Philip Brittan

President Trump has put AI/HPC giants on notice that their data centres need to pay more for electricity and/or help fund expansion of power-generating infrastructure. It’s my hope that this new infrastructure embraces all means of energy production, including ‘greener’ varieties.​  ​ Microsoft was first to respond with a new ‘community-first’ strategy to meet the president’s benchmarks (https://lnkd.in/gursbzcQ). Microsoft is already backing the restart of the Three Mile Island nuclear facility and other tech giants like Google and Meta are also investing in nuclear power.​  ​ Amazon is investing in small modular reactor (SMR) tech that remains largely untested but offers the potential for a major expansion of nuclear power and a corresponding lessening of reliance on fossil fuels: https://lnkd.in/gfffqYmt - (Full disclosure: I invest in some uranium projects.)​  ​ Solar power generation can be deployed in the huge spaces in America’s southwest that get year-round sun. Regardless of location, covering data centre roofs with panels (mimicking the carpark of the Ayre Group’s Canada Place complex) would help reduce their demands on local grids.​  ​ US wind-power projects have had a rough ride of late but I hope these recent court rulings offer some reconsideration of wind’s merits: https://lnkd.in/gsXtxTKi. If the ultimate goal is retaining US AI supremacy, then it’s an all-hands-on-deck power scenario and we shouldn’t keep any hands tied behind our backs.​  ​ More radical alternatives, like solar-powered space-based data centres, are still a long way off. Microsoft tested underwater data centres and found lower rates of server failure than land-based models but shelved the program for unspecified reasons. Predictably, China’s now taking the lead: https://lnkd.in/gWyZtAeu  ​ Barring a complete collapse of investor confidence, AI isn’t going anywhere, meaning the quest for additional power sources will only grow. Who’s going to be the entrepreneurial wizard who cracks this code and how will they do it? #AI #datacentres #renewableenergy

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The only thing worse than choking down a press release about agentic ai or orchestration, is digesting the ones written by ChatGPT. #ccw2025

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The rapid growth of digital asset wealth highlights a transformative shift in global finance, challenging traditional economic paradigms. With 36 billionaires and a surge in Bitcoin millionaires, the implications for regulatory frameworks and wealth distribution are profound. As cryptocurrencies transcend geographical limitations, governments face unprecedented dilemmas regarding taxation and monetary policy. This evolution not only redefines wealth but also prompts a re-evaluation of financial sovereignty in an increasingly digital world. Embracing these changes will be crucial for adapting to the future of finance. More details in the article here: https://lnkd.in/g5VRJprJ

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Terra Industries raises $11.75M seed, led by 8VC, the VC firm by Palantir founder Joe Lonsdale. In participation is Valor Equity Partners, Lux Capital, SV Angel, Silent Ventures, Nova Global, Leblon Capital, and angels like Micky Malka. Alex Moore, Board Director at Palantir, also joins Terra’s board Over a year ago, Max and I started Terra to give Africa the technological edge needed to protect its critical resources. Today we’re building Africa’s first defense prime with millions of dollars in commercial and govt contracts. Over the next few months, we will ramp up defense production across Africa and scale our surveillance software. Link in the comments #technology #ai

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No surprise, Anthropic is now #1 in enterprise LLM market share. Other insights from our 2025 enterprise LLM survey: - Model API spend more than doubled in 6 months, from $3.5B to $8.4B, driven most by code generation - Anthropic leads enterprise share at 32%, overtaking OpenAI, which fell from 50% to 25%; Gemini follows at 20% and rising - Open-source models (led by Llama) dropped from 19% to 13% share - Performance now outweighs cost in model selection - 74% of builders say inference, not training, is their biggest AI cost, up from 48% last year https://lnkd.in/ep3XjFHt

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Last week software stocks, now today is office real estate stocks. AI is now starting its wipe out phase of whole sectors. Many will survive, but just as many won't as agentic AI gets rolling. The IR industry is next.

