General Partner @blackbirdvc
Melbourne, Victoria
Joined March 2019
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Don’t sleep on this team! 💚
delta weight syncs are so important for RL (arguably one of the most important problems in rl atm) and @jerryhong21 + @stefanopopoulos is just about the best engineering combo you could ask for to work on it
Michael Tolo retweeted
delta weight syncs are so important for RL (arguably one of the most important problems in rl atm) and @jerryhong21 + @stefanopopoulos is just about the best engineering combo you could ask for to work on it
Michael Tolo retweeted
I think our industry partners rather doubted we would get anywhere near these numbers but PsiQuantum team made this look easy. This chip enables all-optical switching of network traffic without pluggable transceivers, moving mirrors, or amplifiers to compensate for loss.
Google are still the only company brave enough to do OCS at any meaningful scale — huge credit to them for slamming free-space optics (!) in a datacenter rack. This photonic chip achieves similar power, throughput, and architectural advantages without moving parts, and in a much smaller package.
64-port strictly non-blocking silicon will go into test this year, 72-port device tapes out soon. All of these chips will run well under 3dB loss thanks to ludicrously good passives (<1mdB splitters and crossings, 1dB/m waveguides) and advanced edge coupling (~5X better than industry). No need to put an amplifier on every fiber.
All of this is done using simple millisecond-rate thermal phase shifters, but lurking in the background is the prospect of fast switching with barium titanate — PsiQuantum already builds BTO switches that switch up to 64 ports in a nanosecond, and — somewhat in contrast with TFLN – we can fit a ton of switches on a reticle. This goes far beyond current industry demand but will unlock categorically new architectures for training and inference.
We’re excited to make our first serious foray into classical computing hardware and believe this product will make the architectural benefits of optical circuit switching simpler and more accessible to the industry.
We also would not be doing this if it were not extremely well-aligned with PsiQuantum’s mission. The OCS chip is strikingly similar to parts that we already make for pump laser distribution in the photonic quantum computer — so similar in fact that it only took a dozen engineers a couple weeks to design the part. We did not modify the photonics process, PDK, or packaging flow to achieve these results.
Now, through the process of building hundreds of thousands of these chips for industry, we’re also going to improve the yield, reliability, and supply chain for parts that we need for utility-scale photonic quantum computing.
This is a direct realization of the founding thesis of PsiQuantum — that by aligning ourselves with the prevailing wind of the conventional computing industry, fabs, OSATs, CMs etc, we can de-risk and accelerate the hard journey to a useful fault-tolerant quantum computer.
AI is pushing computing infrastructure to its limits. Our photonics can help.
Today, PsiQuantum is unveiling its industry-leading Optical Circuit Switch initiative with an 8×8 OCS demo built on the company’s low-loss silicon photonics platform—the same platform we’ve spent nearly a decade developing for quantum computing.
Michael Tolo retweeted
PsiQuantum was founded on a simple premise: useful quantum computing requires a million-qubit, fault-tolerant system.
We chose photonics for its scaling advantages and spent nearly a decade building an ultra-low-loss silicon photonics platform to make that path possible.
That platform is foundational to our path to useful quantum computers. Now, beginning with Optical Circuit Switching, it can help power the next generation of AI infrastructure.
Michael Tolo retweeted
We’ve raised a $45m Series A, co-led by
@foundersfund and The @OpenAI Startup Fund, to build cancer therapy that learns. Technology is rapidly changing medicine, but data loops and rapid adjustments are still largely missing. When you start cancer treatment, knowing whether what you’re doing is working is too slow. Clearly there is a better way. Build systems to watch cancer in real time, then feed that data into a system that itself can treat the disease. This seeds a future where, unlike drugs, we develop medicine that continuously learns to improve itself. We've been building neurotechnology and BCI platforms to do just that.
@coherenceneuro
Michael Tolo retweeted
We’ve raised a $45m Series A, co-led by
@foundersfund and The @OpenAI Startup Fund, to build cancer therapy that learns. Technology is rapidly changing medicine, but data loops and rapid adjustments are still largely missing. When you start cancer treatment, knowing whether what you’re doing is working is too slow. Clearly there is a better way. Build systems to watch cancer in real time, then feed that data into a system that itself can treat the disease. This seeds a future where, unlike drugs, we develop medicine that continuously learns to improve itself. We've been building neurotechnology and BCI platforms to do just that.
