Escher Capital
Insights

Notes on raising, and on being underwritten

What we learn running campaigns and reading models, written for founders who are about to be asked hard questions.

Four people around a table in a softly lit Manhattan lounge, reviewing documents and notes
What we learn from the questions investors ask after the deck is closed
08 Mar 2025
1 min
Infrastructure

Solving Stargate and Apple $500B AI Data Center Roadblocks

As tech giants rush to build massive data centers, they're suddenly encountering 2-4 year waits for power grid hookups and diesel generators. These bottlenecks threaten to derail rapid expansion and slow the entire AI industry. Our Solid Hydrogen Battery from SolidState H2 offers a game-changing solution by providing scalable off-grid power and backup capabilities way beyond traditional energy storage, ensuring uninterrupted operations and reducing reliance on traditional grid connections.

18 Jan 2025
3 min
Investors

Is Mark Andreessen’s 50% Healthcare Forecast Too Bold — or Too Real?

Mark Andreessen’s prediction that healthcare spending could reach 50% of GDP by 2062 raises urgent questions about sustainability, especially as current trends point to a financial breaking point long before then. With national debt already at 125% of GDP and healthcare costs accelerating, the system risks collapse without transformative intervention. Companies like Hygia, with their Agentic-First approach and innovative "Mesh of Specialized Agents," offer a path to streamline care, reduce inefficiencies, and slow the runaway growth of healthcare spending.Blog post description.

14 Jan 2025
2 min
Portfolio

Aerie: Redefining Luxury Living with Unmatched Security and Sustainability

The devastating LA fires underscore the need for secure, resilient living spaces—a challenge Al and Naomi Corbi are addressing with Aerie. This groundbreaking residential concept integrates state-of-the-art security features, such as biometric access, off-grid capabilities, and cyber-shielded environments, all while maintaining luxury and comfort. Supported by Escher Capital, Aerie ties seamlessly into a larger ecosystem of sustainable innovations, setting a new standard for safety and sustainability in uncertain times.

07 Jan 2025
4 min
Infrastructure

Microsoft's $80B AI Data Center Push Creates Opportunity for Clean Hydrogen Power

Microsoft is investing $80 billion in AI data center infrastructure by 2025, driving a massive surge in energy demand. With the tech industry collectively set to spend $270B on data centers in 2025, a shortfall of up to 70 GW of power is projected within five years. The real challenge? Sustainability. Emissions are soaring across Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, threatening their carbon goals. Enter Sapphire Hydrogen’s game-changing FARST technology, offering scalable, low-carbon hydrogen solutions that could power the AI revolution sustainably. Discover how innovation can make AI growth sustainable:

30 Dec 2024
6 min
Perspective

AI Charm - a 40 Year Journey - 1984 to 224

2024 was a year of inspiring AI innovation, with it achieving lifelike abilities in so many areas. From ChatGPT O3’s genius math scores to Eleven Labs’ voices and Heygen’s streaming avatars, the advancements are remarkable. This article traces how it all may have started—with Steve Jobs having the original Mac introduce itself and Siri becoming our humble iPhone servant. Along the way, it explores milestones like Watson’s Jeopardy! win and DeepMind’s AlphaGo triumph. At each stage, especially with Gen AI, the fast-moving startups have delivered just as many surprises. Congrats to all of those founders and the next up-and-coming ones.

30 Dec 2024
7 min
Valuation

AI Enhanced Growth Company Valuations

This article explores how AI enhances growth company valuation methods by streamlining data gathering, automating modeling, and improving accuracy across six approaches, including the Scorecard, VC Investor, Comparable Deals, Discounted Cash Flow, Book Value, and 409A Valuation. AI tools like GenAI can generate revenue forecasts, analyze comparable deals, and calculate industry multiples, making valuations more efficient and data-driven. By integrating AI into these methods, stakeholders can save time, reduce subjectivity, and leverage actionable insights to make better-informed decisions.

30 Dec 2024
4 min
Market research

AI Enhanced Market Research Vector Stores & Workflows

Modern market analysis is being transformed by the integration of AI with the traditional TAM/SAM/SOM framework, enabling both top-down and bottom-up approaches to become more sophisticated and accurate. Through the use of vector databases and multi-agent AI systems, companies can now analyze historical market patterns across different sectors, identifying similar growth trajectories and market share development patterns from category creators like ZocDoc to market disruptors like Red Bull. The implementation of AI workflows, connecting data collection, analysis, visualization, and integration agents, allows for real-time market sizing updates and dynamic visualizations through tools like LucidChart and Miro. While AI significantly enhances the speed and accuracy of market sizing, human oversight remains crucial for strategic interpretation and decision-making, creating a powerful combination of artificial and human intelligence in market analysis.

30 Dec 2024
5 min
AI markets

China's DeepSeek AI: 10x Gain for the Global Agent Economy

As 2024 ends, a small startup from China, DeepSeek, has delivered a game-changing AI model, perfectly timed for the rise of the Agent Economy in 2025. This open-source LLM outperforms top models like GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 but was trained for under $6M—less than 1/10 the cost of industry giants. Trade sanctions blocking Nvidia's cutting-edge H100 chips sparked this efficiency leap, achieved through a Mixture-of-Experts design, advanced load balancing and other insights. The full article explores how this dramatic drop in cost will reshape the AI Agent and VC capital landscape in 2025.Blog post description.

30 Dec 2024
3 min
AI markets

The Mesh Has You: Why McKinsey & Top Firms Are Betting on AI's Next Wave

In The Matrix's iconic opening scene, Neo sees "The Matrix Has You" on his computer screen, revealing a hidden digital reality. Today, enterprises are experiencing a similar awakening as Microsoft Copilot Studio and Salesforce Agentforce 2.0 unveil the next evolution of AI: the Agentic Mesh. Using Copilot Studio, McKinsey demonstrated how an Engagement Management Agent was reducing lead time by 90% and administrative work by 30%. And Accenture showed how Agentforce transformed their teams work in Slack to go way beyond CRM automation for their 774k workforce. This article describes the timeline for the evolution of an infrastructure to support this Agentic Mesh.