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AI in supply chain continues to grow in importance. The latest proof point is Loop's $95M capital raise. In the meantime, Pallet, Augment, HappyRobot and others continue to scale up. Smart supply chain companies should be evaluating and adopting now, as their competitors are moving rapidly! https://lnkd.in/eU9s683p

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The amount big tech and AI are spending on lobbying underscores that they are losing the policy debate, especially on CDA230, child safety, and state preemption. But no matter how much big tech and AI companies spend, the child safety and parent's groups will ultimately win a safe online future for their children. #cda230 #cda230sunset #kosa #childsafety #onlineaccountability #nofakes #defiance

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The "sexy" AI hype is over. Now, the real work of integration begins. 🚀 I recently joined an expert panel at the 2026 JaGa Futures Forum to discuss the operational reality of AI in the enterprise. We moved beyond chatbots to look at the "missing foundation" of modern business: Organizational Context. Strategic Pillars for 2026: Context as a Moat: Raw LLM power is a commodity. The real enterprise advantage lies in the Behavioral Layer—teaching AI to understand your team’s specific decision-making and collaboration patterns. The Demography of Automation: In the U.S., we’re solving for efficiency; in Japan, we’re solving for survival. With Japan facing a massive labor shortage, AI isn't replacing jobs—it's maintaining the backbone of society through robotics and elder care. Data Governance & "Authority Issues": We addressed the looming risk of AI models bypassing traditional corporate hierarchies. If an AI can answer anything, how do you secure restricted insights from unauthorized internal exposure? Augmentation Strategy: The workforce shift is here. AI handles the 80% (repetitive code, documentation, support), but the critical 20% remains the domain of human judgment and "purification". The Executive Challenge: As we automate junior tasks, our value as leaders shifts to discernment. The future of work belongs to those who don't just "outsource thinking" to AI, but use it to amplify critical decision-making. Watch the full high-level session here: https://lnkd.in/eyNn-E9v #EnterpriseAI #ExecutiveLeadership #FutureOfWork #JapanBusiness #OrganizationalIntelligence #DigitalTransformation

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A good sign of an industry’s maturity is the number of strategic acquisitions taking place. Until now, crypto has largely lacked those - especially in the realm of tokenized projects. Most have either worked spectacularly well or quietly faded into obscurity, with little in between.   That’s why today’s acquisition of SQD (Subsquid) by Nasdaq-listed AI powerhouse Rezolve Ai marks a pivotal milestone for the crypto industry.   I have been a long-standing believer in the strong fundamentals the SQD team has built.   Together with Rezolve and its visionary founder Daniel M. Wagner, they are now poised to take it to the next level - advancing the foundation for agentic commerce and finance on the blockchain.   The SQD token will be renamed RZAI soon (currently still trading as SQD). Rezolve will adopt a treasury strategy to consistently acquire RZAI (currently SQD) tokens equivalent to at least 1% of its annual revenues, aligning long-term participation with ecosystem growth. https://lnkd.in/ejEfwiCu

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Big milestone for Doppler Finance: Doppler just raised a $3M seed round led by Reforge, with participation from DCG, Maven 11, HashKey Capital, GSR, CMCC Global and others. Their goal? Unlock institutional-grade yield infrastructure on the XRP Ledger, something that’s been missing since day one. Here’s the opportunity: -> XRP’s ~$200B market cap has less than 0.1% in DeFi. -> Ethereum, by comparison, has ~20% of its market cap active on-chain. That’s hundreds of billions in idle XRP and Doppler is building the rails to activate it. With custody integrations (Fireblocks, Copper, Bitgo), verifiable proof-of-reserves, and plug-and-play APIs for wallets/custodians, they’re building for regulated capital but with open access. Their $500M+ capital pipeline speaks volumes. This is a major unlock for #XRPFi and one of the most promising attempts to bridge compliant yield infra with an underserved but globally significant asset. Excited to see how this one plays out.

