
Weekly Dose of Optimism #212
THE SO WHAT
A cross-cut of Vironexis, Solcoa, Terraform, Joby, and Meta’s VR work is a reminder that capital is still flowing into hard tech and frontier interfaces, not just LLM wrappers. If you’re fundraising, anchor your story in a real technical or regulatory wedge—momentum capital is chasing those, not generic AI pitches.
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