Computation

Scaling intelligence

Creating ventures that unlock the potential of computational leverage
Computation is human leverage. It allows us to connect and orientate more effectively, transfer and manipulate abstract information and concepts, create beyond our imagination and magnify our manual capability in automation.

These capabilities have the potential to accelerate us towards a much better future, they also risk making things much worse. We’re focused on how to move the world to one where the full breadth of society benefits from the step change in creativity, connection and automation across health, food, energy, happiness and abundant capital. We’re starting with abstracting hardware out of the way to accelerate the pace of computational capability whilst minimising the energy and resource impact.

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Contact

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Areas of venture creation:

Universal Compute Fabric

Problem to solve

There is an ever expanding range of specialist processors from neural network focused architectures to dedicated ASIC circuits for specific data processing operations. The problem is that most developers do not have the time to optimise for any given architecture, in reality most of the world’s computational workloads are run on CPUs on over provisioned cloud resources. This is enormously costly for business and academia, $100bn on cloud compute alone last year, often millions of dollars training one model, enormous CO2 output (44 millions tonnes on AWS alone) and huge resource waste with tonnes of precious metals being thrown away each year.

Reason to solve

Moore’s law is breaking down and we have become increasingly reliant on just one or two firms that can place transistors at sufficient density but with very high geo-politcal risk. The next wave of performance will come not from denser chips but horizontal integration, minimising memory movement and optimising code on the fly to the specific array of processing architecture. This has the potential to create 10-100x speed and power improvements with any new hardware or any hassle for the developer. That’s what we’re building in Xonai.

Low Loss Compute

Problem to solve

Computing hardware selection and design is a multi-dimensional problem with complex trade-offs (performance, power, area, cost, flexibility, composability) that must be determined years before the required workload is known. The result is that the market is barbelled into flexible but relatively poor performance (CPUs) or a long tail of high performance extremely specific designs that are costly to make, generalise poorly and hard to work with.

Reason to solve

What if we could map the distribution of computational and memory requirements and quickly optimise hardware on demand and in an extremely heterogeneous fashion, extending the plethora of existing specialist hardware so that every process ran in the fastest, lowest power manner possible. That has the potential to create absolute optimal performance from existing nodes and extend performance far past the tradeoffs associated with Moore’s law.

Our companies

  • computation
  • Seed
Dissolving boundaries to accelerated computing

XONAI

Opportunity

While big data analytics has become ubiquitous across modern data-driven businesses, today's proprietary data platforms are exceedingly intrusive; requiring customers to surrender data to monolithic systems designed to tax data movements in and out of closed ecosystems under the pretence that optimization can only be achieved through complete vendor lock-in.

Solution

Without changing a client’s underlying data infrastructure, XONAI seamlessly adapts to both existing and emerging hardware accelerators to power data analytics and AI computing; offering instant end-to-end optimization, seamless integration and scalable technology, with no risk of getting locked-in to a particular ecosystem or exposed to undue taxation
  • computation
  • Seed
Transparent noise cancellation

DeNoize

Opportunity

Studies have shown that long-term exposure to traffic noise affects human blood biochemistry, causes cognitive impairment and behavioural issues in children and The World Health Organization calculating that at least 1m healthy life-years are lost every year in western European countries. In today’s urban world, it is crucial that we insulate ourselves from noise exposure.

Solution

DeNoize have developed Harmony Glass, an active noise-cancelling kit, that fits onto any existing window frame and capable of cancelling up to 90% of outside noise, while still allowing light to pass through unimpeded.
  • computation
  • Seed
Software eats engineering design

The Engineering Company

Opportunity

Engineering design is one of the most expensive, slow moving processes in the development of new technology, dependent on top down direction from senior engineering leads and implementation and iteration by a large cohort of junior engineers. Despite work often being similar across tasks and industries, each must be done manually in the precise engineering context.

Solution

The Engineering Company automates the majority of manual execution work within an engineering company: 30x cheaper, 12x faster and with an 8x smaller team. They’re backed by senior figures at NASA, ESA and BAE Systems.
  • computation
  • Seed
Non-toxic adhesives powered by ML

Materialize.X

Opportunity

In high volume, low margin manufacturing processes such as the production of engineered wood, steel and high value chemicals, any problem that arises represents direct impact on bottom line. The complexity of these processes, combined with the right timeframes required to correct issues, means that human production managers are forced to react suboptimally and are rarely able to pre-empt issues.

Solution

MaterializeX have developed “Leon.x AI”, a tool to guide decision making processes in real time in manufacturing plants, started with the engineered wood industry. The system uses dynamic predictive analytics based on reinforcement learning, which for the first time, enables their customers to predict and optimise in real time.
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Content
  • computation
  • Cyber Insurance

Fixing the broken Cyber Insurance market

Companies are being left vulnerable to cyber security threats, while cyber insurance providers are simultaneously suffering losses. We outline an approach to fix this, to restructure cyber insurance provision and realign incentives.

01 September 2022
  • computation
  • Universal Compute Fabric

Unlocking a post-Moore's Law approach to computing

We launched XONAI Computing as a next-generation data platform, to overcome the economic burden that cloud computing has become. We discuss their approach, their recent impressive results and our next area of focus.

29 July 2022
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