Tech Brew Ride Home - (Portfolio Profile) Nanome.ai

Episode Date: February 25, 2023

Find out more and see demos at Nanome.ai Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus episode of the TechNeme Ride Home, another portfolio profile episode. Today, we are going to talk to one of the most exciting technology companies that we've invested in in the Right Home Fund, and a very timely one considering what's going to be happening over the first half of this year, we believe. We're going to be talking to the founders of Nanom, which is a, you know,

a VR company, but a very specific type of VR company. Actually, let me let the founders do it. First of all, Keta, introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Keta Funakawa. I'm the COO and co-founder of NANAM. And Steve. Yeah, hey, I'm Steve McCloskey, CEO, and co-founder of Nanom. So when I say that it's a unique sort of thing,

it is because this is VR, but doing really cool science shit. So whoever wants to take this away, give me the two-minute sort of elevator of what Nanome does and why it's cool science shit, like I said. Yeah, definitely. So at Nanom, we're building the ultimate interface for science, starting with molecular data.

So it's kind of like, you know, the Jarvis hologram interface that you've probably seen in Ironman when Tony Stark makes a new atom. But it's real. You know, we use off-the-shelf virtual and mixed reality hard. and you can download us on the Quest Store. And so we make software for those devices. Now at the very, very basic fundamentals,

if you strip away a lot of the other kind of features, right, one of the most kind of killer basic things, and as I like to describe it, it's kind of like those chemistry kits that you might have used in high school, except you never run out of parts in VR and AR. And then on top of that, you can apply some crazy simulation algorithms. You can connect it to supercomputers and see the atoms and molecules wiggle and jiggle.

And so combining that with the latest, you know, in AI advancements and chem informatics, it's a really, really powerful tool for researchers to make breakthroughs in AR and VR. So this is for chemists, for biologists, for people working with molecules, you know, down at the atomic level or whatnot. not. So essentially, when you say like the Tony Stark sort of thing, like, or the, what's the Tom

Cruz movie one, the one where you can move with your hand. Minority report. Right. So essentially, because again, or not again, but we'll get into how you can literally download this and demo it yourself, you can stand there in virtual reality and you can put molecules together and and manipulate them and move things around and do magic with it, essentially. Yeah, well, you know, science, right? Because, you know, through the API, we connect with like real scientific force fields and, you know, the best practices, calculations that are out there. So you could be, you know, working with your models very visually and tactfully, you know,

in VR or mixed reality now. And be, you know, interacting, kind of like grabbing the molecules, putting them into different positions. But then you could, you know, calculate very specific, you know, interaction potentials to see how well it's binding chemical properties. Really, all this fun science, you know, cheminformatics out there, this is the interface for being able to understand that and spin it up. So let's get into your backgrounds for a bit.

I'm assuming, obviously, Steve, maybe Keta as well, you have a chemical or biologist background or a scientific background at the very least. Did the idea come from one of those, boy, this is a tool that I wish I had. Maybe I should just build it for myself? Exactly, pretty much. Yeah, I mean, like, I'd grown up around video games and saw a minority report

and all the cool Hollywood movies. I grew up in North Hollywood, not too far from there. So got a lot of exposure to that type of stuff and everyone tried VR in the 1990s with a huge helmet on as a kid. And, you know, I just wanted a better interface. for nano engineering. So I was a nano engineering student at UC San Diego, a very new major,

basically everything at the nanoscale, did it with atoms, molecules, sort of everything below the size of a virus. And I wanted to get hands on. I wanted to be a real engineer with my atoms and my bits, and it just wasn't possible without, you know, kind of putting on the headset and zooming down virtually and, you know,

starting to play with things and tinkering like a real engineer gets to tinker. So, yeah, this was my way. way of fulfilling my dream of being a nano engineer in the way that I saw that it actually had to be. And we found a bunch of other folks in, you know, biotech, drug development, that really had the same vision. Like, they wanted to be able to see if this drug was binding in the, in the pocket and kind of place it there and see all the interactions occur. So, yeah, it's been a very big need for me to want this tool and to see it actually, you know, come to life with our development in progress, but then, you know, we get the same feedback from customers. Yeah, they've been

