Nathan Benaich, founder of Air Street Capital and author of the State of AI report, breaks down findings from the 9th edition. He discusses AI leading its own R&D, long-horizon task execution,…
(01:18) - Crypto Going "Bunker Mode" (16:31) - The AI Mathpocalypse (28:08) - Starbucks Explores Chipotle Takeover (30:57) - Timeline Reactions (49:01) - Mansion Section (55:41) - Rebecca Kaden &…
What changed in artificial intelligence in 2026, and what comes next? From AI agents helping build better AI to advances in robotics, the State of AI Report 2026 examines the breakthroughs,…
Jack & Jill has raised a $40 million Series A led by Air Street Capital to build AI agents for careers and recruiting. In this episode of State of AI, Nathan Benaich explains why he backed founders…
Europe is promising to rearm, but its defense startups often cannot access the realistic test ranges needed to win contracts. Drawing on conversations with a dozen founders and operators, Nathan…
Scientific papers preserve the happy path and lose the abandoned experiments and arguments that produced it. Starting with Alasdair Russell's genome editing group at the CRUK Cambridge Institute,…
Poolside trained Laguna S 2.1 on 4,096 NVIDIA H200s and published the open weights sixty days later. The 118-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model runs multi-hour autonomous coding sessions,…
Description:Black Forest Labs has launched FLUX 3, a multimodal foundation model that learns jointly from images, video and audio within a single architecture, and mimic robotics has released…
Raia Hadsell, VP of Research at Google DeepMind, makes the case that intelligence is more than language: the same recipe that learns the patterns of text can learn the patterns of any complex system.…
At RAAIS 2026, Nathan Benaich sits down with Hadrien Canter, co-founder and CEO of Alta Ares, the air-defense company building AI-guided interceptors to shoot down cheap drones and cruise missiles.…
World models are the bet that AI should learn the world by watching it and acting in it, not just by reading about it. At RAAIS 2026, Odyssey co-founder and CTO Jeff Hawke makes the case: a world…
Ted Moskovitz leads the Science of Scaling team at Anthropic, the group that works out how to turn compute into smarter models. In this RAAIS 2026 fireside with Air Street Capital's Nathan Benaich,…
Vivek Natarajan, Research Lead for AI, science and medicine at Google DeepMind, on porting the self-play and search recipe behind AlphaGo into scientific and clinical reasoning. He walks through the…
Angelos Perivolaropoulos, a research engineer at ElevenLabs, on turning GPU scarcity into an inference-engineering problem: how to serve far more users on the same hardware, from batching to frontier…
The fifth State of AI Compute Index, in collaboration with Zeta Alpha. After a soft 2025, open AI research citations rebounded in 2026 - and NVIDIA still appears in ~91% of them. But the bigger story…
Air Street Capital backs Stark, the German multi-domain defense company, in its €500M led by Founders Fund and Sequoia. In this episode, we discuss why cheap, software-defined unmanned systems in the…
Nikolay Donets, Head of Machine Learning Engineering at Revolut, on what it takes to run AI across more than 70 million customers, 200+ products, and 40+ countries - and why the hard part is no…
Odyssey just raised a $310M Series B at a $1.45B valuation to build world models. We wrote the first check into the seed back in July 2024, so in this episode we walk through what the team has…
Macrodata just raised a $4M pre-seed, led by Air Street, to build the data layer for robotics. The team behind FineWeb - Guilherme Penedo and Hynek Kydlíček - is bringing the discipline that made…
Last week the US government ordered Anthropic to switch off its most capable model for every foreign national on earth - four days after it launched. Nathan Benaich (founder of Air Street Capital,…
Today we announce Perceptic — the AI operating system for biopharma built by the team behind Palantir's AIP and Life Sciences practice. Coming out of stealth with a $12M seed round from Air Street…
Over the past few weeks, it’s been hard to keep up with AI in biology. Profluent signed a $2.25B partnership with Eli Lilly on AI-designed gene editors, Verve put out striking base-editing data, CZ…
Air Street Capital has led Alta Ares’s $60M Series A. In this episode, we explain why modern air defense is no longer just about intercepting threats, but doing so affordably, under jamming, and at…
Angelos Perivolaropoulos leads speech-to-text research engineering at ElevenLabs across Scribe v2 and Scribe v2 Realtime. From AA-WER-leading batch transcription to 150ms real-time ASR, his work…
Odyssey just shipped two new world models. Starchild-1 generates synchronized audio and video in real time at up to 24 fps, responding to streaming text, speech, or action input - the first real-time…
Nikolay Donets leads ML Engineering at Revolut - the platform behind classical ML, fraud detection, time-series foundation models, and the ElevenLabs voice agents now serving customers in 30+…
