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:

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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.