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.