Profluent just announced a multi-program strategic partnership with Eli Lilly to develop AI-designed recombinases for genetic medicine — worth up to $2.25 billion in milestones, plus tiered royalties…
Episode Description Welcome back to the State of AI! In this packed Q1 2026 episode, we dive into a quarter defined by unprecedented geopolitical friction, staggering capital concentration, and the…
Raia Hadsell is VP of Research at Google DeepMind, co-leading the Frontier AI unit. Her work spans Siamese nets and elastic weight consolidation to Gemini 2.5, RoboCat, and a UK AI Ambassador role. A…
Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:53) - The Benchmark Ship of Theseus (14:16) - OpenAI to Kill Sora (23:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (43:07) - SpaceX Could File for an IPO This Week…
Air Street Capital has raised a third fund of $232M to back AI-first companies from the earliest stages. In this post, founder Nathan Benaich shares the conviction behind the firm - from his first…
AI has progressed fastest where the world can be cleanly digitized, but robotics remains stubbornly hard. In this episode, we examine Sereact’s Cortex 1.6 and what its results reveal about learning…
Episode 144 Happy New Year! This is one of my favorite episodes of the year — for the fourth time, Nathan Benaich and I did our yearly roundup of AI news and advancements, including selections from…
Nathan Benaich is the founder of Air Street Capital and author of the State of AI report. On its eighth year, the report is a year-long effort on the biggest things happening in AI, across research,…
Europe sharply increased defense spending in 2025. But money alone does not produce weapons, stockpiles, or readiness. In this episode, we examine why Europe’s defense build-up is running into…
As 2025 came to a close, conversations about AI swung between excitement and anxiety. Markets debated bubbles, capital cycles, and constraints, while researchers quietly shipped systems that worked.…
Today, I’m excited to unveil Air Street’s investment in Black Forest Labs as it announces a landmark funding milestone: a $300M Series B, following a previously unannounced Series A. Together, these…
Profluent builds frontier AI systems to unlock programmable biology. Now, Profluent has raised $106M led by Bezos Expeditions and Altimeter, with continued support from Spark, Insight, and Air…
Understanding how protein sequence encodes structure and function remains one of the central challenges in the life sciences. Yet most protein language models still treat each sequence as an isolated…
Poolside is building one of the strongest full-stack AI companies in the world: energy, compute, models, and the infrastructure needed to run multi-agent systems for complex enterprise workflows. The…
Air Street Capital’s Nathan Benaich just dropped the 2025 State of AI Report — a 313-page tour de force on where artificial intelligence is today and where it’s headed next. In this episode, Dave…
📝 本期播客简介 本期我们克隆了来自美国知名风投机构 First Mark 的《MAD 播客》，主持人 Matt Turck 邀请到欧洲著名风投 Air Street Capital 的创始人 Nathan Benaich，深入解读他每年发布的《AI 现状报告 2025》这份长达三百多页的行业必读宝典。对于不熟悉海外风投圈的听众来说，Matt 和 Nathan 都是全球 AI…
In Episode 448 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of Air Street Capital and the creator of the annual State of AI Report, an open-access…
Welcome to the latest issue of the State of AI, an editorialized newsletter formerly known as Guide to AI that covers the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the…
Episode 1 explores the State of AI Report 2025, authored by Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital — one of the most influential annual publications in the AI industry. This report dissects…
Power is the new bottleneck, reasoning got real, and the business finally caught up. In this wide-ranging conversation, I sit down with Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner at Air Street…
Building a next-generation food company.
The third episode of TechBio Talks features host Chris Gibson in conversation with leading AI investor Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital. Learn about the evolving landscape of AI in drug…
Integrating across compute, power, and intelligence.
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The State of AI Report is the most widely read and trusted analysis of key developments in AI. Published annually since 2018, the open-access report aims to spark informed conversation about the…
AI is the ultimate force multiplier on technological progress in our digital, data-driven world. Our mission at Air Street Capital has always been to back the most ambitious teams building…
We’re excited to announce Air Street Capital’s lead investment in Studio Atelico’s $5M Seed round, alongside friends including Chris Ré (Stanford), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), and Alex Ratner…
Gene editing has the potential to solve fundamental challenges in agriculture, biotechnology and human health. CRISPR-based gene editors derived from microorganisms, although powerful, often show…
No one is coming to save Europe. We must build new primes here and now.