dreaming of this for like 30 years, and now it's finally here. Yeah, and my background's not really deeply in the sciences. It's a combination of computer science, media, and economics. So my passion actually has been in kind of filmmaking, digital media, photography, and stuff like that. But I also really loved kind of like actual technology and computer science. I've been coding since I was in ninth grade and like doing robotics and stuff like that in high school. And so I was always interested in like, you know, the arts as well as kind of hardcore, you know, computer science programming at the same time. And I really didn't know like what I wanted to do in my life until I tried my first

cardboard, a Google cardboard experience in 2014. And that's when, you know, the metaphor I use from kind of an artistic point of view is like this is what the painters felt like when they first experienced photography in the 19th hundreds or something where it's like, oh my God, this changes everything. And also it happened to combine all my passions at the same time, right? It was digital arts. You know, I was able to use Unity and, like, code up a few prototypes back in the day with Steve, right? And so back of the day, like, you know, so Steve and I both went to UC San Diego. And like, we were the only two undergrads that were kind of seriously doing VR stuff on campus. And so, you know, at that time, and even kind of to this day, you know, there's a lot of like zombie shooters and roller coasters in VR, but I was always like there ought to be a better use for this technology, right? And I, you know, so when Steve was like, yeah, man, like molecules in science, and I'm like, yeah, of course, like Tony Stark, like, full on Jarvis, like, let's do this, right? So, you know, one fun fact, kind of early on when I first met Steve speaking of

him like wanting to tinker on stuff like Steve converted his car to run off of vegetable oil in high school or was it high school college right and so I like I saw that I'm like wow this awesome like let's you know and like going down to the molecule level and he like able to explain it like what's happening at the chemical level and then you just do these hand wavy motions like oh yeah like you know this part would go like this at the molecule level and stuff and I'm like, man, if only we could actually see this in 3D and actually collaborate and talk about this. And he's like, yeah, exactly, right? And so it's like, it all kind of came together when we met in 2014, 2015. Right. So that actually leads me to, you know, one of the sort of like founding issues for you have a

great idea, but the technology maybe isn't there yet. And so if we're talking 2014, 2015, this is when, you know, the Oculus Rift is sort of, you know, coming to the fore. Like, Is it one of those things where it's like, oh, wait, technology might be ready for this idea? Either if that's part of the founding story, or I guess what I'm kind of poking at is, like, is that something that you all have been dealing with throughout the entire story of this company, which is we know where we want to go and we have to wait for this platform or this technology to get? to where we want to go? Yeah, that's been a bit of it. Yeah, 2014, I got the Oculus developer kit too. It was a six-d-off headset with no controllers.

And, yeah, there was only so much you could do. So you could show people that they could, you know, look around the protein. But to try to grab it, you know, we had to use the six cents like motion controllers or the Razor Hydra's, actually. And it was very limiting. You know, it wasn't tracked that well magnetically and then also it had wires. But it kind of showed the concept a little bit. And then we get the Vive pre-developer kit, boom.

And then like that was a big deal because then we had good hand tracking, good head tracking. You get your hands in there, start grabbing things. And we improve the prototype. And so like every hardware generation that comes out, we get to show like more of the vision becoming real. But yeah, some of it is just, you know, waiting. I don't know when Apple is going to release their headset or, you know, other hardware players. But this technology gets better every year. And it's not slowing down.

And so every time that there's a big. hardware improvement. It helps us. It helps our customers. And it definitely gets to that far vision of like, this is going to be the ultimate interface for science that everyone's using and developing new technology on. What's interesting on that aspect real quick, I wanted to add is that, you know, when we back in the early days on campus, like we did a bunch of like, you know, business accelerator, startup competitions, that sort of thing that forced us to ask really tough questions about, you know, who's their customer, why are they going to use it, all these types of things.

