High Bit

Integration is a dirty word in defense. The consultancy model that solved it for decades no longer works when you're dealing with hundreds of systems from dozens of vendors across land, sea, and airspace, all needing to work together within milliseconds.

In this episode of High Bit, Brett Gibson talks with Zane Mountcastle, cofounder and CEO of Picogrid, about how they built the hardware and software infrastructure layer that makes ...

The internet was built without identity at the protocol level. Now AI makes it nearly impossible to know who or what you're interacting with online. Alien is a decentralized unique identity platform built on the principle of one human, one account — no government required, no central authority, just a cryptographically verifiable way to prove you're human and link that identity to the AI agents acting on your behalf. Mainnet ...

Azura built a unified application for trading across multiple blockchains from one interface. You can trade tokens across Solana, Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Blast, and more without jumping between wallets, bridges, and apps. Try it: app.azura.xyz

In this episode of High Bit, Initialized managing partner Brett Gibson talks with Jackson Denka, founder and CEO of Azura, about building an onchain trading platform that aims to feel more l...

Code can be generated faster than ever. But getting that code to actually look good is a different problem entirely.

In this episode of High Bit, Initialized managing partner Brett Gibson sits down with Daniel Bulhosa Solórzano, cofounder and CTO of Variant, about what it takes to build AI that gets design right, not just code that runs.

Daniel started thinking about this problem in 2017 at Weebly, when the models weren't close to re...

Code can be written faster than ever. But getting that code safely into production is where many engineering teams lose time.

As organizations grow, CI failures, flaky tests, and conflicting pull requests start to compound.

In this episode of High Bit, Initialized managing partner Brett Gibson sits down with Eli Schleifer, founder and CEO of Trunk, to talk about the systems that keep CI green and allow engineering teams to land code ...

AI models keep getting better, but most AI systems still fail in production. Why?

In this episode of High Bit, Brett Gibson sits down with Ghita Houir Alami, cofounder and CEO of ZeroEntropy, to break down the real bottleneck holding AI agents back: retrieval.

Ghita explains why embeddings alone can’t reliably surface the right information, why tools like Slack search feel so frustrating, and how rerankers add a critical second...

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 l...

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 contro...

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...

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.

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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 m...

“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 carefu...

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 reshap...

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...

Amir Elaguizy, cofounder and CEO of Poker Skill, joins Brett Gibson on High Bit for a look inside the mind of someone who’s been all in on AI long before it was everywhere. He explains what’s possible when you’re not just using AI tools, but constantly learning, testing, and pushing them to their limits, and he shares how he’s used AI to build his startups.

Follow Amir and Poker Skill for more:

@amirpc

@PlayPok...

Brett Gibson hosts Sol’s Ben Chelf and John Boiles on the "High Bit" podcast to discuss their groundbreaking work on the Sol Reader, the world’s first wearable e-reader. They dive into the unique engineering challenges of integrating e-ink technology into a head-mounted format, the intricate development process of creating their own e-ink driver, and the importance of optimizing for user comfort and the reading experien...

Our managing partner, Brett Gibson, spoke with Playground AI founder Suhail Doshi about advancements in AI-driven image generation and their new Playground v3 image foundation model. Suhail shared Playground’s mission to make graphic design more accessible, enabling users to create items such as T-shirts, logos, social media posts, and even memes. They discussed the gap between language and image models, as well as the underi...

On the latest episode of our podcast “High Bit,” Brett Gibson spoke with Pratap Ranade, CEO of Arena, about the intricacies of using AI to convert data into real-time simulations for optimizing sales, pricing, and marketing strategies. Pratap explained how Arena navigates the complexities of large-scale enterprises, including those in the consumer goods and advanced manufacturing industries. He also shared insights from...