Raviraj Jain on What Frontier Investing Actually Means | Lightwork

0:00The way we think about Frontier is when founders build companies and businesses that go outside the boundary lines of what's possible. This week, our guest is Lightspeed's own Raviraj Jain. Raviraj is a partner here where he invests at the Frontier. His companies include Skilled, Andruel, Helsing, and Helion. Today, he's giving us the primer on the firm's Frontier thesis. The point is that the most value creation in the history of human civilization has happened by innovation at the frontier. What exactly does frontier investing even mean? I think frontier is about new technologies, right? And the themes we'll be going deeper on in episodes to come.

0:41And we are in a very unique era where several new frontiers are emerging at the same time. Ravi Raj, welcome to Lightwork. I am so excited to have you on here today because I feel like every time I talk to you about the frontier, it just reminds me so much of why I was so excited to join a place like Lightspeed. It is truly just so proximate to the frontier. But I think one thing that continues to come to mind when I talk about the frontier is that for a lot of people who are outside of tech or, you know, just building in tech, sometimes it's not clear what the frontier means. So today, I'm excited to have you to chat through a little bit more about this moment that we're in, what the frontier means zooming out, and also the spaces that you as someone leading a lot of our frontier work are spending time on.

1:27Awesome. It's exciting to be here, Claire. And this is what we are here for, right? The investing at the very frontier. The way we think about frontier is when founders build companies and businesses that go outside the boundary lines of what's possible, whether it involves building new technology or bringing science to the world in ways that has never been done before, or bringing current cutting edge technology in new or old industries where people have already written them off as something that would never change. And they bring about a massive change in those industries. So that's really where the frontier is.

2:03And if you look back at this graph, which is really interesting, is that the point I'm trying to make is most of the progress in the world happens at different years. So this is a graph of total world output over the last 2 ,000 years. The interesting part is the first 1 ,800 years, 18 centuries, human life was pretty much the same, right? So in the year 1800, people are living basically the same life as old Romans did. But then something changed at 1800. And in just last 200 years, the total world output increased by more than 100x. And it's not an accident. It's driven by a lot of meaningful innovations that have happened over the last 200 years that are the innovations at the frontier.

2:52So you start with the first one, which is steam engines and rails. These are also like beginning the industrial revolution when we learned how to build and produce things at scale. And they were powered by steam engine that was able to drive automation at scale and railroads. Very soon, like within five decades of it, we have a massive breakthrough with electricity coming everywhere. We take it for granted today, but truly it was the frontier that changed the world as we know it. Quick, fast followed was cars and auto and driven by vast availability of oil. Another five decades of that or four decades, computing came.

3:36So your calculator, you realize a normal calculator you use has more power than a computer in the Apollo 11 mission in the 1960s. We saw a massive, massive increase in computing. And that was the next frontier. and then there was 1995 when internet came and it was the next frontier. Notice that the frontiers are compressing and now we are in the frontier with AI, which is fundamentally shifting the way we live life. So the point is that the most value creation in the history of human civilization has happened by innovation at the frontier and by diffusing the innovation to the world. And that's really what we are excited about.

4:22Our view is that as time goes by, each frontier catalyzes the next frontier. And therefore, the time between different frontiers actually decreases. And we are in a very unique era where several new frontiers are emerging at the same time, catalyzed by all the other frontiers from the past, right? We wouldn't have had computing without electricity. We wouldn't have internet without computing and electricity. We wouldn't have AI without internet and computing and electricity, all of those things. These are things that keep compounding and compounding and compounding. And we are in a very special era where all of these things are coming together to drive several new frontiers.

5:05And our belief is that this line is getting steeper, not flatter. And that's where we are excited to invest in. It's so interesting because I think for a lot of people, people, they have viewed the world of investing in companies as, I would say, a little bit more on the applied front, right? And the diffusion of these technologies, or even if you look at the last few decades of value creation has been, you know, traditionally in software and enterprise, not necessarily in these harder spaces of the frontier. How do you think about that difference? What do you define as frontier versus something that's a little bit more diffusion?

