May 2026 Update
Humanoids, drones, cybersecurity, model-memory research
May brought new fundraises, new research, and a packed calendar across SF, NYC, and Bangalore.
If you’re interested in joining SPC, apply here.
Events at SPC
In NYC, Soleio hosted a Design Chat with Dylan Babbs, SPC alum and current CTO at Profound. In Bangalore we hosted -1 to Razorpay, where Harshil Mathur unpacked the challenge of building payments infrastructure at planetary scale, and -1 to Space, with actual astronaut Shubhanshu Shukla.
In SF, Demo Night showcased explorations at the edge of what’s possible: model memory research, tactile hardware-software interfaces, and new operating systems for an agentic world.
The month closed with the SPC Embodied AI Hackathon, where teams designed and completed a challenge to bring intelligence into the physical world involving manipulation, locomotion, simulation, or flight, with bonus points for collaboration. We ran SPC as a fully-stocked robotics lab including humanoids, drones, SO-101 arms, and 3D printers. From the Desktop Robot Assistant, which moved a candy bar using voice agents, VLMs, and ACT policies, to the autonomous drone that tracks your squats and coaches your form in real-time, many teams had end-to-end policies running on real hardware by the end of the weekend.
Member Updates
Product Launches & Company News
Cognition raised over $1B in a Series D at a $26B valuation led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC.
Recursive raised $650M at a $4.65B valuation led by GV and Greycroft, building AI that recursively improves itself via open-ended algorithms.
Vori raised $22M in a Series B to build the self-driving OS for grocery stores, processing over $500M in payments across 55 cities.
Goodfire launched Silico, a platform for building AI models with the precision of written software.
VMax published PopuLoRA, research on co-evolving LLM populations for reasoning self-play.
Asymptote Labs open-sourced Agent Beacon, a tool for AI agent security.
Personal Projects, Explorations & Publications
Rex released PathOn Robotics, showing a custom navigation stack running on a Unitree Go2.
Arya published a piece on debugging multi-agent systems, with a follow-up case study on iterative refinement.
Jake shared a directory of 12,000+ open-source STEP parts for mechanical and electrical engineering, and released text-to-cad for generating 3D models in coding agents.
Coming Up
Recent Content
We released new conversations with Nikesh Arora (Palo Alto Networks), Amit Jain (Luma AI), and Steve Ruiz (tldraw) covering everything from why the most defensible AI companies are building world models, to the infinite canvas as a use case for agents, to the cybersecurity crisis ahead.
Thanks for reading! The work continues.