And what we found back in the day, and even to this day, what's fascinating is that our users, like, they've been the ones that were pushing for 3D TVs, like buying, you know, the green and red 3D glasses just to be able to get an inkling of an idea of the three-dimensionality of their molecules, right? And so I feel like the, you know, it's not necessarily, you know, our software waiting for the hardware to catch up, but it's more, I feel like, the problem. and then the demand of our end user base that's always been wanting this,

that has been kind of feeling the supply side, if that makes sense as well. Yeah, and it's also this gets into sort of the use case of the technology, which is, you know, mentioned at the beginning, there's a lot of games on VR and AR and

XR and stuff like that, because that seems to be like sort of, like the most obvious thing. And games is a good way into the technology. But like, you know, people have been intuiting for decades that there is real practical applications to this. And it's, you know, I make a lot of jokes on the show about how Mark Zuckerberg wants us to have our meetings in virtual reality with no legs. But this is a, this is different than that because this is like what he's imagining whiteboarding, you know, and plotting on charts and things like that. But taking them to the next level, because what essentially scientists are able to do with this,

it's sort of like something that they couldn't do before in the same way that, like, before the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was something that, like, transformed how things were able to be done by people. And this is sort of like that. It's not just you can collaborate. It's not just that you can show your molecule and here's a model or whatever. But you can manipulate and you can collaborate in real time and you can do stuff that was not possible without this technology. Yeah, they literally have been dreaming of this for decades. And they tried every system.

You know, Silicon graphics back in the 90s. It was like Hollywood using those. And then the scientists are trying to get better models of their protein. And then you look at the cave systems. Like they had these huge 3D projector on every wall, the ceiling, the floor type of rooms. You have multi-million dollar setups just to be able to have that experience where you're with your scientific colleagues, you're understanding the protein bonding pocket. You're kind of getting that three-dimensional view. And now this thing is commoditized.

For a few hundred bucks, you get a VR headset. It's connected through the network so you don't ever need to be physically located in the same space. You can be anywhere in the world. and you can get a higher quality experience when you're interacting with that molecular data. And like Keda said, when we were at UC San Diego, we got to actually interact with a ton of researchers

that were working on everything from, you know, cutting edge nanoengineering and sort of biology and that field, but everyone like computer science and virtual reality. There were researchers that have been doing this for decades as well, working on 3D user interface design or interactions, coding their own VR development programs for like scientific data and like anatomy data.

And, you know, there was all very experimental research, but, you know, we're in the position where now we get to commercialize this type of technology and actually bring it out to, you know, all the scientists out there and hopefully, you know, create new scientists in the world as well. Well, that's a good time to mention that you can try this out yourself. If you have a quest or Quest 2 or what platforms are you on right now? pretty much all of them except for ones that don't have hand controllers. So essentially like HoloLens is the only exception, as well as like magically because they only have one controller.

But if you notice, you know, like PCBR, Steam VR, so index, Vive, right, like all those headsets. We're even on the Pico Neo business store as well. So yeah. Well, and you can, if you don't have VR rigs, you can also go to. nanom.aI, N-A-N-O-M-E-D-A-I to see videos of, like, you know, this stuff in action. In the chat, Steve just shared that Ballagy also made the same analogy that I did, which I did not know about, he says, this is from a few years ago, a tweet where when he used Nanom recently with a colleague, I felt like an accountant that had just seen his first electronic spreadsheet.

So great minds think alike there in terms of analogies. The context on that, that was actually during the pandemic. And so we're helping a lot with a bunch of pandemic research. And I'm pretty sure that's how he got exposed. So, okay. So who is using this right now, like not naming like, you know, clients or things like the bitch? Like, okay. And let me, you can obviously hear listeners that Brian doesn't know much about this.

