Happy Thursday and July 4th folks. Today’s edition is short and sweet as America’s 250th is just around the corner. And before we dive in, let’s first salute our boys for advancing to the Round of 16!
We’ll see you back here next week with heavier-hitting, regularly scheduled programming. By then, with all due respect to our Brussels readership, hopefully Belgium will be packing its bags and we’ll be on to 8. 🦅 🇺🇸 🎆
If you hadn’t heard, these United States of America turn 250 on Saturday.
Doomers have been writing our obituary since before the ink dried on the Declaration. Every generation had its serious-sounding, self-important “experts” who were sure the experiment was over: in 1814 the British burned down the Capitol; from 1861 to 1865 the country was shooting at itself; in 1933 a quarter of the workforce stood in bread lines; in 1979 a president went on television to diagnose a national crisis of confidence.
The pessimists always have their reasons. And, for the record, they’re 0-for-250.
There’s a very particular version of American entrepreneurial optimism we can’t stand: the occasional LinkedIn post from a B2B SaaS startup founder comparing themselves to The Founders, of America… to which we say, “OK lil buddy.” A much more compelling version goes like this: pessimists sound smart, optimists make history.
It’s true, and something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Because Per Aspera (Latin for “through hardships”) is for the builders and believers taking on hard pursuits, no matter how conventionally “crazy” or uncertain the odds. And you’ll see in in these very pages week in, week out that there is no shortage of problems: issues with our supply chains, challenges to our sovereignty, recurring displays of technical incompetence, and the compounding costs of own goals (e.g., decades-long strategic amnesia).
These are, on paper, reasons to be pessimistic. But you have to be willing to talk about the problems before you ever get to the solutions. Encountering uncomfortable ideas and having some healthy tension between the partisan tribes (not the political ones, but the pessimists vs. the optimists) offers motivation to keep going and puts chips on shoulders.
I look at us: an operator-led research group and media brand, doing this nights and weekends for the love of the game. I look at you, working your tails off because you know that the hard things are what will underwrite the next 250 years of American leadership in exploration, prosperity, security, and creativity. Much like you, the team behind this thing is a study in contrasts — mostly non-overlapping circles of competence, sharp spiky edges, and enough scar tissue to go around. We occupy different places on the pessimist ←→ optimist continuum. Some of us are jaded after a collective, long drift away from the hard things; others are optimistic to a fault. (Longtime readers probably know who lands where…)
We built Per Aspera to be the resource we ourselves had wanted — the crossroads where physics, hard engineering, capital intensity, obsessive drive, and give-a-damn agency meet. We don’t fit neatly into any camp and we don’t need to. We ignore the decline-narrative doomers and equally reject the techno-optimist-rapturist who says human agency is obsolete and that AGI will solve everything (or VCs, or Washington, or the invisible hand). The story doesn’t neatly resolve into it’s so over or we’re so back — it never has.
At the end of the day we wouldn’t be doing this, and you wouldn’t be here, if we weren’t, in our heart of hearts, builders. Which I take to mean stubborn optimists, convinced that the future can and will be better, if we actively make it so.
That is the story of America, after all.
Happy 250th, folks. Echoing JFK, as we like to say: pray not for easy lives, but to be stronger. And enjoy the fireworks!
— Ryan Duffy, editor in chief/cofounder
And a toast to a few of you who, in just the last few weeks, gave us reason to celebrate as we start ushering in the next era.
001 / WE DID IT! The U.S. set an ambitious goal of three new advanced reactors reaching criticality by July 4. Last week, we asked you all if you thought we could get there… and turns out… we’ve got quite the group of optimists! 77% of you voted that we’d have a clean sweep.
And we sure did: Deployable Energy’s Unity microreactor at Idaho National Laboratory crossed the line and went critical on July 1, joining Antares’ Mark‑0 (also at INL, June 4) and Valar Atomics’ Ward 250 (Utah’s San Rafael Energy Lab, June 18).
Yes, this is just the beginning — but it’s 1) a massive psychological victory for a corner of energy that sorely needs it, and 2) proof that nuclear stagnation over the last 50 years was self-imposed. Thank you to Antares, Valar and Deployable Energy for shifting minds, hearts, and culture… as our friend Packy McCormick would say:
What a week for the optimists!
001B / THERE’S MORE: Just yesterday, Valar Atomics ran a demo in Utah where its Ward 250 microreactor — a high‑temperature, helium‑cooled fission design using TRISO fuel and a graphite moderator — generated electricity to directly power an Nvidia Blackwell chip, briefly running a live website off the reactor.
002 / FRIENDS WITH FUNDS… Congratulations to our PA friends who announced funds this week. If you’ve got a startup, here are three to hit up:
Ian Rountree (Cantos). Cantos turned 10 this week — and Ian marked it with a fresh new brand and Canto IV, an oversubscribed $70M pre-seed/seed fund. For 10 years, Cantos has been investing the "near frontier" (categories before they become obvious frontier bets). Some advice Ian shared on TBPN: “If you're better at packaging things that are off-the-shelf in a novel way and contextualize that in a business that makes money, that's a lot more interesting than saying, 'I did my PhD in this crazy thing, and it sounds really cool.’”
Morgan Beller (more to come). Morgan Beller — who co-led Libra at Meta and later served as a GP at NFX — is teaming up with Ashton Kutcher, who’s leaving Sound Ventures, to launch a new early‑stage fund targeting AI infrastructure, energy, and deep‑tech startups built on hard science.
Larsen Jensen (Harpoon). Harpoon — the early-stage dual-use natsec fund — closed its $155M Fund IV this week, bringing the firm to $450M+ in AUM with 50+ portcos that have secured $1B+ in U.S. government contracts. Congrats to Larsen, a two-time Olympic medalist and former Navy SEAL turned VC, and the rest of the Harpoon crew.
003 / UNVEILINGS… And finally, the builders.
A $5B semi challenger destealths... On June 30, Etched, a chips-to-rack company addressing the ever-growing demand for inference, came out of stealth with A0, an ASIC that hardwires the transformer’s core operations into silicon, sold as full racks co-designed around the chip. It has completed a first production run on TSMC’s advanced process, and is claiming significant gains on speed, latency, and power efficiency in early tests. Etched has raised $800M to date (!) and signed $1B+ in customer contracts. Vertically integrating the full inference hardware stack is enormously hard, but the startup has some big names, and early derisking stages, already behind it.
A <$1.3K American home robot? Robotics startup Nori opened orders for the L2 this week: a dual-arm, wheeled home robot — made in SF, shipping this summer — that loads dishes, sorts and folds laundry, sweeps, makes coffee, and (very relevant this weekend) pours a beer. It starts at $1,288 and will plug into a “skill marketplace” where any task one Nori learns, every Nori can learn. A non-humanoid form factor, “made in America,” offered at appliance pricing… We’ll be watching this one. 👀
🇺🇸🦅🙏 Per aspera — to us all. Happy 250th birthday to the greatest country in the world.
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