5:39I think frontier is about new technologies, right? It's about completely new paradigm that is brought to the world. Oftentimes, it is foundational technology. Oftentimes, it's also taking the technology that already exists, but bringing them to new market, right? In some sense, the emergence of AI is the frontier because it took the learnings, the compute in one place with new and innovative algorithms and frameworks to actually fundamentally come up with the next paradigm of intelligence. That's really the frontier. And once this technology, the frontier work is done, foundational work is done, the diffusion actually allows us to monetize that frontier.

6:27And the faster the diffusion is, the more valuable the frontier becomes, right? And therefore, we are able to invest a lot more at the frontier because we know through diffusion, we will be able to monetize it at scale. And the diffusion of the frontier has really accelerated, right? The first five years of internet, we had only 16 million people who ever accessed internet. The first five years since the LLMs came out, we have more than a billion people actually using it. The diffusion of Frontier is accelerating. And so in that way, actually, both are really important. Diffusion allows you to monetize the Frontier and which in turn allows us to invest more in the Frontier to then bring up new Frontiers up front.

7:14And you've been spending a lot of time shaping how we've been thinking about the frontier. Obviously, these are new spaces that are complete, just truly definition of frontier. They have not been proven out. How do you think about underwriting that then compared to, you know, I think, again, that traditional SaaS company where there are proof points and comps that you can look to? Yeah, I think there is. It's a lot harder, right? The breadth of opportunities at the frontier are a lot more. But the depth of understanding you need to have and have a first principles view of each of those is also a lot deeper, right?

7:50So it's an exponentially harder problem that way, which means that it requires a totally different approach. It requires you going native on a space, understanding all the different stakeholders, talking to researchers across the world, speaking to a lot of other practitioners who are going to buy the technology, and also sometimes reading papers and even consulting with folks in the industry. In one particular case, without going into details, we actually spent a year diligence-ing the space before we made our first investment, which is very different than when you're investing in a company in the diffusion space where you have a mental model of what it takes to build a company, what kind of founders are successful.

8:35And so that allows you to actually make the decision faster versus that the frontier requires a lot more upfront and right and work. But when you're right, you're right in a very big way. But there are many ways you could go wrong too. And therefore, the underwrite process actually is fundamentally more involved. How do you think about, it sounds like you are getting closer to the source of research. You're spending a lot more time speaking to customers on Frontier. And to your point, it's this idea that we have to build first principles thinking around these spaces. What do you look for? And obviously, it differs widely depending on the space that you're building in.

9:11But are there any key qualities you look for in Frontier Founders? In venture, we always say like the golden rule is there are no rules. But even then, I think there are three type of archetypes of Frontier Founders we look for. That's not completely exhaustive. We will and we have back founders outside of those three archetypes. So the three archetypes are, number one, is it's all like the prodigy, like really young folks who really would not take no for an answer, have been really exceptional. They have no priors really in the industry, but they have a strong belief and intellectual horsepower and ambition to deliver.

9:51That's the first archetype. Those are the people who are so like not colored by what is possible. And they only focus on what they can do. And so there's not limited by any ideas. And that's the first archetype. The second archetype is the breakthrough scientist archetype, which is someone who's done a research that fundamentally breaks through the walls of what's possible in the world. And they use that research as the foundation to build a company. And the third is oftentimes someone who's been a successful founder before, they've already been successful and the success, instead of making them complicit, they're becoming more ambitious and they want to do a lot more in their life.

10:36So that's the second time founder. Those are the three archetypes of a lot of our frontier companies that we look for. And because these projects are much longer and much harder, and we need someone who is willing to dedicate their life towards that. And I think we've seen that these three typically tend to be the archetypes that work very, very well. Yeah, it's energizing to think about these hard problems because one thing when we had these conversations around how you think about the frontier, one thing that stuck with me was this idea that progress isn't the default. You have to have people who truly want to terraform the world to their belief.

