Air Street Press

Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)

As an AI-native investor, we believe it’s important to be a hands-on contributor to the community. Since our earliest days, we’ve been building in public - whether that’s sharing our perspectives on the direction of the field, emerging best practice for building AI-first companies, organizing meet-ups, and campaigning for policy change. Air Street Press brings together all of our content under one umbrella. Subscribe to listen to our analysis, portfolio news, Guide to AI monthly newsletter, annual State of AI Report, and our policy work.

  1. 19h ago

    Europe cannot rent its way to AI sovereignty

    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, co-author of the State of AI Report) argues this exposed the AI risk almost no one is naming: not that the machines go rogue, but that everyone outside the US and China rents their intelligence from a landlord who can cut them off at will. Adapted from remarks given at a private dinner this week, this is the case for why Europe can't regulate its way to sovereignty - and what government, industry, civil society and academia each need to do to build it instead. Read the full essay and subscribe at press.airstreet.com.

    7 min

  2. 23h ago

    Introducing Perceptic: the AI operating system for drug development

    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 Capital, Accel and angels, Perceptic is already in production at CSL and multiple top-20 pharma companies. In this piece, we unpack why the frontier labs are racing into life sciences — from Anthropic's recent Novartis CEO board appointment to OpenAI's 80-year-old Erdős proof — why pharma's next R&D leap needs an application layer the model labs can't build alone, and why this is the team to do it.

    7 min

  3. 3d ago

    From discovery to design: in conversation with Ali Madani (Profluent)

    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 Biohub published new scaling results on protein models, and Isomorphic Labs pulled in another large raise. I couldn’t think of anyone better to discuss this with than Ali Madani, the founder and CEO of Profluent. Profluent is an AI lab building frontier models to design proteins, with the goal of taking medicine from discovering molecules nature already made to designing the ones it didn’t. I first read Ali’s ProGen paper back in 2021, DMed him on then Twitter, and wrote the largest first check from Air Street Capital into the company at inception. Last month, Profluent announced a $2.25B deal with Eli Lilly, one of the largest to date between a frontier AI biology lab and big pharma. We discuss the shift from discovery to design, why Profluent bet sequence-first while others went structure-first, the Lilly deal and large-scale DNA editing, fine-scale base editing, whether LLM-style scaling laws hold for proteins, and much more. You can either watch the interview in full here or on YouTube or read the transcript below. Timestamp timeline 0:00 – Teaser: AI-designed molecules & the $2.25B Lilly deal 0:22 – Intros: Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital) & Ali Madani (Profluent) 2:10 – What is Profluent, and why AI matters 5:45 – The landscape: readers vs. writers 7:45 – Profluent’s edge: 100B+ sequences and a wet lab 9:20 – OpenCRISPR and the exponential curve 12:55 – Why sequence beats structure 14:50 – The Eli Lilly deal and large gene insertion 16:20 – Fine-scale vs. large-scale editing 18:00 – Why it’s hard: the pre-AI era and the activity/specificity trade-off 20:45 – The Verve news, and scaling beyond one-offs 23:45 – Rare vs. common disease 26:10 – “What do you know that no one else does?” 27:40 – bio × AI is an undersaturated field 32:40 – When will a top-10 pharma be AI-first? 34:30 – Every molecule will be designed with AI Timestamp

    38 min

  4. Jun 9

    Alta Ares: the Iron Dome for autonomous air defense

    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 the speed of battlefield adaptation. From Ukraine to the GCC, the old model of static shields and slow procurement is breaking. Alta Ares is building full-stack, AI-first air defense across software, sensors, command-and-control, and effectors. We believe it can become Europe’s Iron Dome for autonomous air defense.

    8 min

  5. May 31

    Speech-to-text at conversation speed - Angelos Perivolaropoulos, ElevenLabs

    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 powers voice agents that can listen. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.

    7 min

  6. May 19

    From clip-makers to simulators: Odyssey's new world models

    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 multimodal world model. Agora-1 puts up to four players into a shared simulated deathmatch on GoldenEye, with every frame each player sees generated on the fly while the model holds a shared world state across all participants. We walk through both releases, the technical contributions behind them - a causal distillation pipeline from a bidirectional audio-video foundation model, an asynchronous KV-cache that handles the audio/video clock mismatch, and a decoupled simulation/rendering architecture for the multi-agent case - and why world models are a different shape of system than the clip-makers (Veo, Sora, Kling) that have dominated generative video for three years. Odyssey is an Air Street Capital portfolio company. Jeff Hawke, Odyssey's co-founder and CTO, presents this work at RAAIS 2026 in London on June 12.

    5 min

  7. May 17

    What it takes to ship AI under regulation - Nikolay Donets, Revolut

    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+ languages. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.

    5 min

  8. May 4

    State of AI · May 2026: cyber threshold, China parity, agents in real markets

    The April 2026 issue of State of AI from Air Street Press. The through-line: frontier AI moved from benchmark progress to operational capability across cyber, coding, agents, and capital formation. Two frontier models cleared the UK AI Security Institute's 32-step end-to-end cyber-attack range in a single month, and AISI now estimates frontier cyber-offence is doubling every four months, down from seven months at the end of last year. We unpack what that means for the public cybersecurity stack. Microsoft and OpenAI reset their 2019 deal to non-exclusive while keeping Microsoft as primary cloud partner. Anthropic stacked another $40B from Google, $5B from Amazon (with $100B of AWS spend), and chip deals with Google and Broadcom reportedly worth hundreds of billions, and is reportedly already raising again at a $900B valuation. Sam Altman's Axios essay sketched a "superintelligence New Deal" in explicit FDR terms. Four Chinese labs (Z.ai, MiniMax, Moonshot, DeepSeek) released open-weights coding models inside a 12-day window, all landing at roughly the same capability ceiling as Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 on agentic engineering. NIST's CAISI evaluation puts the aggregate gap closer to eight months. Both are true. Anthropic's Project Deal ran a classified marketplace of 69 Claude agents and reported that stronger agents won, and the losers did not realise it. KellyBench (from Air Street portfolio company General Reasoning) watched every frontier model lose money on a Premier League betting season under non-stationarity. Ramp's procurement agents run 3× faster. Plus eight research papers worth keeping (π0.7, the Ríos-García epistemology paper, ClawBench, the FAIR experience-replay paper, Agent-World, and others), April Investments (Ineffable Intelligence's $1.1B seed, Saronic, Cognition's $25B talks, Cursor's $50B+ talks), and Exits (Skild and Zebra, SpaceX and Cursor, OpenAI and Hiro, Cohere and Aleph Alpha, China blocking Meta's acquisition of Manus).

    28 min
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About

As an AI-native investor, we believe it’s important to be a hands-on contributor to the community. Since our earliest days, we’ve been building in public - whether that’s sharing our perspectives on the direction of the field, emerging best practice for building AI-first companies, organizing meet-ups, and campaigning for policy change. Air Street Press brings together all of our content under one umbrella. Subscribe to listen to our analysis, portfolio news, Guide to AI monthly newsletter, annual State of AI Report, and our policy work.

Information

  • Creator
    Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    127
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)
  • Show Website
    Air Street Press