Electrification isn’t easy—and most people don’t see the chaos beneath the solar panels, batteries, EV chargers, and heat pumps going onto the grid. Coperniq cofounder and CTO Max Kazakov breaks down the hidden workflows behind distributed energy: legacy tools installers still rely on, hardware that doesn’t want to integrate, and why the next generation of “utilities” will look nothing like the last.

Coperniq is the workflow platform for contractors and energy companies to move from post-its and spreadsheets to a system that sells, permits, installs, and maintains distributed energy assets over decades.

Max also shares what it takes to build vertical SaaS for the physical world: curbside Figma demos during COVID, rebuilding their mobile app for 120°F rooftops with no cell service, designing a workflow engine that matches real-world permitting and interconnection, integrating a wild west of OEM hardware, and how AI is already reshaping their product and engineering culture.

Content:

(00:00) The Invisible Glue of the New Grid

(01:05) The Second Electrification Wave

(02:51) Cofounder Origins: Russia, Yemen, Berkeley

(06:12) Humans + Hardware Coordination Challenge

(08:10) Anti-MVP: Mini ERP on Day One

(11:56) Curbside Figma Demos during COVID

(14:47) Field Reality: 120° Rooftops, Zero Cell Service

(20:03) Stateful Workflows (Permits, Interconnection, Construction)

(24:56) Integrating OEM Hardware (Hitting Walls)

(28:41) The Dongle Question: Do we need software afterall?

(31:25) Rebuilding the Mobile App for an Offline-First World

(36:40) Hire Tinkerers, Not Pedigrees

(43:00) How AI Is Reshaping Coperniq

Subscribe to High Bit for more conversations with technical founders building the future.

Follow @Coperniq_AI for more.

Robots built like humans.

On High Bit, Dhanush Radhakrishnan, cofounder & CEO of Clone, explains how they’re letting biology set the blueprint for musculoskeletal, super-intelligent androids — synthetic humans straight out of sci-fi.

Powered by artificial muscles instead of motors and attached to anatomically accurate skeletons, Clone is building robots designed for human-level motion, durability, and full-body control.

Dhanush explains the early engineering choices that helped them move fast, their data strategy (motion capture, teleoperation, egocentric video), and his excitement about a future untethered biped.

Hosted by Brett Gibson, managing partner at Initialized.

Content:

(00:00) From Fragile to Durable

(00:37) Musculoskeletal Androids

(02:03) Why Artificial Muscles

(04:10) Starting Clone in Poland

(06:29) Removing Early Sensors

(10:14) The Durability Challenge

(14:10) Anatomy as Blueprint

(16:22) Building Custom Valves

(18:17) Hand to Full Body

(24:40) Prototyping with Pneumatics

(29:26) Delaying Tactile Skin

(32:39) Data: MOCAP + Teleop

(45:20) Toward an Untethered Biped

Subscribe to High Bit for more conversations with technical founders building the future.

In this episode, Brett Gibson talks with Lucas Young, cofounder and CEO of Deepnight about how they’re building AI-powered night vision that helps the military, law enforcement, and first responders see in near-total darkness. Deepnight combines AI with commodity digital sensors — the same kind used in smartphones — to replace expensive analog night-vision hardware that costs over $30,000 per unit and hasn’t kept pace with modern imaging technology.

Lucas explains how night vision has worked since World War II, why analog image intensifiers hit a ceiling, how smartphone photography paved the way for this breakthrough, and what it takes to bring military-grade low-light imaging into the field.

Chapters

(00:00) Why Night Vision Is Still Mostly Analog

(00:39) Deepnight’s Breakthrough: AI That Sees in the Dark

(01:44) How Their AI Reconstructs *Real* Scenes

(03:58) Lucas’s Path: Google Pixel → YC Founder

(05:26) Why Modern Cameras Rely on Software

(09:12) The Rise of AI-Enhanced Photography

(11:45) The Insight: AI Could Beat $30K Night-Vision Goggles

(13:03) How Traditional Night-Vision Tubes Work

(14:10) Starting Deepnight Without Knowing If It Would Work

(15:11) Early Prototypes: Offline → Real-Time Night Vision

(16:15) The Physics Challenge: Seeing in Moonless Starlight

(19:12) Running This on Smartphone-Class Chips

(22:27) Building a Custom Neural Network for Night Vision

(28:43) Can Cheap $50 Sensors Match Military Gear?