@coherenceneuro
Michael Tolo retweeted
Exclusive: Inside @baseten
The $13B startup at the centre of the biggest fight in AI - Open vs Closed.
We spent a day at their SF HQ with co-founder & CEO Tuhin Srivastava, Charlie O'Neill, Mudith Jayasekara and the Base Labs team - to understand why they're building an open ecosystem.
Backed by top VCs led by @saranormous @altcap @apoorv03 @wmccarthy11 @saammotamedi @nikiscevak @lachygroom @willreed + more. Plus participation from @nvidia.
0:00 The Open vs Closed AI War
2:18 A Billion AI Requests a Day
3:43 The Best Models Are Chinese
4:06 Tuhin: Don't Rent Intelligence
5:09 Sachin & Tuhin Talk Cricket
6:02 Tuhin: The Real Bottleneck
10:15 Why Launch Base Labs?
11:35 "You Have to Have an Opinion"
12:52 Centralised Control Is the Danger
13:07 Publish Everything, Even Fails
15:08 Hugging Face & the 6-Month Gap
16:10 Why We Still Need Closed
Michael Tolo retweeted
Today, Heidi (@tryheidi) is announcing US$340M in new funding: a US$100M Series C led by our very first believer, @blackbirdvc, alongside @phxcrt, @p72vc and @HeadlineVC and a US$240M growth investment from @generalcatalyst's Customer Value Fund.
The round values Heidi at US$900M.
Five years ago I sat in a hospital cafe in scrubs after a night on call and pitched Blackbird. I worked with so many incredible doctors burdened by the work created from our care. I believed that every clinician would partner with AI, to handle that workload so they could get to the next patient.
Where Heidi is today is way beyond what I could have imagined then. Our team has grown to almost 600 people. We’ve supported over 175 million patient visits in some of the world’s leading and most highly regulated healthcare systems. That only comes from an incredibly talented and hard working team driven by the mission to double the world’s healthcare capacity.
In this next chapter Heidi is becoming the AI Care Partner I imagined. Handling all the work that a visit creates for every clinician and extending what we can accomplish in a day.
Next week we’ll show you what that looks like. It’s what we’ve been building towards since the very beginning.
Michael Tolo retweeted
When racism is disguised as patriotism… Jack and airwallex are great and we should be proud to have them in America.
Amazing how Keith keeps changing his story.
When his unhinged conspiratorial rants began a year ago Airwallex was 40% Chinese-owned according to him (a lie). When the facts caught up with him he moved the goalposts. And notice that the personal attacks have stopped too? He no longer calls me a “CCP tool” or attacks my integrity now that people are paying attention.
Keith also uses “Chinese investors” to make ordinary venture capital sound sinister. He means Sequoia. Nearly eight years ago, Steve Ji, a respected Midas List investor then based in Melbourne, approached an Australian founder and offered to lead a round in our startup. It was one of the best days of my life. Does Keith believe every founder backed by Sequoia in that era should now be punished?
The world has changed, and we have responsibly evolved our cap table with it. Most of our investors (Greenoaks, Addition, Lone Pine, Salesforce Ventures, Visa, Mastercard, Amex, T.Rowe Price) are from the US, Australia and Europe. No global Airwallex executive is based in China.
And his supposed “legal standard” is fiction. He literally doesn’t know what he is talking about.
By Keith’s logic, dozens of Fortune 500 companies would be suspect simply because they employ senior regional executives in China. Airwallex does not even have a global executive based there.
With regard to ownership, HSBC and other banks literally do business in the US.
I respect Keith, I think he’s smart, you’d think he’d get off of X and just talk to me about this but he won’t because the smear must go on.
We’re proud to call @awxjack one of our own. He’s already a hall-of-fame founder and the most exciting chapters of his story are still to be written.
An Aussie working hard to succeed on the world stage might seem like an easy target … but remember that it took him 100x more work and determination to get where he is as an underdog.