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I recently sat down with David Prosser at Forbes to discuss how we, at AAF Management Ltd., have strategically positioned ourselves to ride — and invest through — the current AI wave. The conversation came at a meaningful inflection point for us: just days after announcing 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘹𝘪𝘴 𝘍𝘶𝘯𝘥, a $55 million early-stage hybrid vehicle anchored by Mubadala Capital. Over the past decade in venture, I’ve seen the industry evolve through extraordinary macro shifts — the rise and fall of online-native e-commerce brands, the boom and bust of biotech, and the irrational exuberance of the ZIRP-era liquidity that fueled a historic valuation run-up, followed by a painful but necessary reset. Each cycle has followed a familiar pattern: euphoria → over-investment → correction → consolidation → compounding. And every cycle reinforces the same truth: 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘷𝘢𝘭𝘶𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘵 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘦𝘵𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘷𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯. So, are we in an AI bubble? The honest answer: it depends which asset class you mean. As I said in the interview: “It’s really a story of two different worlds. A handful of very large private companies have been flooded with liquidity and seen huge valuation increases — but that’s not been the experience of small start-ups raising their first $1M to $5M.” Because most investors follow momentum, we’re seeing overzealous valuations in public markets (e.g., NVIDIA) and late-stage private names (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI). But in early stage, while Seed valuations have crept up, most AI startups raising $1–5M rounds remain sensible. We see AI as a once-in-a-generation platform shift, not a passing cycle. Through The Axis Fund, we’re intentionally positioned to capture both beta and alpha across this paradigm: Beta — via our 20% fund-of-funds allocation, giving us exposure to the next wave of category-defining AI companies: • Decagon – AI for customer service (backed by Andreessen Horowitz ) • ElevenLabs – AI voice and language models (backed by ICONIQ) • Sanas – AI-powered voice translation (backed by Insight Partners) • Legora – Legal AI for the EU (backed by General Catalyst) Alpha — by cherry-picking the most promising companies across Pre-Seed to Pre-IPO. Our AI thesis is clear: • 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐋𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫: Agentic workflows driving automation, efficiency, and error reduction. • 𝐒𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐈𝐧𝐟𝐫𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞: Libraries, tools, and data systems enabling scalable model deployment. • 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐢𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐈 > 𝐚𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭 𝐀𝐈:  Founders solving real, high-value problems in fintech, healthcare, SaaS, and industrial tech. • 𝐆𝐥𝐨𝐛𝐚𝐥 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞, 𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐞𝐱𝐞𝐜𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Founders who think globally and execute precisely in their markets. We will stop talking about AI as a category the way we stopped talking about cloud or web protocols, 𝘪𝘵 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘢𝘶𝘭𝘵. 👇🏽 Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/ejwREwEe

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Yesterday, after 22 development sessions and 9 progressive mint attempts, we minted the first Self-Sovereign Entity Identifier (SEID) on Cardano mainnet. Transaction: 1d6a4590a426321d481a88abb1173c78b6b2170076a395fc7144614c5ef099d0 That's not just a hash. That's the first proof that a cooperative organization can steward its own identity on a public blockchain — without asking permission from a corporation, a government, or a platform. Here's what makes SEID different from every other decentralized identity system I've studied: It's entity-first, not person-first. Most DID systems assume the primary identity holder is a human being. SEID starts with the organization — the DACO (Decentralized Autonomous Cooperative Organization). Our first mint was did:c3:4dtSvpKb3f7K7kckSGSn4mwiks6VULCwyxiHiDn3:@D — the @D means this is a DACO identity, not a person. People come later, by choice, with biometrics they control. It's soulbound. This isn't a tradeable NFT. It's a CIP-68 soulbound token minted via PlutusV3 smart contracts on Cardano. You can't sell your identity. You can't transfer your reputation. Your SEID is yours — permanently linked to your sovereign vault, your credentials, and your cooperative participation history. It uses BLAKE2b-512 hashing with Base58 encoding — and it's quantum-ready now. The identifier itself is derived from cryptographic primitives, not assigned by a registrar. No central authority decides who gets an identity. The math does. While quantum computing threatens the asymmetric cryptography (RSA, elliptic curves) that most identity systems depend on, BLAKE2b-512 maintains 256-bit security even against quantum attacks. Grover's algorithm halves effective hash strength — so our 512-bit output still delivers 256 bits of post-quantum security. Most DID systems will need emergency upgrades when quantum hardware matures. SEID was built for that world from day one. We built this on Cloudflare Workers talking to Cardano via Blaze SDK and Blockfrost — no centralized backend, no database you need to trust. The smart contracts are open, the policy is parameterized, and the reference scripts are deployed as CIP-33 on-chain references. This is Day 1 of a 10-day series on what the C3 Alliance built differently. Tomorrow: why every cooperative eventually fails — and how three-faction governance prevents it. → C3-Alliance.org #C3Alliance #Cardano #SelfSovereign #DID #Web3 #CooperativeEconomics #SEID #PlutusV3 #ForkToFlourish

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Gemini is preparing to launch federally regulated prediction markets under its proposed Gemini Titan exchange, pending approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The platform would offer event-based contracts tied to real-world outcomes such as elections or economic data, aiming to integrate prediction markets into mainstream finance. If approved, Gemini Titan would be among the first US-regulated venues for event contracts, expanding transparency and investor access.

