferrari); its Chairman is Nitin Nohria (Executive Chairman of Thrive Capital and former Dean of Harvard Business School). Lingotto’s Chairman is George Osborne, former UK chancellor.

LiquidMetal Ventures is a newly established venture capital fund based in Boston, aiming at investing in early-stage (Seed, Angel, and pre-A round) in a minority group, particularly deep-tech startups. LiquidMetal Ventures is based on deep-tech start-up communities and has a unique advantage in reaching out to ‘off-the-market’ early-stage deals and cooperating with peer VC funds tightly to reduce the risk, overall a high return could be expected. LiquidMetal Ventures focuses on biotech and healthcare, carbon neutrality, AI and data, infrastructure, and consumer tech. There is a huge tide of startups among Boston entrepreneurs in the US on the way. We would like to be the first to check VC with the founders. Investment FocusBioTech Medical Device Sustainability AI & Data Science Advanced Energy Technology Robotics & Advanced Manufacturing

We founded HOF in 2016 to connect the most relentlessly ambitious founders to the capital and resources that they need to succeed, thereby accelerating the march towards a society of technologically-enabled abundance. Progress towards this goal cannot be achieved by backing “safe” ventures - for example, companies using already-proven technology and applying a formulaic business model. It can only be done by backing the visionary founders who build nascent platforms and take on fundamental technology or business model risk. The Next Steps Towards Abundance We believe that technologies that advance the march to abundance can come from unexpected domains, so we approach each new opportunity with an open mind. At the same time, we are constantly refining our theses about the most critical next steps in this march. Below are some of the technologies that we believe will see meaningful advancements over the next decade. Freedom from repetitive work through AI and automation Utopia cannot be achieved if people are bogged down by rote work for the majority of their waking lives, and yet, repetitive unfulfilling tasks are crucial to the function of many of the most productive companies. Thankfully, AI now has the potential to eliminate large swaths of this work. For example, new technologies such as large language models can now complete various cognitive tasks at similar proficiency to a human. If AI capabilities continue to accelerate at a rate faster than Moore’s Law, then billions of person-hours of repetitive work will be automated each year, and in some cases, AI will be capable of completing tasks that were previously intractable to even the most skilled humans. A multi-trillion dollar opportunity lies in both the infrastructure that powers this AI, as well as in the applications that deliver it. Freedom to transact and financial security Access to financial services, such as banking, credit, and insurance, are a key underpinning of an abundant society. Given some of our team members’ roots in developing economies, we are sensitive to the fact that this access is not yet a reality for much of the global population. Even those who do have access to such services are often subject to low quality user experiences, archaic processes, and exorbitant fees, making it difficult for them to transact or build meaningful wealth. Thankfully, in the last decade, proliferation of mobile phones has expanded access to core financial needs for many. Furthermore, we are optimistic that applications built on decentralized networks will ultimately serve as an important medium to extend financial services to those who have been barred from legacy institutions. Freedom from genetic disease and biological limitations Perhaps one of the most unfair realities of life is that some people are born with unfavorable genetics that expose them to greater disease risk and overall poor health. For example, just a single base-pair point mutation in the hemoglobin-beta gene causes sickle cell anemia, resulting in a lifetime of discomfort and a significantly reduced life expectancy. However, in 2012, a landmark paper demonstrated that clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) could enable scientists to edit specific sequences of DNA in a faster, more precise, and more cost-effective manner, enhancing humankind’s ability to change the previously immutable coding of life. Genetic engineering technologies like CRISPR have the potential to eliminate genetic diseases like sickle cell for hundreds of millions of people, an important step forward in the march towards utopia. In the long-term, we believe that a deeper understanding of genetics and biology will enable mankind to surpass other previously insurmountable limitations, such as aging and infertility. Interconnection of humanity In utopia, people can freely connect, form relationships, and transact with peers from across the world. Those of us who live in vibrant cities often take for granted the benefit of our surroundings; we are surrounded by accomplished and intelligent people, as well as great workplaces, nature, and entertainment. However, much of the world’s population does not have this experience, as they are isolated or surrounded by relatively homogenous populations. Internet access through smartphones and desktop computers have helped close this gap to some extent, but our world is still a far cry from utopia. As they reach maturity, new mediums such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and, in the long term, brain-computer interfaces, will facilitate new forms of commerce, entertainment, and work. The clouded horizon Some naysayers push back against the idea that technology company founders can help bring us closer to abundance. Popular sentiment in the media and politics is that these founders do more harm than good for society, often citing examples of oversight or unethical behavior by certain founders and presenting them as the norm. However, we believe that such instances of social harm are rare and vastly outweighed by the good achieved by mission-driven and relentless founders. The fact that the advancement of technology has been of net benefit to society is supported by a variety of data, including declining global poverty rates and growing global human development indices. In the last 20 years, nascent technology companies have produced countless prosocial and beneficial advances. Game-changing technologies advanced by venture-backed companies include reusable rockets, widely-accessible genome sequencing, conversational AI, affordable electric vehicles, as well as faster and more convenient access to education, communication, and entertainment. Without the efforts of the founders who brought about these innovations, society would be at great risk of stagnating on its march to abundance. Unfortunately, founders today are often met with extreme skepticism, criticism, and opposition, so they must be more relentless than ever before. The founders we back Although we believe that the future will be built by founders from all backgrounds and walks of life, the truth is that the responsibility of being a CEO of a venture-backed company is not for everyone - in fact, our observations suggest that only a small fraction of the population has the traits necessary to succeed in such a position. Given the high expectations of growth for venture-backed companies, exceptional leadership ability, work ethic, and clarity under pressure are table stakes for successful founders. Moreover, since outcomes for venture-backed businesses follow a power law distribution, the most accomplished founders tend not only to be hypercompetent but also possess an incredibly rare technical skill or personal characteristic that enables their success. For example, founders with the outlier trait of having a voracious appetite for computer programming from a young age were at a fundamental competitive advantage during the past several decades (e.g., Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Bill Gates). Such an outlier trait can rarely be cultivated opportunistically - by the time the value of a specific trait becomes obvious, an oversaturation of competitors possessing that same trait usually emerges. This is why the best founders will include an overrepresented proportion of individuals who possess esoteric interests or neurodivergent tendencies in addition to exceptional communication ability and competence. This turns out to be a rare & zenlike combination of traits, hence why we are so excited to partner on the infrequent occasions when we come across individuals who possess it. Conclusion While headline news may grow increasingly pessimistic and certain groups may grow hostile towards technology, the march to abundance will continue thanks to the efforts of relentless entrepreneurs and the small army of employees, customers, and investors who take a chance to partner with them. Regardless of the distracting vicissitudes of market cycles, we remain dedicated to providing those entrepreneurs with not only capital but meaningful support and game-changing connections to help advance their missions.