For those responsible, lies are never acceptable and ultimately the universe rights the wrongs done, but as an investor in @airwallex, I’m excited that you gave the strongest-willed and most competitive founder ANOTHER reason to outwork and outsmart you… 😉
I hope @eglyman and @karimatiyeh are asking themselves if they are comfortable with politically connected investors in their company using a founder’s Chinese ethnicity and national-security as weapons against a competitor?
@tryramp was valued at $44 billion just three months ago. Airwallex was valued at $11 billion. This is a company four times our valuation whose investors are using their political reach to turn a commercial rivalry into a Washington national-security fight.
This is the anatomy of a smear campaign. Their investors have been attacking me and my company for months. This week a congressional letter about Airwallex is published and two of its most immediate and aggressive amplifiers are Ramp investors.
What exactly are they afraid of?
Airwallex spent ten years building global business accounts and financial infrastructure for companies operating around the world. Why not compete on the merits? Build the better product.
Instead, Airwallex is being singled out for something utterly ordinary among global financial companies. Adyen has had a Shanghai team for more than a decade. PayPal, Checkout, JPM, Citi etc. many others operate in China to serve a global payments market. Why is the serious policy question not what security standards should apply to every global financial-services company?
We welcome that question.
We hired Coalfire, an A2LA-accredited FedRAMP Third-Party Assessment Organization, to independently evaluate our controls. Its published assessment described our security program as “intentional, structured, and forward-looking,” with controls that “go beyond minimum expectations.” We published the attestation.
That should be the standard. Establish rigorous requirements for protecting American customer data. Independently test companies against them. Publish the results. Apply the same rules to Airwallex, Adyen, PayPal, Checkout and every other global financial company.
The Committee’s letter itself says it “has not reached the conclusion that Airwallex has engaged in unlawful conduct.” There has been no finding of unlawful conduct here. Airwallex has instead opened its systems and controls to independent scrutiny.
So why is Airwallex deserve to be on trial according to Ramp?
I was born in China. I am an Australian citizen. My ethnicity is not evidence of allegiance to the Chinese government. It should not become a substitute for technical evidence simply because it makes an accusation more politically potent. National security is too important for that.
Eric and Karim should ask whether this is really how they want competition in fintech to work. We have nothing to hide. We will keep answering legitimate questions, publishing evidence and subjecting ourselves to independent scrutiny.
And after ten years building @airwallex, we are proud of what we actually compete on which is helping businesses operate and win globally.
Michael Tolo retweeted
Are @tryramp employees proud of this obvious smear? is this how they want to compete?
Michael Tolo retweeted
In Melbourne with some time to kill tomorrow evening (>6:30pm, 2nd Sep) or Thursday arvo (2:30-3:30pm, 3rd Sep).
Open to meeting anyone to talk about AI / compute / energy.
Who should I meet?
(Feel free to DM.)
Michael Tolo retweeted
Exclusive: Inside @PsiQuantum
The $7B startup backed by NVIDIA, BlackRock and Founders Fund, building the world’s largest quantum computer.
0:00 Inside The $7B Quantum Giant
0:49 The Race to 1 Million Qubits
2:01 Pete: “AI Cannot Solve This”
3:36 This Is The Next $1 Trillion Sector
5:12 Live Tour: Pete Opens the Machine
9:18 The Alien Tech Inside Every Chip
11:07 Pete Has Zero Doubt
13:03 “Quantum by end of decade”
Michael Tolo retweeted
Instead of spending a year raising a formal venture fund, the Sabertooth VC founder used a captive network of LPs to invest startups like Anthropic, Anduril, and SpaceX. spr.ly/6016B826Eg
Michael Tolo retweeted
Ever wondered what cancer sounds like?
Cancer rewires neural circuits in the brain, and we’ve been listening in. More to share in our upcoming pre-print.
Michael Tolo retweeted
We are thrilled to announce that @LipBuTan1, Intel CEO and longtime veteran of the semiconductor industry, has joined PsiQuantum's Board of Directors.
His appointment reflects PsiQuantum's ongoing work to leverage existing semiconductor manufacturing as the company rapidly scales its silicon photonics platform and drives toward deploying utility-scale quantum computers. Learn more: psiquantum.com/news-import/l…
