Air Street Press

In this episode, Air Street Capital shares its 2025 year in review. We cover what changed as AI moved into large-scale deployment, from the emergence of reasoning models and agents in production to the economics of frontier AI, energy constraints, and geopolitics.We reflect on the year across our investment portfolio, angel investments, Air Street Press, the State of AI Report, and our global community, and look ahead to what it will take to deploy AI reliably and at scale in the years to come.

Europe sharply increased defense spending in 2025. But money alone does not produce weapons, stockpiles, or readiness.In this episode, we examine why Europe’s defense build-up is running into industrial limits as it enters 2026. From procurement bottlenecks and factory capacity to Germany’s surge in orders and the slow pace of production, the challenge is no longer political will - it is execution.This is a conversation about defense as an industrial system, and why turning budgets into battlefield capability is proving harder than expected.Read more on press.airstreet.com

As 2025 came to a close, conversations about AI swung between excitement and anxiety. Markets debated bubbles, capital cycles, and constraints, while researchers quietly shipped systems that worked.In this audio essay, Nathan Benaich takes stock of what AI actually delivered in 2025 — drawing on recent writing by Tim Dettmers, Dan Fu, and Andrej Karpathy, alongside conversations with Sebastian Borgeaud at Google DeepMind.Rather than speculating about distant futures, this episode focuses on what changed in practice: why AI crossed a usability threshold, how constraints reshaped progress rather than stopping it, and why the shift from models to systems matters more than any single benchmark.The result is a grounded look at AI progress as it enters 2026 — not as hype or prediction, but as an evolving system that continues to compound.Read the full essay at press.airstreet.com

Delfa is an AI-first clinical trials software company. In this episode, we explore how Delfa’s AI-first Participant Relationship Management system transforms clinical trial operations, speeds recruitment, and helps bring medicines to patients faster.

New AI research systems are beginning to contribute verifiable results across mathematics, physics, biology, and materials science. How close are we to AI producing genuinely new scientific knowledge?

Explore the robotics renaissance driven by foundation models, revealing how neglected fields are rapidly advancing. Discover innovations in world models like Odyssey 2 and Dreamer 4, showcasing long-horizon capabilities. Delve into the unification of perception and action with VLAMs and the latest humanoid control breakthroughs. Examine planning layers that enhance interpretability and execution, along with real-world deployments like Seriact Cortex in warehouses. Finally, witness large-scale driving with Wave's models in 90 cities, pushing the limits of embodied AI.

Today, I’m excited to unveil Air Street’s investment in Black Forest Labs as it announces a landmark funding milestone: a $300M Series B, following a previously unannounced Series A. Together, these rounds represent a big step in scaling the company’s momentum, with Black Forest Labs now capitalised with half a billion dollars and trusted by leading Fortune 500 enterprises.

Welcome to the latest issue of the State of AI, an editorialized newsletter that covers the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the last month.

Building the first AI-native wealth institution for the mass affluent. Air Street Capital is investing in Clove’s $14M first financing round, backing a new kind of wealth institution built for this generation rather than the last. Clove’s founders, Christian Owens and Alex Loizou, see this gap not as an inevitability but as a result of infrastructure that was never built for the modern consumer. With Clove, they are creating a new kind of financial institution, one designed from the ground up for people who want trustworthy guidance but have been priced out or ignored by traditional services. Their platform brings together regulated human advisors with an AI-first environment that handles the repetitive and compliance heavy processes which dominate advisory work today. By removing friction and expanding advisor capacity, Clove can deliver high quality personalised guidance at a scale that has not been possible before.

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.