One of the beauties of having great LPs in the fund is that, you know, I was able to lean on. LP that is a big-time scientists at a big-time biotech to demo this stuff with me. And he was like, Brian, invest in this. This is game-changing. So explain to me who's using this now and what they're using it for and, you know, right now today, the actual use case. Yeah. So real quickly, we actually can share some of the names, one being Novartis because we wrote a paper with them that we published in 2019. Another one is actually Genentech. slash Roche that we just did a webinar with in December of last year. And so overall, we actually have over half of the top 20 pharma as our customers already, as well as a lot of a few dozen like smaller

biotechs, not necessarily top pharma but biotech startups and folks like that. In terms of the use case and who's using it, it's really, we're focused right now on early stage drug discovery. And so there's already kind of a, you know, a subsect of that called CAD with two D's computer-aided drug discovery. And so that's pretty much where most of our users lie. And those are like computational chemists, medicinal chemists, as well as structural biologists. So really kind of cross-disciplinary teams

that are working on the early stages of drug discovery. But we also have non-biofarmia customers as well, including a food and beverage company that we can't name yet, but as well as chemical engineering companies. So even though we're kind of focused as a startup, you know, within our first vertical of biopharma, the applications extend far beyond biopharma, because everything is made out of atoms and molecules.

And the idea here is literally building the atoms and molecules and block by block, putting the Legos together. But also, I brought up the Zuckerberg meetings analogy. So you can collaborate across teams across the world. And so it's showing off, it's not just showing off what you've been working on, but you can also work collaboratively together, right? That's a key part of, this is actually the dream of VR made real where it's like, it's not just that distances and borders are erased, but it's also, again, doing the sort

of work that wouldn't be possible in Meetspace because you're able to do the sort of walk around it and take a look at it. and make your point and make changes all in real time together. Exactly. I mean, you hold in your hand kind of point at different locations. There's a lot of analysis in the collaboration as well. So you could totally go in and make modifications and design your new molecule. But now there's so many tools out there that are screening through libraries.

You need to understand the top hits and kind of select that ever and more. So if you have like a thousand top molecules, you want to get that down to like your top 20 that you actually want to synthesize and test. Just that process of getting the team on the same page to look at all that Ken Informatics data and see the three-dimensional structures like side by side and make the best decisions. That's done at a lot of group meetings. They have molecule review sessions. A lot of the medicinal chemists will be presenting their molecules and say,

hey, these are the ones I generated. These are the different scores and values associated with them. Maybe this is different how they did on a physical assay, like, tests like in terms of integrating experimental data and having that as just a data point. So there's all these pieces of information, different AI generated molecules out there now too. But being able to decipher that and really truly understand it as an individual is already hard enough. But then getting the group on the same page where everybody understands it and where to take the project forward, you know, things like that could save literally months of

time off of the pharmaceutical development pipeline, just getting everyone aligned on the same page and understand what's working, what's not working, what they need to kill, and what they need to do more of. Well, and this is another way to think of it, for those of us not in these fields, is this is almost a development platform too, right? Like, you're testing things, you're able to almost like run experiments and like, this works, but that doesn't work. And so, So it's not just, again, a presentation tool. It's also sort of like a development platform for figuring out what does work or getting ideas and stuff like that, right?

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean, just getting everyone, you know, they're in the same space. There's a lot of questions that come up and like, oh, what if we tweak that? And you can just reach in and tweak it and like just get the answer to your question immediately. So yeah, that real-time feedback is really awesome for the, you know, collaborative. aspects of the program. Well, and one of the other things that the LP told me is he was like, you know, this is an amazing time saver.

Like, you know, this is one of those things that we can do what used to take weeks or months of back and forth, and we can do it in one shot and then immediately, you know, break a logjam or something like that. Exactly. And, yeah, we've heard stories about that. Yeah, we've worked on case studies kind of showing the, you know, immediate new insight leading to a complete change of either what molecules they were synthesizing or what tests they were running. But yeah, just one little insight could really change your perspective on how you look at these

things because with science, you know, there's a lot of open questions and you're trying to, you know, come up with some good ideas that you might want to test and validate or invalidate. And if you could, yeah, increase the feedback cycle or I guess decrease the amount of time in that feedback cycle, you could just. you know, get so much more, you know, good research and science done. So, you know, personally, like, I wanted to see better healthcare, better technology in society. And so the more that we can enable people to move quicker, you know, get their drugs to market, develop new, you know, flavors and other, you know, industries that we also hop with molecularly. I just want to see

