Playground Global

Agility Robotics CEO Peggy Johnson explains why the true value of humanoid robots is doing real paid deployments for companies – not backflips. Read the story by Lila MacLellan in The Wall Street Journal here: https://lnkd.in/gjXCxzxa

Congrats to Wyatt McDonnell and the Infinimmune team on closing a $75M Series A to advance next-gen antibody treatments for atopic dermatitis (eczema) and other inflammatory diseases. Infinimmune's Anthrobody platform directly discovers antibodies from the human immune system, screening millions of memory B cells to identify naturally occurring, fully human antibodies with real therapeutic potential.  Patients could take medicines far less often, with better results. Playground has backed Infinimmune since its founding, and we're proud to co-lead this round alongside Regeneron Ventures, with new investors RA Capital Management, Goldcrest Capital, Forge Life Science Partners, @Godfrey Capital, and Wild Tree Ventures, as well as existing investors Merck Global Healthcare Innovation Fund, Pear VC, and others. As our own Benjamin Kim Kim put it: "This platform delivers a level of potency, half-life, and developability that traditional discovery approaches haven't matched. " Excited to see these programs move toward the clinic.

“We’re getting to this point where we’re starting to understand biology at a completely different level,” – Daniel Chen, M.D. Ph.D. CEO and Founder of Synthetic Design Lab in Nature article: Cancer-fighting antibodies with a one-two punch take aim at tumours https://lnkd.in/dMkngU7C

Playground is proud to share that we’ve invested in Photon Queue. Quantum computing has a scale problem, and it's not about qubits. It's about getting photons to move, store, and synchronize across a network with the precision the next era of computing demands. That's exactly the infrastructure Photon Queue is building: room-temperature quantum memory systems that keep photons in sync across complex quantum networks. In less than two years, Photon Queue has taken technology from the lab to deployed commercial hardware with Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Maryland, proof that quantum memory is becoming essential infrastructure. We are thrilled to work with  Nathan Arnold, Kelsey Ortiz, and the entire team, with Playground investor Marissa Ramirez de Chanlatte joining the board.

PicoJool Inc. CEO and Founder Al Yuen talks to Austin Lyons of Creative Strategies, Inc. about introducing 200G VSCELs and MicroVSCELs for scale up AI data centers https://lnkd.in/gDc-YRe6

PsiQuantum featured in MIT Tech Review. PsiQuantum is building the world's first fault-tolerant, million-qubit quantum computer — the scale needed to move quantum computing from the lab into real-world use. https://lnkd.in/g8hj83Rn

We're excited to welcome South Korea-based Prazer Therapeutics to the Playground portfolio. Prazer has developed a differentiated targeted protein degradation platform with the potential to address diseases that have remained out of reach for conventional approaches, including neurodegenerative disorders. We’re proud to back this team building a new therapeutic platform for some of biology’s hardest problems. Kyung-Soo Inn Kim jory bell Nicole Sonnert https://lnkd.in/g5fRB5E5

Welcome to Playground, Alexandra Seymour! We're excited to welcome Alexandra as our new Senior Director, Government Affairs, where she'll lead global government strategy for our next-generation compute and automation companies, with a focus on expanding partnerships across the Asia-Pacific region. Alexandra brings extensive experience from the White House, National Security Council, Pentagon, Capitol Hill, and the Center for a New American Security, where she helped shape policy on cybersecurity, AI, quantum technologies, critical infrastructure, and the CHIPS and Science Act.

Three weeks ago, Playground hosted Tech's Next Frontier: Building the Foundation for an AI World as part of Deep Tech Week in San Francisco. We brought together founders, engineers, researchers, investors, and members of the broader deep tech community for an evening of thoughtful discussion on the technologies shaping the future of AI. Here's a look back at some highlights. 💡 Andrew Côté Kendra Perlitz Peter Barrett Rahul Meka Marissa Ramirez de Chanlatte Cynthia Liao Vertical Semiconductor Ed Doe Delos Data Michael Lafferty Snowcap Compute Inc. Nicholas Kelez xLight Inc.Giota Kalogirou