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What happens when boomers exit the market? | A clip from my Substack post, EP028: The Architect Who Became the Grey Rabbit of Finance. Watch it here: https://lnkd.in/eiT_7Dse

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At our recent LP Advisory Council meeting, LPs asked about headlines claiming AI is undermining SaaS. Our view is that the two are mutually reinforcing, not mutually exclusive. We are bullish on AI, and we believe certain SaaS leaders (with systems of record/action, first-party data and data rights, network effects, ambitious AI roadmaps, etc.) are well-positioned to capitalize on the agentic AI opportunity. There are multiple reasons for this. To start, consider what’s happening today with SaaS. The median company in the SEG SaaS Index grew 13% in Q2 while doubling its EBITDA margin year over year, with a top quartile growth rate above 20%. SaaS accounts for only 25% of overall software revenue in 2025, according to Gartner, so secular growth from on-premise to SaaS migrations should continue for years. Notably, this growth largely comes before many SaaS firms monetize a new wave of agents. Meanwhile, small AI startups with little revenue are burning cash and trying to sell. At the other end of the spectrum, Klarna’s much-hyped move to replace Salesforce with AI proved overstated; the CEO later said he was “tremendously embarrassed” by the fallout. SaaS pessimists might ask themselves: Has any large enterprise successfully replaced SaaS systems of record with an LLM? Rather than the AI-SaaS story being one of complete disruption, I believe it’s moving in waves, not unlike how businesses have historically incorporated new technologies:  ● Wave 1 (2023): “Get me some AI so we’re not left out” (a reprise of 1996’s “build a web page and we’ll figure it out later”). ● Wave 2 (2024-mid 2025): “Show me the budget and ROI. Also, why do we need an expensive AI model over a cheap one?” ● Wave 3 (late 2025): "I need enterprise-grade AI that integrates seamlessly, delivers measurable results and won’t disrupt core ops with experimental tools." We can’t say for sure what will happen next, but we do know how software brings value to the enterprise. SaaS is more than software code; it’s digital business intelligence using code to express that intelligence. That takes massive data sets and business experience brought to bear on enterprise functions, at scale and over time. It’s about executing tasks efficiently today, then innovating new tasks over time. For these reasons, we see a supercharged future of AI-enabled enterprise software that enhances productivity and innovation in dramatic ways. That future is less about ever-larger foundation models or narrow AI startups that complicate the stack. Instead, we see integrated software systems that orchestrate digital services to accelerate complex tasks, with agents as the 2026 step-function. AI is a massive force multiplier in that equation, but not a radical disruptor. At Thoma Bravo, we welcome the AI-SaaS conversation. We’re healthily paranoid as part of our mindset. But evidence, history, and business logic suggest that the AI revolution is set to accelerate SaaS value and growth, not undermine it.

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Every Friday, we run our Decasonic AI Ship Day (ASD), our internal weekly cadence for shipping and reviewing the AI agentic applications we build for the fund. Across the last several ASDs this April, a clear pattern has surfaced. Good software is no longer scarce. What separates good software from impactful software is the coordination workflow loop between the humans and AI. Most teams pick up AI and map it onto the workflows they already run. They automate the past. That's a reasonable first step. But the real leap is harder. It's asking: "If we built this firm from scratch today, what would that ideal intelligence system actually look like?" Here's how I think about it: - Humans drive insight, judgment, and non-consensus conviction, with higher standards of performance - AI drives synthesis, speed, and scalable execution across all six stages of our workflows. - AI agents are first-class partners in the workflow, not just tools bolted onto it, with appropriate expectations of where they will add intelligence. Once you internalize that split, you stop shipping a faster version of the old workflow. You ship a different agentic application entirely. That's the discipline we're building into Decasonic through AI Ship Day and it's the same discipline we look for in the founders we back. Full April 2026 recap linked below. Follow me and the team for weekly takeways.

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tokenization might be eating the world, but we'll only realize its full benefits when the 'illliquidity' issue is fixed it requires 24/7 instant settlement and deep liquid markets to swap tokenized assets (RWAs) and tokenized money (stablecoins) at any time seamlessly Will Beeson, CFA is building Multiliquid by Uniform Labs to make this a reality

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Found this interesting article "Do AI-enabled companies need fewer people?" by Laurie Voss within the Venture Capital topic on AI Colorado. AI-Native vs Traditional SaaS: AI-native startups operate with roughly 60% fewer people at $10M ARR (15-20 vs 50-70), generate 6x higher revenue per employee ($3.48M vs $580K), and raise 30% larger Series A rounds ($51.9M vs $39.9M). Layoffs Continue: Over 126,000 workers were cut at US tech companies in 2025, with the pace carrying into 2026. Tech job growth has flatlined since 2023 in what the author calls another K-shaped graph. Interesting times ahead.

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