At this year’s RAAIS, Max Jaderberg of Isomorphic Labs delivered a talk that felt like the spiritual sequel to AlphaGo, only this time the board isn’t 19×19, it’s the human body. The stakes? The…
At this year’s RAAIS, I joined Adam Satariano of the New York Times and Dimitrios Kottas, founder of Delian Alliance Industries and formerly Apple's Special Projects Group, for a candid conversation…
At RAAIS 2025, Andreas Blattmann, co-founder of Black Forest Labs, shared a deep dive into FLUX.1 Kontext, the startup’s newly released generative model for controllable image and video generation.…
What you need to know in AI across geopolitics, big tech, hardware, research, models, datasets, financings and exits over the last 4 weeks.
Two years ago, I met Mati Staniszewski in a time before AI voices were good enough to fool anyone. ElevenLabs hadn’t launched yet, but their vision was clear: voice was broken, and they were going to…
If 2016 was the year AI shocked the world by mastering Go, 2025 is shaping up to be the year they learn to innovate. This is the thesis of Ed Hughes, long-time researcher at Google DeepMind and one…
At this year's RAAIS, we convened a panel with Lionel Laurent (Bloomberg), Chris Yiu (Meta), and Benedict Macon-Cooney (Tony Blair Institute) to dissect the uneasy relationship between AI and the…
When poolside co-founder and CTO Eiso Kant stepped on stage at RAAIS 2025, he didn’t deliver the kind of slick, pre-baked keynote you might expect from the co-founder of one of the most ambitious AI…
A decade is a familiar yardstick for measuring progress. In that time, we tend to expect steady, incremental change. Historically, meaningful change tends to unfold slowly. In AI, however, the last…
On AI factories, sovereign AI and what this means for national AI strategies. This article originally appeared on Fortune.com and can be read here for free.
What you need to know in AI across geopolitics, big tech, hardware, research, models, datasets, financings and exits over the last 4 weeks.
Bringing you the best of AI today and what’s coming tomorrow.
Scaling on-site precision oncology infrastructure and real-world data.
Generative models, reinforcement learning, model efficiency, DeepMind and NVIDIA's impact weren't top of mind on Wall Street back in 2016...
Where politics and power meet AI. In recent months, a subtle but politically astute rebranding has propagated across the AI industry. Leading figures like NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s Sam…
On Profluent’s launch of ProGen3, a new family of protein language models trained on over 3.4 billion protein sequences.
What you need to know in AI across geopolitics, big tech, hardware, research, models, datasets, financings and exits over the last 4 weeks.
Building European maritime supremacy.
What you need to know in AI across geopolitics, big tech, hardware, research, models, datasets, financings and exits over the last 4 weeks.
$3M day one financing to build multi-agent systems for real-world problems. Learn more at www.fern-labs.ai
The State of AI Report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know across AI research, industry, politics, and safety. To ensure the report remains at a manageable length,…
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the last month.
Air Street’s submission to the UK Strategic Defence Review. You can read more at press.airstreet.com and https://press.airstreet.com/p/uk-defence-and-dynamism
The dawning AI-first era is creating clear winners and losers. Here we dive into the vibe shift of both Microsoft and Google in their work on AI.
Final 2024 statistics for AI chip usage across NVIDIA, Google, Huawei, Apple, AMD, Cerebras, Cambricon, Graphcore, Groq, SambaNova, and Intel Habana in the State of AI Report Compute Index.
Revisiting my 2019 lecture on why biology was experiencing its AI moment. Read more at press.airstreet.com and https://press.airstreet.com/p/ai-first-biology-five-years-on
In the spirit of building in the open and holding ourselves accountable to our progress, here is our year in review for 2024. We cover Air Street, Air Street Press, the State of AI Report, and our…
Episode 142 Happy holidays! This is one of my favorite episodes of the year — for the third time, Nathan Benaich and I did our yearly roundup of all the AI news and advancements you need to know.…
Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital, joins me to discuss AI in 2025. From runaway consumer adoption to evolving enterprise moats, from still-elusive AI-driven drug…
We share our best essays from 2024 on Air Street Press.
We dive into the AI energy wars, arguing that things will get worse before they get better. Read on for uranium, geopolitics, and why technical fixes likely aren’t coming to the rescue.
The State of AI Report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know across AI research, industry, politics, and safety. To ensure the report remains at a manageable length,…
Every month, we produce the Guide to AI, an editorialized roundup covering geopolitics, hardware, start-ups, research, and fundraising. But so much happens in the AI world, that weeks can feel like…
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the month of November 2024. Read more at…
Every month, we produce the Guide to AI, an editorialized roundup covering geopolitics, hardware, start-ups, research, and fundraising. But so much happens in the AI world, that weeks can feel like…
Biorisk is real, but we’re having the wrong debates. Could the AI-first bio tools we use to design life-saving vaccines also be used to evade the screening protocols of DNA synthesis companies? How…
AI investment is massive, but AI profits are not — and yet investors seem confident massive AI fundraising will one day translate into sizable AI profits. To break it down, Verge Deputy Editor Alex…
Nathan Benaich, founder and GP at VC firm Air Street Capital, publishes every year "State of AI", one of the most widely-read and comprehensive reports on all things AI across research, industry, and…
What a four day meltdown tells us about standards and scrutiny.
