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Faircraft Raises $15.8 Million to Accelerate the Development of Lab-Grown High-Quality Leather Goods
Faircraft, a pioneer of lab-grown leather using unique and patented tissue engineering techniques, has announced a $15.8 million fundraising round. The round was backed by internationally-renowned investment funds, including Kindred Ventures (USA), Cap Horn (France), BPI (France), Sake Bosch (Netherlands), Entrepreneur First (UK), Alliance for Impact (France), and Heirloom (USA). This funding will enable Faircraft to expand its team, notably by recruiting more engineers and biologists, and accelerate its efforts to scale operations and meet growing demand.
Faircraft is developing lab-grown leather that leverages cellular biology to create materials for a wide range of uses with a low environmental impact. The start-up develops lab-grown material derived from animal skin cells that replicates the structure and composition of traditional leather through cellular agriculture processes. Inspired by the medical and cosmetics industries, this material is genuine leather, made in a lab. Embracing traditional leather goods craftsmanship, Faircraft also relies on master tanners specializing in luxury leather goods to perfect the finishing of this sustainable leather.
Extropic raises $14.1M to build ‘physics-based computing’ hardware for generative AI
Extropic, a hardware startup led by former members of Alphabet Inc.’s quantum computing research team, announced that it has raised $14.1 million in seed funding. Kindred Ventures led the investment. It was joined by HOF Capital, Julian Capital, Marque VC, OSS Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Weekend Fund. Extropic says the round also saw the participation of more than a dozen other backers, including executives from Adobe Inc., Shopify Inc. and several venture-backed artificial intelligence startups.
It’s believed Extropic is building a chip optimized to run large language models, or LLMs. In a blog post, Verdon described the company’s technology as a “novel full-stack paradigm of physics-based computing” and detailed that it harnesses “out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics.” This hints that Extropic’s chip design incorporates concepts from non-equilibrium thermodynamics, an emerging branch of physics focused on studying phenomena such as chemical reactions.