Hedral

Raises Seed Round at Markup from VC Legend, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures

Pre-Seed (July 2023): $250,000 invested by Steel Atlas Fund I (warehoused)

Hedral is an AI structural engineering firm based in New York that enables real estate developers to build faster, cheaper, and with lower environmental impact. Today, Hedral is already the most efficient structural engineering firm in the world, delivering stamped drawings and 3D building models to developers 10x faster than legacy firms. Hedral's core technology automates the creation of the drawings and models that traditionally take competitive firms weeks to months to produce manually. This is positioning Hedral to roll-up the fragmented, multi-hundred billion dollar market for construction design and engineering.

Traditionally, structural engineering firms required large numbers of experienced engineers with in depth knowledge of local building codes to manually design and certify buildings. Now, rapid advancements in AI have created the opportunity for Hedral to disrupt this market with a lower cost and higher value service. Hedral has integrated a large-language-model (LLM) that can ingest local building codes from any market to produce structurally valid designs based on those codes (removing the need for local expert engineers). Like other AI systems, Hedral's product improves as it is exposed to more data (buildings). Impressively, Hedral has increased the pace of their product development by using generative AI to create synthetic 3D building models that they then use to test and refine their structural engine.

Beyond leveraging AI, Hedral's proprietary technology includes a 3D geometry engine, steel + concrete solvers, a drawing generator, a cost module, and integrated project management tools. The team efficiently executed these technical milestones with only ~$1.5M in funding from their Pre-Seed round that we invested in. This quick progress can be attributed to the CEO's and CTO's experience investing and operating in companies tackling similar problems.

Hedral commenced and quickly closed an oversubscribed Seed round led by Silicon Valley veteran, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures. This round, Hedral raised $5.5M on a $25M post-money valuation. We invested in Hedral in July 2023 at an $18M post-money valuation.

We expect these dollars to be dedicated to furthering product development to ensure higher automation coverage and commencement of a structured go to market motion focused on commercial developers. With that, we are beginning to support their efforts in expanding into the largest construction market in the world today – the Gulf.

GenLogs

$1M in ARR in Two Weeks Results in Competitive Seed Extension + Markup

Seed (November 2023): $750,000 invested by Steel Atlas Fund I with board seat

GenLogs, founded in 2023 and based in Washington DC, is a supply chain & logistics technology company that uses proprietary data + AI to track and analyze US long-haul freight in real-time. In the US, there are 27K brokers tasked with moving $1T of goods each year by placing loads from shippers on one of the 4M trucks operated by 500K individual carriers. Today, brokers attempt this market matching without the single most important piece of data for doing it efficiently, the location of each of these trucks at any point in time. Among other issues, this lack of visibility has led to trucks being empty 35% of the time (resulting in unnecessary CO2 emission) and inconsistent pricing on freight.

This problem is widely recognized in the industry, however traditional methods like GPS trackers that require buy-in and permission from individual truck owners have not been able to gain market-share due to privacy concerns. However, there is a vast amount of data being generated by the trucking industry daily, including mobile-ad-IDs and electronic logging devices. The issue is that this data is anonymized and thus not linked to a specific truck. The same problem applies to satellite imagery and traffic camera data that only reveal the presence of a truck at a certain time and place without identifying the specific vehicle (DOT number, carrier name, etc).

GenLogs has developed a proprietary approach for solving this problem scalably and without need for permission from individual truck owners. By deploying a sensor network that acts as virtual gates, GenLogs is able to generate a distinct ID for each truck that passes a sensor that can be used to deanonymize the previously mentioned datasets. This breakthrough allows GenLogs to passively track all trucks in real-time using a fusion of disparate datasets, including satellite data, mobile ad IDs, and public traffic cameras. This approach sets GenLogs apart as the key to unlocking end-to-end tracking capabilities, distinguishing it from would-be competitors like Project44 (who is using GenLogs as a pilot) and FourKites.

GenLogs chose to launch a waitlist for ten paid pilot customers for access to data from their partially deployed sensor network (deployment to be completed in 2024). In under two weeks, GenLogs booked ~$1M in ARR through ~$100K average contract value per broker. With 27K brokers in the market as clear customers, we are excited for the full product release later this year.

Given the demonstrated demand for GenLogs' product, we expect the biggest bottleneck will be customer service and account management. They need to be prepared with a team large enough to onboard and manage the many customers as well ensure they gather proprietary data to improve GenLog's AI model. As this model improves based on broker usage of the product, we believe GenLogs can ultimately replace brokers altogether – representing a $160B revenue market today.

