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obeavs 4 days ago

So, we've been down this rabbithole at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and have explored/made a couple of really big technology bets on it.

The most unique/useful applications of it in production are based on combining dependent types with database/graph queries as a means. This enables you to take something like RDF which is neat in a lot of ways but has a lot of limitations, add typing and logic to the queries, in order to generally reimagine how you think about querying databases.

For those interested in exploring this space from a "I'd like to build something real with this", I'd strongly recommend checking out TypeDB (typedb.com). It's been in development for about a decade, is faster than MongoDB for vast swaths of things, and is one of the most ergonomic frameworks we've found to designing complex data applications (Phosphor's core is similar in many ways to Palantir's ontology concept). We went into it assuming that we were exploring a brand new technology, and have found it to work pretty comprehensively for all kinds of production settings.

ubercore 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Can you expand on

"We build non-dilutive growth engines for industrial and climate technology companies by creating high quality development pipelines for institutional capital."

obeavs 4 days ago | parent [-]

Sure. Would contextualize by saying that infrastructure is a financial product: climate/industrial projects are sited in the physical world and have a hard upfront cost to produce a long term stream of cash flows, which, from a finance perspective, makes it look a lot like debt (e.g. I pay par value in order to achieve [x] cash flows with [y] risk).

When you drive past a solar project on the side of the road, you see the solar technology producing energy. But in order for a bank to fund $100M to construct the project, it has to be "developed" as if it were a long-term financial product across 15 or so major agreements (power offtake, lease agreement, property tax negotiations, etc). The fragmentation of tools and context among all the various counterparties involved to pull this sort of thing together into a creditworthy package for funding is enormously inefficient and as a result, processes which should be parallelize-able can't be parallelized, creating large amounts of risk into the project development process.

While all kinds of asset class-specific tools exist for solar or real estate or whatever, most of them are extremely limited in function because almost of those things abstract down into a narrative that you're communicating to a given party at any given time (including your own investment committee), and a vast swath of factual information represented by deterministic financial calculations and hundreds if not thousands of pages of legal documentation.

We build technology to centralize/coordinate/version control these workflows in order to unlock an order of magnitude more efficiency across that entire process in its totality. But instead of selling software, we sell those development + financing outcomes (which is where _all_ of the value is in this space), because we're actually able to scale that work far more effectively than anyone else right now.

jaggederest 4 days ago | parent [-]

Reminds me a lot of AngelList, which was initially nominally just a mailing list that connected angels and early stage startups, but eventually found that the restriction was in special purpose vehicles and automated the hard legal work of making many individual funding vehicles, and thus was behind the scenes actually a legal services company, if you squint.

esafak 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What made you choose TypeDB? What kind of performance are you getting out of it?

flyingsilverfin 2 days ago | parent [-]

Just spotted this! We (I'm CTO at TypeDB) just released some early benchmarks: https://typedb.com/blog/first-look-at-typedb-3-benchmarks/