The Great Convergence: Uniting physical and digital worlds

The challenge of an investor was captured well by the late physicist Erwin Shcrödinger as:

“The task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”

In our hyper-connected day, there are few secrets, and the whole world is at our fingertips.  As investors, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to look at the world, the data, and the information in a new light. How do we think about what nobody has yet thought? Finding the ‘North Star’ in our work is hard which is why we spent considerable effort developing our thesis of ‘The Great Convergence’.

A thesis is a way to look at the world and filter information. In the ‘The Great Convergence’, we believe that the physical and digital will come together in an integrated and seamless way. Over time, great technology tends to ‘disappear’, it becomes intuitive and flows into our daily lives without us even noticing. Think of electricity, the combustion engine, the telephone, the TV or microprocessors controlling every electrical device or lighting in the form of LED. Adoption curves vary, but the most successful technologies become seamlessly integrated into our everyday, not only as consumers but also in enterprises, government, and in industrial facilities.

At the centre of The Great Convergence is a radical enhancement of human life ushered in by the ‘machines’. Machines broadly mean computers, robots, autonomous vehicles as well as software agents running in the cloud, on-premise or at the edge. We believe three distinct critical elements are merging in the future converged world; Experience, Interaction, and Infrastructure.

How will we experience the convergence?

The first question is: ‘How will we experience the convergence?’ If I am a media consumer, I may have light beamed into my eyes creating images of a movie. If I am a warehouse worker, it may be through carrying a small exoskeleton as a backpack that helps me lift heavy objects. As a production planner, it may be through a real-time model of a manufacturing plant that is rendered on my computer screen. What matters is that the experience is intuitive, fit for purpose, and natural.  

Secondly, the ‘machine’ and the human will interact physically. We are familiar with a keyboard, a mouse, and voice control. However, modes of interaction will be greatly expanding as robots in all shapes and forms will proliferate. Not only is there a need to give a robot instructions through voice, visual clues or programming, but the robot needs to navigate and act in the physical world through sensors and actuators. For example, autonomous vehicles or the most discussed robotic problem of filling and emptying a dishwasher. We will require not only new sensors and actuators, but also new materials better suited for increasingly sophisticated interaction modes.

Thirdly, we believe The Great Convergence will accelerate our needs for spatial computing, bandwidth, memory, low latency, cybersecurity as well as next-generation AI and ML models running much more efficiently and on edge devices. We may find that we in some instances need mm accurate, real-time information about our physical environment, enabling robots to act precisely and let algorithms plan workflows and industrial plant layouts. In brief, a re-architecting of the data and communications stack will be required. This is why a next-generation infrastructure will emerge as part of The Great Convergence.

The ‘glue’ in The Great Convergence is software

Today, software = AI = software. Software writes software; a non-coder can simply speak to the computer and software code is written. A ‘traditional’ coder today is managing agents writing software and stitching these agents together in execution flows. In brief, everyone is a coder, leading to faster proliferation and faster iterations on product designs and software in continuous development and deployment. Software acts as the glue connecting Experience, Interaction, and Infrastructure. Software will run everywhere and be pushed increasingly to the edge, meaning a robot, an IoT device, or an autonomous vehicle, where it runs closest to the Interaction and facilitates real-time interactions.

What is different this time?’ 

The difference with ‘The Great Convergence’ is that the cost of compute, the sophistication of software, and the integration of electro-mechanical systems are reaching cost and performance points where penetration will accelerate.

As investors, we follow the lead of the great entrepreneurs we meet. We already see important advances toward ‘The Great Convergence’ in Robotics, Edge and Data Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, Semiconductors, Communications, and Space technology.

We believe that integration with space-based solutions is an important part of the next-generation Infrastructure. We all use GPS today, knowingly or unknowingly, however, hundreds of satellites are being launched every year facilitating communications, data processing, earth observation, and asset monitoring, all of which need to be integrated with systems on Earth.

 We believe that the advent of widespread AI will allow entrepreneurs to vertically attack whole business segments. This means rethinking from the ground up, with AI and convergence in mind, how an industry or business segment can be reinvented. Our German portfolio company Daedalus is one such example where the precision metal parts industry is being rethought, enabling less skilled workers to enter the industry using AI agents to operate and manage CNC machines in a software-controlled workflow.

We hope we have provided a brief glimpse into our thesis of ‘The Great Convergence’. We believe that our examples show, that in a different way, we could say in the words of William Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”