(48:06) What’s Next: Real Soldiers Using AI Night Vision

Subscribe to High Bit for more conversations with technical founders building what’s next, hosted by Brett Gibson of Initialized Capital.

Brett Gibson sits down with cofounders Max Prilutskiy (CEO) and Veronica Prilutskaya (CPO) of Lingo.dev to talk about making every product multilingual—so teams “just keep shipping” and don’t have to worry about localization and translations at scale. Lingo.dev helps product teams develop multilingual user interfaces, uses LLMs to produce perfect translations, and automates localization end to end.

Chapters:

(00:00) The Future of Coding and “Vibe Coding”

(00:50) What Lingo.dev Does

(01:24) Built at a Hackathon

(04:59) From Google Translate to LLMs - for more context

(06:20) “Perfect Translation” - objective AI precision + subjective brand tone + cultural nuance

(11:13) Automating Translations with Pull Requests

(13:41) The New Compiler - making apps multilingual without refactoring

(17:42) How “Vibe Coding” Changed Software Development

(19:10) Write Once, Click Save, See It in Any Language

(37:29) AI Impact: “The Future of Coding” in Practice

Subscribe to High Bit for more conversations with technical founders building what’s next, hosted by Brett Gibson of Initialized Capital.

Follow Lingo.dev, Max and Veronica on X for more:

https://x.com/lingodotdev

https://x.com/MaxPrilutskiy

https://x.com/vrcprl

Orbital Operations is building high-thrust, cryogenic spacecraft designed to move freely in orbit—reshaping how we think about mobility, defense, and logistics in space.

Cofounder & CEO Benjamin Schleuniger joins Initialized Managing Partner Brett Gibson on High Bit to talk about the next generation of spacecraft that will move, refuel, and think for themselves:

• Why satellites need to move — the rise of in-space mobility
• How cryogenic propulsion unlocks long-duration missions
• The refrigeration-cycle tech enabling propellant storage in orbit
• Military and logistics use cases driving demand
• Refueling with water to extend mission life
• The third age of space mobility and what it enables
• How AI and autonomy will power future spacecraft

Chapters

(00:00) Intro

(01:10) What Orbital Operations is building and why it matters

(01:26) Ben’s path: NASA → SpaceX → Relativity

(02:17) Why satellites need to move now

(04:30) Basics of propulsion and why mobility is limited in space

(05:55) Satellites vs rockets: propellant tradeoffs

(08:30) Choosing cryogenic propellants and rethinking storage

(10:15) The refrigeration-cycle system that makes it possible

(17:00) Thermal management and engineering challenges in orbit

(22:30) Military and logistics use cases for in-space mobility

(25:40) Refueling with water and the future of orbital logistics

(27:50) Engineering vs. business challenges of building in space

(30:50) Scaling missions and the path to commercial viability

(33:30) The third age of space mobility and what comes next

(35:20) AI tools in aerospace and autonomy in orbit

Subscribe to High Bit for more conversations with technical founders building what’s next, hosted by Brett Gibson of Initialized Capital.

Follow Orbital Operations and Benjamin Schleuniger on X for more:

@OrbitalOps_

@BenSchleuniger

“Robots are the only way my business survives, but it’s not viable for me.”

Formic founder and CEO Saman Farid joins Brett Gibson, managing partner at Initialized to unpack why that mindset keeps factories from adopting automation and how Formic closes the gap.

They cover: de-risking with financing, productizing complete robot work cells, and running fleets with teleoperation, intelligent error recovery, and careful staging to hit factory-grade uptime.

You’ll hear why palletizing is the ideal first beachhead, how the team cut deployment costs roughly in half, and why they say no to one-off requests until they can be productized.

Saman also shares how the company resists “fun” engineering in favor of scale, injects controlled chaos into his company, uses daily 8 a.m. meetings for problem solving, and bridges the culture gap between the manufacturing and software industries.