more of it. Yeah, I want to live in that crazy, cool future world. And this is, you know, our part to help us get there. Um, if you don't mind, let me zoom. out for just a second and ask you where you all feel the XR, VR, AR space is at the moment in the sense that, and again, you know, if there's things that we can't talk about publicly yet or whatever, I get all that. But Apple, we believe, is going to at WWDC demo, whatever they're going to do. So there's a lot of speculation that even though they're going to come in at the high end, you know, how many people will buy a $3,000 headset if that's what it comes in at, questionable. But it's one of those things where Apple tends to prove a market, you know, for wearables, for smartphones, for, you know, you name it. And so just at, you know, a 30,000 foot level. And again, like we've discussed earlier, like, you know, boy, if the technology is, almost ready for what we are imagining or whatever.

Where do you feel that the VR space is in terms of, are we on the cusp of like a new era? Are we still waiting on mass adoption? Both of you just for whatever thoughts you have in terms of VR as a space? You go first, Steve. I mean, it's not the 90s, right? Right. You know, like people in the early days in the 2015, 16,

you know, it's a VR done in the 90s, what are you guys ever doing? And, you know, it's like, yeah, the technology was not ready. Like we didn't have cell phones. And so the fact that we have cell phones and miniaturized technology now, high pixel density displays, you know, that all really led to the current generation of VR and mixed reality.

So, you know, now I think that putting that together, you know, a cell phone pixel display into a headset with a few lenses is kind of easy to do. So we're seeing a lot more different like third party random developers like big screen VR developing their own headset. So I think that headsets are not going away. The adoption curve has been a little bit slower than cell phones, I think, just because cell phones had been around 90s, 2000s, people had flip phones and all that. But then the smartphone came out and it was like, oh, this is the obvious thing that we've all wanted. But there were enough people already onboarded to the whole

like cell phone idea before getting smartphones. So now it's like, you know, there's a lot of stuff that works in 2D. You know, I still do emails and like a lot of 2D stuff. But for the aspects of, you know, three dimensions, you know, molecules in particular without a lot of 90 degree angles, these things are really hard to analyze. And so I think it's the perfect time for, yeah, these applications where VR just makes so much more sense. You are as being one of them.

So I don't think that that's going away. The developers are, sorry, the headset developers are getting, more into the business enterprise use cases. Like we've always been, you know, science enterprise business like since day one. And they've been very much focused on gaming. But now I think they're getting outside of the gaming entertainment world, kind of getting it into more business applications.

And I think that that's going to just be a no brainer for businesses that can save money and, you know, make better stuff for their business. Like, you know, if the ROIs there, they're just going to keep going for it. But yeah, like you said, Apple coming out with the new headset, you know, it's going to be kind of a new era. era of just consumer adoption and awareness. Even if it is 3,000, all the developers are going to get at this round, the next round on the Gen 2, hopefully the price comes down.

A lot more people just kind of treat it as a normal thing. I'm like, oh, yeah, I got my TV, I've got my smartphone, and I've got my three-dimensional thing. And whenever I want to do 3D things, like this is the best interface for experiencing that. So yeah, I'm excited. I think Apple getting into the game is going to be a huge. leap forward for just everyone in the industry to have it be more accepted as a technology that's here to stay and that's going to just keep getting better with the iPhone 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 type of situation.

Yeah, I'll say some very quick things here. The Google cardboard was a double-edged sword, right? I think, you know, for people like me, I was like, oh, my God, I know this is where this is going in a macro sense. I need to be a part of this, right? But for a lot of folks, it was just like slide in a phone. I guess this is VR, I get motion sick. I don't like VR anymore, right?

And like we've, you know, Steve and I have demoed countless people who haven't tried, you know, the actual like desktop, you know, Oculus Rift or the vibe or even the quest lately, right? Like people just think that the sliding into your phone, that's VR. And then we demo these folks, you know, actual VR and they're like, oh my God, I didn't know. Like when you have your hands and we can move around naturally, turns out you don't get motion sick as much. And so I think that narrative is probably going to be greatly amplified.

