Air Street Press

Profluent builds frontier AI systems to unlock programmable biology. Now, Profluent has raised $106M led by Bezos Expeditions and Altimeter, with continued support from Spark, Insight, and Air Street. The company is now the largest position in Air Street’s second fund. This new capital accelerates the company’s path toward scaling frontier protein models and, ultimately, delivering the first AI-designed therapeutic to a human patient.

Understanding how protein sequence encodes structure and function remains one of the central challenges in the life sciences. Yet most protein language models still treat each sequence as an isolated datapoint. This forces the entire burden of evolutionary context into model parameters, which leads to blind spots in underrepresented families and amplifies the biases of sequence databases. Profluent’s new E1 family demonstrates that this constraint is no longer necessary. Retrieval augmentation, a technique that transformed natural language processing, is now beginning to reshape protein modeling by allowing models to incorporate evolutionary information at the moment of inference rather than storing it all in weights.

Poolside is building one of the strongest full-stack AI companies in the world: energy, compute, models, and the infrastructure needed to run multi-agent systems for complex enterprise workflows. The Fern team brings a deeply opinionated agentic core - built from first principles and stress-tested on real workloads - into a company with scale, distribution, and compute firepower. Fern’s architecture was built for agent specialization and coordinated long-horizon work - the exact capabilities poolside can scale into a full production environment.

Welcome to the latest issue of the State of AI, an editorialized newsletter formerly known as Guide to AI that covers the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the last month. First up, a few reminders:Read more on press.airstreet.com

PARIMA, a global leader in cultivated proteins, has become the first European company to secure regulatory approval for cultivated meat, with the Singapore Food Agency granting clearance for its cultivated chicken. It’s a historic moment for Europe’s food-tech sector, but one that’s unfolding thousands of miles away from home.

Building a next-generation food company.

Integrating across compute, power, and intelligence.

The State of AI Report is the most widely read and trusted analysis of key developments in AI. Published annually since 2018, the open-access report aims to spark informed conversation about the state of AI and what it means for the future. Produced by AI investor Nathan Benaich and Air Street Capital. State of AI Report 2025 is reviewed by leading AI practioners in industry and research.

AI is the ultimate force multiplier on technological progress in our digital, data-driven world. Our mission at Air Street Capital has always been to back the most ambitious teams building breakthrough AI products that would have seemed like magic when I started investing over a decade ago. Key to these inflection points is the infrastructure that enables them: NVIDIA computing systems. I have long argued that NVIDIA is the defining company of the AI era, powering breakthroughs in science, industry, and national strategy. This is why I’m excited to share that we are deepening that story together: Air Street Capital is partnering with NVIDIA as part of its new £2B commitment to the UK AI ecosystem.

Clinical trials are the bottleneck of the pharmaceutical industry. They’re slow, expensive, and often fail, not only because the science frequently doesn’t pan out, but because the ops don’t either. That’s why we’re leading the $3.8M Seed round for Delfa. The team is building an AI-native operating system for clinical trials, starting with patient enrolment, the most broken part of the process.