Subscribe for more builder-level deep dives from High Bit.

Follow Formic and Saman for more:

Formic: https://x.com/goformic

Saman: https://x.com/samanfarid

Content

(00:00) “It’s not viable for me”—closing the adoption gap

(00:44) What Formic does & where robots work today

(02:24) Engineer → VC → founder: why start Formic

(04:38) Adoption vs flashy demos. Solve one task well

(05:47) De-risking with financing; manual first, then automate

(08:23) The playbook: scope, build modules, deploy, operate1

(10:36) Work cells, not just arms

(13:38) 99.9% uptime15:01 Why palletizing was the first beachhead

(16:49) Cutting costs per deployment

(18:08) Saying “no” & expanding scope the right way

(21:15) Resisting “fun” engineering to serve more factories

(22:07) Injecting chaos into your company

(23:34) Daily 8am to crack hard problems

(25:40) Culture clash: manufacturing × software

(27:24) Evaluating new robots, regional rollouts

(31:24) Where AI helps across the org

(37:11) What’s next: more robots, more tasks, more factories

Daksh Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Greptile, joins Brett Gibson on High Bit and explains why human code review is essentially "security theater" and how Greptile uses AI to catch bugs by understanding entire codebases. He dives into why code generation and code review must stay separate, the surprising challenge of teaching AI what's a nitpick versus a severe issue, and how intelligence becoming "abundant and nearly free" is reshaping software practices.Plus: why some companies will be left behind if they don't adopt AI tools, what happens when human "taste" becomes the final bottleneck, and whether code legibility will matter in an AI-dominated future.

Follow Greptile and Dkash for more:

@greptileai

@dakshgup

Chapters

00:00 - About Greptile, the evolution to specialized bug detection

3:00 - Humans are bad at code review. Why AI works

6:00 - Intelligence becoming abundant

7:20 - Sneaky disruption - what people are looking for vs what they need

10:50 - Code gen and verification are different problems

14:00 - Code gen and code review should be separate

17:15 - Getting LLMs to understand code

24:15 - Claude 4's tool-using capabilities changed their approach

25:00 - Architecture: from flowcharts to agent tools

27:30 - What’s hard about code review - what’s a nitpcik vs. a severe issue

31:00 - What was the “High Bit”

35:06 - Whether code legibility will matter in an AI world

37:25 - Why Terraform and infrastructure code is particularly difficult

43:25 - Re-architecting systems to be AI-friendly vs. adapting AI to messy reality

45:55 - Human "taste" as the final bottleneck

47:14 - Rick Rubin level taste in software

47:55 - Human appetite for change - kitchen exhausts for stoves

50:50 - Working with companies that use AI to generate code

AyJay Lasater, cofounder and CTO of Albedo, joins Brett Gibson on High Bit to talk about the challenge of building satellites for one of the toughest places to operate in space: very low Earth orbit (VLEO). He shares how the idea took shape, the importance of avoiding fear-based calls, why they decided to bring key systems in-house, and the physics-driven design choices that shaped their approach. Along the way, AyJay walks through the mirror mishap that could have delayed them a year, the supply-chain chess it took to recover in just two weeks, and what it means to take on a mission where there’s no playbook to follow.

Follow Albedo on X for more.

Chapters

00:00 – Knowing Everything – Why total system knowledge is the only way to do something that’s never been done

00:59 – Albedo’s Mission – Getting drone-quality imaging from space

04:21 – The Spark – From Lockheed to startup. How a single tweet ignited the VLEO idea

09:29 – Inside VLEO – Why it’s one of space’s toughest environments

14:46 – Breaking Down the Impossible – Applying first principles to the hardest orbit

18:17 – Ditching the Bullet – Rethinking design from physics up

21:09 – Make vs. Buy – The decision to take control in-house

28:55 – No Fear – Avoiding fear-based calls when stakes are high

35:37 – The Mirror Crisis – Saving a year’s work in two weeks

47:11 – 4D Supply Chain Chess – Creative problem-solving under pressure

50:38 – The Fun and Stress of Knowing It All – Why no detail can be left to chance

51:32 – What’s Next – Albedo’s path to VLEO and its first 10 centimeter images