As 2025 came to a close, conversations about AI swung between excitement and anxiety. Markets debated bubbles, capital cycles, and constraints, while researchers quietly shipped systems that worked.
In this audio essay, Nathan Benaich takes stock of what AI actually delivered in 2025 — drawing on recent writing by Tim Dettmers, Dan Fu, and Andrej Karpathy, alongside conversations with Sebastian Borgeaud at Google DeepMind.
Rather than speculating about distant futures, this episode focuses on what changed in practice: why AI crossed a usability threshold, how constraints reshaped progress rather than stopping it, and why the shift from models to systems matters more than any single benchmark.
The result is a grounded look at AI progress as it enters 2026 — not as hype or prediction, but as an evolving system that continues to compound.
Read the full essay at press.airstreet.com
Delfa is an AI-first clinical trials software company. In this episode, we explore how Delfa’s AI-first Participant Relationship Management system transforms clinical trial operations, speeds recruitment, and helps bring medicines to patients faster.
New AI research systems are beginning to contribute verifiable results across mathematics, physics, biology, and materials science. How close are we to AI producing genuinely new scientific knowledge?
A deep dive into world models, VLAMs, planning layers and real deployments from robotics companies Sereact and Wayve - and what comes next for embodied AI.
Today, I’m excited to unveil Air Street’s investment in Black Forest Labs as it announces a landmark funding milestone: a $300M Series B, following a previously unannounced Series A. Together, these rounds represent a big step in scaling the company’s momentum, with Black Forest Labs now capitalised with half a billion dollars and trusted by leading Fortune 500 enterprises.
Welcome to the latest issue of the State of AI, an editorialized newsletter that covers the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the last month.
Building the first AI-native wealth institution for the mass affluent. Air Street Capital is investing in Clove’s $14M first financing round, backing a new kind of wealth institution built for this generation rather than the last. Clove’s founders, Christian Owens and Alex Loizou, see this gap not as an inevitability but as a result of infrastructure that was never built for the modern consumer. With Clove, they are creating a new kind of financial institution, one designed from the ground up for people who want trustworthy guidance but have been priced out or ignored by traditional services. Their platform brings together regulated human advisors with an AI-first environment that handles the repetitive and compliance heavy processes which dominate advisory work today. By removing friction and expanding advisor capacity, Clove can deliver high quality personalised guidance at a scale that has not been possible before.
Profluent builds frontier AI systems to unlock programmable biology. Now, Profluent has raised $106M led by Bezos Expeditions and Altimeter, with continued support from Spark, Insight, and Air Street. The company is now the largest position in Air Street’s second fund. This new capital accelerates the company’s path toward scaling frontier protein models and, ultimately, delivering the first AI-designed therapeutic to a human patient.
Understanding how protein sequence encodes structure and function remains one of the central challenges in the life sciences. Yet most protein language models still treat each sequence as an isolated datapoint. This forces the entire burden of evolutionary context into model parameters, which leads to blind spots in underrepresented families and amplifies the biases of sequence databases. Profluent’s new E1 family demonstrates that this constraint is no longer necessary. Retrieval augmentation, a technique that transformed natural language processing, is now beginning to reshape protein modeling by allowing models to incorporate evolutionary information at the moment of inference rather than storing it all in weights.
Poolside is building one of the strongest full-stack AI companies in the world: energy, compute, models, and the infrastructure needed to run multi-agent systems for complex enterprise workflows. The Fern team brings a deeply opinionated agentic core - built from first principles and stress-tested on real workloads - into a company with scale, distribution, and compute firepower. Fern’s architecture was built for agent specialization and coordinated long-horizon work - the exact capabilities poolside can scale into a full production environment.
Welcome to the latest issue of the State of AI, an editorialized newsletter formerly known as Guide to AI that covers the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the last month. First up, a few reminders:
Read more on press.airstreet.com
PARIMA, a global leader in cultivated proteins, has become the first European company to secure regulatory approval for cultivated meat, with the Singapore Food Agency granting clearance for its cultivated chicken. It’s a historic moment for Europe’s food-tech sector, but one that’s unfolding thousands of miles away from home.
Building a next-generation food company.
Integrating across compute, power, and intelligence.
The State of AI Report is the most widely read and trusted analysis of key developments in AI. Published annually since 2018, the open-access report aims to spark informed conversation about the state of AI and what it means for the future. Produced by AI investor Nathan Benaich and Air Street Capital. State of AI Report 2025 is reviewed by leading AI practioners in industry and research.
AI is the ultimate force multiplier on technological progress in our digital, data-driven world. Our mission at Air Street Capital has always been to back the most ambitious teams building breakthrough AI products that would have seemed like magic when I started investing over a decade ago. Key to these inflection points is the infrastructure that enables them: NVIDIA computing systems. I have long argued that NVIDIA is the defining company of the AI era, powering breakthroughs in science, industry, and national strategy. This is why I’m excited to share that we are deepening that story together: Air Street Capital is partnering with NVIDIA as part of its new £2B commitment to the UK AI ecosystem.
Clinical trials are the bottleneck of the pharmaceutical industry. They’re slow, expensive, and often fail, not only because the science frequently doesn’t pan out, but because the ops don’t either.
That’s why we’re leading the $3.8M Seed round for Delfa. The team is building an AI-native operating system for clinical trials, starting with patient enrolment, the most broken part of the process.
We’re excited to announce Air Street Capital’s lead investment in Studio Atelico’s $5M Seed round, alongside friends including Chris Ré (Stanford), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), and Alex Ratner (Snorkel), to back a team on a mission to redefine the role of generative AI in games.
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the last month.
Gene editing has the potential to solve fundamental challenges in agriculture, biotechnology and human health. CRISPR-based gene editors derived from microorganisms, although powerful, often show notable functional tradeoffs when ported into non-native environments, such as human cells1. Artificial-intelligence-enabled design provides a powerful alternative with the potential to bypass evolutionary constraints and generate editors with optimal properties. Here, using large language models2 trained on biological diversity at scale, we demonstrate successful precision editing of the human genome with a programmable gene editor designed with artificial intelligence. To achieve this goal, we curated a dataset of more than 1 million CRISPR operons through systematic mining of 26 terabases of assembled genomes and metagenomes. We demonstrate the capacity of our models by generating 4.8× the number of protein clusters across CRISPR–Cas families found in nature and tailoring single-guide RNA sequences for Cas9-like effector proteins. Several of the generated gene editors show comparable or improved activity and specificity relative to SpCas9, the prototypical gene editing effector, while being 400 mutations away in sequence. Finally, we demonstrate that an artificial-intelligence-generated gene editor, denoted as OpenCRISPR-1, exhibits compatibility with base editing. We release OpenCRISPR-1 to facilitate broad, ethical use across research and commercial applications.