11:10And I think maybe we could transition into where you are seeing some of that innovation. Maybe I'll quickly flip it over. Yeah. This is a super high level. Obviously you spent and the team have spent a lot of time in all of these spaces, but I figured it could be helpful to just break through these categories and the trend lines that are underpinning all of these. Absolutely. I would start with saying that these are a sample of areas where we believe there are new frontiers emerging. But by frontier, by definition, will emerge again and again. And something else that's a frontier moves away. So I think these are the few areas that we've been spending our time on at light speed.

11:53I think we believe fundamentally that we are entering an era of abundance. And starting with intelligence, really, like the quality of intelligence that you can get on your, you know, Claude or ChatGPD app is actually insane. It's almost unthinkable, even for a version of you living in 2020. And the cost of intelligence is going down significantly, right? So the cost of a million tokens of the same model from 2023 to 2026 has gone down by 1000x. So we are actually entering an era of abundant intelligence. And we don't think it's the end, right? Like I think we are in the early cycles and there will be more breakthroughs.

12:37that'll happen in the world of intelligence that allow us to get back more and more and more intelligence and make it available to everyone else. The second piece is energy. And it's really, really important that we understand some things as fundamental as energy can be a frontier, right? Like the world was created at the beginning when energy was converted into mass. so energy goes back as far in time as anything else but our relationship with energy is we invent as human beings different things that consume energy at scale which then necessitates the requirement to build a lot more energy and then we use it and that actually allows us to really push the envelope of human civilization and we had a very interesting point where energy has been one of the cheapest it's ever been in our lifetime, right?

13:36Solar energy, for instance, in the 70s, costed$100 per watt. And now it's down to 20 cents. That's a massive decline. Just to give you a sense of the scale of solar deployments, last year, 2025, we deployed more than 500 gigawatts of solar energy. That was more than the entire civilization did till the year 2018. It's wild how fast we are doing it. But that's not enough, right? There's a clear bottleneck in the energy space, especially as the infinite and abundant intelligence is actually consuming more energy. Data centers, for instance, are expected to consume by 2030 more energy, the data centers in America, than the entire country of Japan, right?

14:24Data centers in the U.S. will likely, the way they're going, consume more energy than a lot of other industries combined. So there's a huge energy demand that's happening. And we need to innovate on the entire energy lifecycle from generation to interconnect to storage to live up to that demand. And there's a lot of really fascinating things happening. Third piece is life. We also believe that we are entering an era of abundant life. And what that means is, if you think about the last 20th century, average lifespan for an American has gone up by 30 years, and it's only rising. It's not just about going after diseases, but actually improving every day that you live, like being the best version of yourself.

15:09And we believe there's a lot of opportunity across longevity, health, personalized medicine, and a lot more. I keep going. Space, for instance, right? Like for all the two million years of human civilization or humans, we've all lived in this tiny planet, which is a small, small speckle in the global universe. And for the first time, we figured out a very effective way to access the world. And just to give you two data points on this, just 20 years ago, it costed$54 ,000 to put one kilogram of weight up in the space. Now it's down to 900. That's 60 times cheaper. It's going to be 10x cheaper in the next four or five years.

15:52What that means is now you can transport to space at the same cost as you could transport from point A to point B on Earth. And that actually will open up everything. Like there was around 1 ,000 satellites in 2010 in space. Now there are more than 10 ,000. So like most of the stuff that we've sent outside Earth, majority, vast majority of that is in the last decade. So now suddenly the space and the human footprint is going to increase massively by this decreasing cost. And that's also something that creates massive opportunity to back the space economy. The last two ones are sovereignty, right?

16:30Like for the longest time, we have focused on building supply chains and building specialization in this country. and our supply chains exist across the world, that creates tremendous dependencies. Just to give you a sense, 94 % of all the world's magnet is processed in China, right? While we need magnets for electric vehicles, for data centers, for robots, and more, we have a very critical dependency that needs to be changed. Sovereignty is about owning our own destiny, about owning our supply chain and building everything in-house. And there's a huge trend here, a secular move across manufacturing, across defense, across supply chains, metals, and mining.

