When Josh Silverman started shopping around the idea for his methane-eating microbe startup, Windfall Bio, eight years ago, the market just wasn’t ready.
Menlo Park–based Windfall Bio raised a $28 million Series A round to expand its commercialization efforts.
The round was led by Prelude Ventures with participation from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Incite Ventures and Positive Ventures, among others, as well as existing investors, including Mayfield.
Windfall works with industries that produce large levels of methane, such as agriculture, oil and gas, and landfills.
The startup supplies methane-eating microbes that absorb methane emissions, turning them into fertilizer.
As the election cycle heats up, Instagram and Threads will be cooling down the amount of political content entering many users’ feeds.
These changes, which limit the reach of political content from accounts users don’t already follow, are enacted by default.
If you’re already wondering how to get that kind of content back into your feed, you can follow our guide on changing Instagram’s political settings here.
Threads will host, but not “amplify” news, per remarks from its head Adam Mosseri’s last year.
And what posts and topics will Instagram actually deem to be political?
AI is “not open in any sense,” the battle over encryption is far from won, and Signal’s principled (and uncompromising) approach may complicate interoperability efforts, warned the company’s president, Meredith Whittaker.
“The overall theme I’m seeing is a deep desire for accountability in tech, which we saw sort of animated mid-2010s.
That, then, has been weaponized; and I think we’re seeing surveillance wine in accountability bottles,” she said.
It’s a form of, again, parochial, magical thinking here,” said Whittaker.
But then Google published a couple of days later, like Microsoft is actually the monopoly because it has the OpenAI and sort of the Azure monopoly, right?
Talks of bitcoin spot ETF approval circulate as India blocks exchange sites and crypto is seeing more optimismWelcome back to Chain Reaction.
The crypto space has been off to a strong start for 2024 as reporters and ETF analysts have reported that a bitcoin spot ETF approval in the U.S. could be coming as soon.
This week in web3The latest podFor this week’s news episode, Jacquelyn dove back into the latest developments on spot bitcoin ETF applications in the U.S. as anticipation builds.
As it stands, there are 14 asset management firms, including BlackRock, Fidelity, Grayscale and VanEck, hoping to individually win approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for their spot bitcoin ETFs.
We also discussed what a spot bitcoin ETF could mean for investors, institutions and miners, as well as bitcoin’s price.
This year was tough for many space companies, and we aren’t trying to paper that over with our optimism.
Advanced satellite operations demonstrationsIn the broadest possible terms, a huge portion of space startups are interested in increasing the number of things a satellite can do in space.
Another hot area of satellite operations involves in-space manufacturing and satellite reentry.
Next year, we expect to see more demonstrations from startups looking to execute state-of-the-art satellite operations.
2024 should be chock full of exciting tests and new developments from other companies looking to take their slice of the launch market.
