The Scoop
Purdue Research Foundation, which helps turn academic findings into startups, has inked a deal with Albuquerque-based Roadrunner Venture Studios.
Founded in 2022, Roadrunner is the brainchild of America’s Frontier Fund, a nonprofit investment firm with backing from some of the tech industry’s biggest names, like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, entrepreneur Mark Cuban and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel.
Roadrunner’s mandate is to invest in and build new companies working on “deep tech,” or endeavors that require overcoming scientific challenges.
The agreement gives Roadrunner a first look at promising research coming out of Purdue University and is the latest example of the increasing interest in deep tech investments after years of internet, software and social media bets drawing the lion’s share of attention and dollars.
The deep tech trend is spurred in part by increasing tensions with China, and a belief that technological breakthroughs can help slow climate change or allow humanity to survive on a less hospitable planet.
Deep tech investments are generally viewed as higher risk and requiring longer horizons. That’s in part why Roadrunner has taken money from a deep-pocketed nonprofit, along with a recently announced $50 million infusion from New Mexico’s sovereign wealth fund.
The oil-rich state is also home to national labs like Los Alamos, a history that was recently depicted in this year’s Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer.
Reed’s view
What makes Roadrunner’s deal with Purdue interesting is what it says about the big picture of scientific and technological advancement in the US.
Major progress in energy production, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biology and materials science seems within reach, and they are all sort of linked symbiotically.
Breakthroughs in energy will enable breakthroughs in AI, which will enable breakthroughs in biology and materials science, which will enable quantum technologies, and then it’s basically anybody’s guess what happens from there.
But there’s also this race against the clock. None of these technologies are easy and the solutions are not obvious. And we may not have decades to stem climate change or years to avoid a conflict with China. That makes deep tech basically a story of humanity’s future, potentially even its survival.