Reflections on the State of AI Report, by Air Street Capital.
The State of AI Report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know across AI research, industry, politics, and safety. To ensure the report remains at a manageable length,…
The “State of AI Report - 2024" by Nathan Benaich provides an overview of the development of artificial intelligence in 2024. The report examines the progress in research, the impact on the industry,…
Shifting creative control from companies to people.
Why storytelling matters from inception to IPO and beyond.
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month.
At the end of July, the UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology commissioned Matt Clifford, Chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), to produce a roadmap on…
On “Agentic AI”: This week, we’re asking how far along this road we are towards agentic AI, looking at some of the more promising research threads, and assessing where value might be found in the…
Openness is not a strategy. Given our past advocacy for open source and skepticism of the ‘bigger is always better’ paradigm, we felt it worth asking if these breakthroughs mark a tipping point in AI…
While we work on the State of AI Report 2024, this summer edition covers our 8th Research and Applied AI Summit, held in London on 14 June.
We dive into the SOTA from Chinese AI labs, the chip wars, sanctions, and loopholes.
At Air Street, we search for ideas that are non-consensus today but have the potential to flip into being voted consensus by the market in a few years' time. We see this in founders who are working…
Powering breakthrough visual storytelling with AI-first visual effects for Hollywood.
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month.
There are also specific dynamics at play in the frontier model space that will likely prevent the market from correcting in the near future. These have the potential to impact the entire AI value…
What went wrong and how to prevent this from happening again.
Yesterday, I was the opening act at the MIT Tech Review EmTech Digital conference, where I spoke about how easy it is to miss step changes in AI progress among the day-to-day swirl. This prompted a…
In episode 104 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nathan Benaich. Nathan is Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, a VC firm focused on investing in AI-first technology and…
The State of AI Report (stateofai.com) analyses the most interesting developments in AI. We aim to trigger an informed conversation about the state of AI and its implication for the future. The…
Nathan Benaich is a General Partner at Air Street capital a investment firm investing in AI startups. When asking around in the European ecosystem his name came across several times as a thought…
Nathan Benaich is the founder of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm investing in AI-first technology and life science companies. He is the coauthor of State of AI report, an annual report…
* Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here! * Want to write with us? Send a pitch using this form :) In episode 48 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir…
Nathan Benaich , the lone general partner at Air Street Capital, has long been on my radar as an artificial intelligence obsessive. And so now that the artificial intelligence is suddenly the…
Shining light on AI research and applications in a conversation with the curators of the most comprehensive report on all things AI. If you think AI is moving at a breakneck speed and it's almost…
On this week's show: 03:22 — SoftBank backs Proximie in $80m round for AR surgery 06:00 — Epoch Biodesign has raised $11m to grow its plastic-eating enzymes tech 09:38 — What's going on in European…
Artificial intelligence had a breakout year, with major new developments in disparate fields, from medical biology to defense. AI investors Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth , who co-author the annual…
It's this time of year again: reports on the state of AI for 2021 are out. In what is becoming a valued yearly tradition, we caught up with AI investors and authors of the State of AI report , Nathan…
In a conversation with Cade Metz about his new book, Genius Makers, we dive into the history of AI, how academia drove the industry to adopt deep learning, geopolitics and China, Europe’s role on the…
MLOps community meetup #43! Last Wednesday, we talked to Nathan Benaich, General Partner at Air Street Capital, and Timothy Chen, Managing Partner at Essence VC, about The MLOps Landscape. Join the…
From fit for purpose development to pie in the sky research, this is what AI looks like in 2020. A discussion on all things AI, with authors of the State of AI 2020 Report , Nathan Benaich and Ian…
On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured: James Hardiman Nathan Benaich Paul Martino Each investor illustrates a critical lesson learned about startup…
On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured: -Zach Coelius -Nathan Benaich -Jason Calacanis Each investor highlights a situation where they decided not to…
On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following investors are featured: Nathan Benaich Ethan Kurzweil Jonathon Triest & Brett DeMarrais Each investor describes their investment thesis and…
Today we cover Part 2 of Artificial Intelligence Investing with Nathan Benaich of Playfair Capital. In this segment we address: Can you provide an overview of the funding landscape for AI in recent…
Nathan Benaich of Playfair Capital joins Nick to cover Artificial Intelligence Investing, Part 1. We will address questions including: Can we start off w/ a simple definition of artificial…