✍️ Weekly Dose of Optimism #202
Packy McCormick's roundup covers Saronic's autonomous drone boats and its new $3B+ shipyard in Brownsville, Texas; Base Power's grid-battery deal with Austin Energy and TerraFirma's $100M Kleiner-led Series A for construction robots; new humanoid launches from Walden Robotics ($300M seed, $1.1B valuation) and Sunday Robotics; FDA approval of the first oral PCSK9 cholesterol drug; and open-weight AI releases from Moonshot and Thinking Machines now competitive with closed frontier models. The throughline: capital is rotating hard into hard-tech, robotics and defense-adjacent infrastructure alongside continued open-source pressure on closed AI labs.
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