Just four months after leading GenLogs' Seed round where Talal sits on the board, GenLogs preemptively received (without going to market to raise) term sheets from ten VCs. We chose to complete this $2.9M extension with Autotech Ventures, one of the top supply chain and transportation funds whose LP base are prime customers for GenLogs. This extension was completed at a $25M post-money valuation, a nearly ~2x markup on valuation from when we led the Pre-Seed round in November 2023 at a $13M post-money valuation. We participated in this extension to maximize our ownership target for this position.

Transmutex

Progress in Saudi Arabia + Germany for First-of-a-Kind System

Series A2 (December 2023): $1,147,700 invested by Steel Atlas Fund I with board seat

Transmutex, founded in 2019 in Geneva, is reinventing nuclear energy for a safer, cleaner future. Transmutex's innovative approach addresses the core concerns associated with nuclear energy of cost, safety and proliferation. Transmutex's technology represents a significant advancement in carbon-free energy generation that is deployable around the world.

Unlike traditional fission systems, Transmutex's system can use multiple types of fuels, including thorium, by leveraging a particle accelerator to drive a safer, non-self-sustaining reaction. Applications of the technology are extensive, spanning from efficiently breeding new fuel to replace uranium enrichment, enabling a new thorium-based fuel cycle for national security, burning the existing stockpile of long-lived nuclear waste to lower long term costs, the scalable production of medical radio-isotope for cancer treatments, and software solutions for nuclear and high-energy physics for in space and medicine.

Today, Transmutex's primary focus is securing a government commitment to lead the construction of their first-of-a-kind system. With that, we at Steel Atlas have worked to bring Saudi Arabia to the table as a potential partner. Transmutex's non-proliferant system is uniquely positioned to bring nuclear power to Saudi Arabia as the country has traditionally been held back by the US due to the proliferant nature of the traditional uranium fuel cycle. Most recently, we met with Dr. Mohammed Garwan and his team of scientists at the King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (K.A. CARE), the institute with the mandate to develop civilian nuclear energy in Saudi Arabia under the Ministry of Energy.

In Germany, Transmutex is executing an MOU for a JV to build a first-of-a-kind with the leading European isotope production company, ITM (Isotopen Technologien Munich SE). A new company has been established with the purpose of building and operating Transmutex's system in Bavaria under the name Bavaria Isotope and Fusion Fuel (BIFF) GmbH. This development is notable because Germany is the world's most staunchly anti-nuclear nation. Thus, even in Germany renewables do not address the need for clean-sovereign-baseload power. Civilian nuclear energy is on the rise and Transmutex is helping lead the way. We expect to have significant progress with one of these nations prior to the next update.

Group1

1 Ton Per Year Capacity Reached + Series A Fundraise Commencing

Seed (August 2023): $250,000 invested by Steel Atlas Fund I

Group1, founded in 2021 and based in Austin, TX, is commercializing the world's first potassium-ion batteries (KIBs), a credible alternative to LFP-based lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Their KIBs are critical-mineral-free and "drop-in" compatible with existing LIB cell manufacturing infrastructure. This makes the KIBs far easier to commercially scale than any new chemistry. Group1's chemistry promises better performance than LFP-based LIBs, comparable cycle life, faster charging, and superior low-temperature performance. This promotes domestic resilience by reducing reliance on materials from China and would allow buyers of Group1's cathode materials to access US Government incentives in the $349B committed to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).

Group1's team, originating from the famed lab of Nobel laureate Professor John Goodenough (inventor of the LIB), has a proven track record in global battery and materials commercialization. Group1 recently achieved a significant milestone with the production of a 3.7V 18650 cylindrical KIB cell, reaching 104 Wh/kg, which exceeds the majority of sodium-ion batteries on the market and low-end LFP-based LIBs. This is a substantial improvement from their MVP pouch-cell's 60 Wh/kg. Group1 is on track to reach 160-180 Wh/kg by 2025, thus exceeding the performance of LFPs.

Group1 has scaled production of their product, Kristonite™, to 1T/year, and plan to expand to 10T/year with their next fundraise. With that, Group1 has secured joint development agreements and has strong interest from blue-chip stakeholders in the US battery industry.

To that end, Group1 is commencing a $20M Series A round to complete performance developments for KIBs, scale manufacturing, and secure further funding from government agencies. Please let us know if you have any interest in introducing the team to potential strategic partners or investors for their Series A.