That's my prediction with the kind of the Apple headset, is that more people are going to be like, oh, this I could do kind of thing, rather than dealing with cardboard VR, right? And then the other thing is the, I think meta got a lot of kind of key for like the half-bakedness, if you will, of the Quest Pro of like, is it, is it consumer? Is it actually professional? Like, we don't know. And I think that a lot of it is valid.

But I do think that there's a portion, which is that, you know, we've seen a tremendous amount of, like, really, really high-end enterprise VR stuff, which is great for, like, industrial use cases. You know, you're training fighter, pilot jets and stuff like that. Like, great, awesome. But, like, for us, there is, like, this kind of, you know, medium where it needs to be a little bit more scalable, like, maybe essentially, like, high-end iPad price point that allows it to be deployed in fleets, right? but still use in an enterprise setting. And I think that like that sort of headsets didn't necessarily exist before the Quest Pro, kind of with the Bifocus 3,

and now it's starting to, I think, catch on with the XR elite from HCC and stuff like that. So I'm really kind of hopeful and bullish in that direction, if that makes sense. So to wrap up again, if you want to see what we're talking about and you've got VR stuff, search for nanomene,

There's also the website, N-A-N-O-M-E-A-I. But guys, to wrap up, are there any asks for the audience in terms of if people want to get involved, if people are excited about this, and want to contribute, just tell me anything about if people are excited about this technology and want to learn more how they can do so. Yeah, you know, one kind of quick anecdote here is that a lot of people, when we demo them, like, oh, man, if I only had this, I would have been a chemist or a biologist. And my reaction is, you know, twofold. One is like, I'm flattered.

But another hand, it's like, it's not too late, right? Like, buy a $300 quest and, like, start learning chemistry, right? And, you know, one thing that we didn't really talk about so far is, like, we have over 250 universities that use nanom as a replacement for the ball and stick models, right? And so, you know, like, I've had family members that are like, oh, yeah, like, I learned what, you know, like, what a hydrogen bond is, like, just by looking at, you know, nanom and stuff like, that. So definitely like download nano, like learn chemistry. You know, it's a great tool to be able to just learn some really fundamental basics. But, you know, on kind of the business side of things, you know, if you know, you know, CIOs or scientists, you know, drug discovery researchers, send them our way. We're always trying to, you know, I mentioned we're in half of the top 20

pharmas. We'd love to get into the other half and continue to get a lot more customer traction. So I would say those are the ask for my end. Yeah, I'd definitely like to see more established biotex and pharmaceutical companies adopting this. We already have the privilege of working with quite a number of the industry, but definitely getting our word out there. But in terms of long-term future, I think that you can download the software today, go onto your quest to or whatever other VR-enabled device, and start watching content from scientists, like literally explaining biochemistry and all this stuff.

So personally, I would like to see more scientists in the world. And so if you're interested in learning, there is a free bird. version to get started, sort of download nano, start playing with it. But then I also want to see the world where there's just more like biotech science going on. So I do think that a lot of people can use this software to make new molecules, kind of share that with people. Maybe everyone in the future have this whole digital biotech economy where people are able to, you know, create things, share them with each other. Maybe everyone spin up their own, you know, decentralized companies and sort of things like

that to help enable the science. So yeah, I guess I'm a bit of a futurist, but not too late. You get started even if you don't have a science background. But if you do, I think you'll find it very, very entertaining and mind-blowing if you've been waiting for this. Mind-blowing is the right way to end this. This is one of those, you know, the cliche is hashtag proud investor. But like, this is one of those where I'm like, oh, man, this is a dent in the universe sort

of investment. so I'm super thrilled that the Ride Home Fund is participating with what you guys are doing. Thank you for both of you for coming on and telling us all about Nanom, and it's just really exciting, awesome stuff, guys. Cool, yeah, thanks a lot, Brian. And yeah, thanks everyone for listening.