17:17And then finally, we talked a lot at the Abundant Intelligence about how do we move pixels fast enough, but the world is made of atoms and moving atoms is the ultimate frontier for intelligence. So we believe that the next big wave will be the physical intelligence, right? And we are already seeing that with physical AI, you know, think about Waymo. If all those who are in San Francisco, taking a Waymo is like, you don't even think about the fact that there's no driver on the seat and you drive around the city, it probably drives better than majority of human drivers. So that's just a sign of what is there to come.

17:57Robots are going to be everywhere. They're going to do a lot of really amazing things, things that humans should not be doing, things that are too onerous, things and tasks where we don't have anyone to do. And these robotic systems and physical AI systems will do that at scale and more safely, leaving us all the time in the world to do things we genuinely care about. This is so interesting because every time you brought up another part, it felt like they were all compounding in the ways that, you know, when you bring up data centers, It's this compounding of intelligence and energy, but then, you know, with physical AI, what that unlocks for longevity and to live these abundant lives.

18:37And I think with each of these, you had a metric that almost reminded me of what we walked through in the first place, which is this idea that it's almost always slowly, slowly, then suddenly. And all of these are seeing these kind of those same inflection points where for a very long time, we had these multi-centuries of stasis. And then all of a sudden now we have like in all of these categories, some sort of 100x inflection point, which is really interesting. And yeah, it's just very energizing. I guess since you're spending a lot of time in these spaces, are there any startups or opportunities you think you'd like to meet founders building in?

19:12You've seen the whole gamut. Any spaces you think worth building in? There is so much, right? There is so much. We believe that intelligence is at a point where we can start pushing the envelope of science and technology. right? Whether it's new materials, discovery, personalized medicine, there's a lot of opportunity in intelligence. Same in energy, right? Like we've been spending time across nuclear, both fission and fusion to produce energy at scale. You know, one of my pet ideas, and it's probably too early, is actually building a world model of human biology, right? So if a company can do that, we would then be able to do clinical trials on those world models, which will, instead of taking 10 years will happen overnight on our servers and will also allow us to actually understand ourselves much, much better and the impact of different drugs and different medicines on our body.

20:05So I think there's this huge opportunity of creating the world model for human biology. I think that's a little bit far. We're not quite there yet. And there's just a lot across the board, right? We believe that we need to build an entire backbone for manufacturing in America. And we can't really do it the way it happens in other countries because of lack of labor and the cost of labor being very, very high. So we have to really figure out manufacturing with deep, like, physical AI automation built in it, as well as a lot of intelligence embedded in it to actually drive automation. like founders were willing to drive and build actual manufacturing facilities at scale will finally be a place where venture capital should go.

20:49And we are certainly very excited about it. I can keep going on and on. There's just so many opportunities. And we should definitely do a breakdown of all the opportunities in each of these. Because I think, you know, there is so much talent flowing into these spaces. And to your point, I think it's a really exciting time to build these hard problems. I guess on an ending note, Do you have any advice for founders who are building in these spaces? I think to what we were discussing earlier, a lot of traditional venture has been sort of a playbook. That playbook is completely broken now that, you know, the cost of creation in software is relatively low.

21:22But here, these feel like big, difficult problems. Any motivating words for these hungry founders who want to build in these spaces and how to even get started? Yeah, I think, look, the reality is that it's all happening now. And we're all very fortunate to be living in a world. It's a phenomenal, phenomenal time to be alive and phenomenal, phenomenal time to be in technology and to be a founder. And I would say like the one thing to think about is like, if you're going to spend all your life doing something, do something that matters really. And make the boldest and greatest bet to change the world as you would like to see it.

22:00And I think one thing I would say is like, as it relates to us, like for us, no idea is too ambitious. In fact, that's what we get attracted to is the most ambitious ideas. And oftentimes the journey is not straightforward. You will have a lot of roadblocks on the way, a lot of bumps on the way. And that's fine because that's really what building behind these hard industries is about. And that's really what we want to back, not just once, but over the life cycle so that you can fundamentally change the world and we can be supporting you in every way possible. I love that. So if any founders out there, if you're building something bold and ambitious and you want to change the world, reach out to Ravi Raj.

22:40Lightspeed.