The more robotics and manufacturing founders I talk to, the more I realize how scarce electrical engineers seem to be. As an EE myself, that’s surprising. But after years of talent gravitating toward software, maybe it shouldn’t be. AI is making code easier to write, but we’re entering an era where we need to build actual machines. You can vibe code a PCB, but electrical engineering still feels like a much bigger barrier to entry than software. I think EEs are about to become a lot more valuable.

Robotics has a distribution problem. Today, Ultra is announcing $62M in funding to solve it, including a $50M Series A led by @hiFramework. We believe that deployment is the bottleneck in robotics. It’s relatively easy to make a robot look impressive in a controlled environment. It’s much harder to put a robot into the open world, make it useful, keep it running, earn the trust of the people working alongside it, and do that over and over and over again. So that’s what we’re focusing on.

Introducing Palatial Mad Max, a state-of-the-art parametric generation agent that unlocks scalable Real2Sim for robotics and physical AI. It's a generalized agent that can create extremely detailed SimReady assets with precise articulated parts and grounded physics properties designed for dexterous manipulation tasks. Try it now at dashboard.palatial.cloud (1/4)

Many of the great VC firms and solo GPs started out with funds of $10M or less. These micro VC firms have a risk appetite which is crucial to the industry, and play an important role in seeding risk capital where larger firms cannot. "Micro VCs play a pivotal role in democratizing access to entrepreneurial finance by allowing ventures to get funding from a new type of investors. Moreover, micro VCs encourage more kinds of limited partners to access the VC industry." - Micro VC (2022) Unfortunately, the associated regulatory costs make operating at this scale incredibly difficult in the UK. Admin and compliance often consumes about $1.4M of a $10M UK fund, versus just $450k in the US. As a result of this high cost, the median fund size in the US was $20M in 2024, in the UK (with just 3% of the volume) it was $88M. So, the UK not only has lower total venture capital volume, it also has fewer small funds — the worst of both worlds. This is a major bottleneck, but there is a fix. If you're interested in hearing more, drop me a DM. (Credit to @cupazhou and @samhuleatt for the graphic below, from The Side Letter.) Micro VC paper: eiexchange.com/api/submissio…

Palatial was just featured in @BusinessInsider's inaugural list of the 25 most promising robotics startups of 2026, alongside pioneering firms like @SkildAI, @GeneralistAI, @fieldai_, @UnitreeRobotics, and @foxglove. Physical AI raised $16.3B in Q1 alone, and simulation is the layer that will unlock scale for all of it. Thanks @hlynakim for the nomination! Tune in later this week to see what the team has been cooking up!