Allen Lau
It is that time of the year again: our annual Legends of Semiconductors dinner, hosted as always at our home. This year, we were treated to an omakase prepared by private chef Cho San. This year, 17 engineers gathered around the table. We all have one thing in common. We either studied...
Allen Lau
Long before I became a founder or venture capitalist, I spent a significant part of my academic life in the University of Toronto Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, thinking about signal processing: how do you recover meaningful information from an incredibly weak and noisy...
Allen Lau
Where founders sleep at night has little to do with how great their companies can become. Last week, Eva and I were in Berlin, spending time with two founders from the Two Small Fish Ventures portfolio and hosting a School of Fish dinner with researchers, engineers, and founders. From AI to...
Allen Lau
As a founder, I attended many founder summits over the years. Now, as an investor, I am hosting our own. Based on my own experience and from speaking with many founders I know, if I had to pick one thing that allows founders to get the most out of a founder summit, it is peer-to-peer learning,...
Allen Lau
In the past few years, I have been spending much of my time with researchers, professors, and deep tech founders sitting on remarkable breakthroughs and asking a difficult question: What does it take to turn this innovation into a world-class company? That question has become central to how...
Allen Lau
Canada has a paradox that I have been talking about for a long time. We are home to most of the world’s AI godfathers. We have Nobel Prize winners, world-class researchers, and some of the most respected engineering schools on the planet. Those institutions attract exceptional students from...
Allen Lau
We are super excited to share our investment in Tiptree Systems!Founded in Montreal by two Mila AI researchers, Dr. Martin Weiss and Nasim Rahaman, Tiptree is building an AI-native researcher and knowledge network: infrastructure for how AI researchers share, exchange, and advance knowledge.There...
Allen Lau
We are super excited to share that Two Small Fish led YScope’s US$3.9 million financing, with Snow Angels (the Snowflake alumni investment syndicate), Next Wave NYC, UTEST, and other successful founders participating.YScope was cofounded by University of Toronto Professor Ding Yuan, who is also...
Allen Lau
OpenClaw, an AI agent that can operate a computer on your behalf, has taken the world by storm. Unless you have been living under a rock, you have probably either tried it already or at least wanted to find out what all the buzz is about. Many, however, have failed to get past installation...
Allen Lau
Is software dead? Today, writing software is no more difficult than pressing a button. You describe what you want. In a few minutes, not a mockup but a fully functional application is ready to use. I can testify to this personally. In 15 minutes, using AI, I have “written” more software than...
Allen Lau
For most of semiconductor history, progress was a simple loop. Shrink transistors. Fit more into the same area. Get faster compute as a byproduct. That loop had a name. Moore’s Law. It traces back to Intel co-founder Gordon Moore. He observed in the 1960s that the number of transistors on a...
Allen Lau
Edge AI has been a key pillar of our Advanced Computing Hardware investments and a core part of our thesis for a long time. It is the same arc I wrote about in The Next Data Centre: Your Phone a while ago. We need new architectures to meet the speed, security, and energy demands of the next...
Allen Lau
I spent a full day at Ontario Tech University in Oshawa a few weeks ago. It was my first time on campus, despite it being just over a 40-minute drive from Toronto, where I live. I arrived curious and left with a clearer picture of what they’re building. Ontario Tech is still a relatively young...
Allen Lau
I wrote my master’s thesis on Code Division Multiple Access, or CDMA, a wireless communication technology that originated from military needs in World War II. CDMA uses a technique called direct sequence spread spectrum, which spreads a signal across a wide bandwidth so that it appears as random...
Allen Lau
I had the opportunity to join a panel at the Impact 2025 Summit in Calgary, moderated by Raissa Espiritu, with Janet Bannister and Paul Godman. Ironically, none of us are labelled as impact investors, and I explained on stage why Two Small Fish Ventures does what we do. At Two Small Fish...
Allen Lau
When I was studying electrical engineering, out of my curiosity, I chose to take an elective course on quantum physics as part of advanced optics. It sparked my curiosity in quantum. The strange, abstract, counterintuitive rules, for example particles existing in multiple states or being entangled...
Allen Lau
Last year we invested in Axiomatic AI. Their mission is to bring verifiable and trustworthy AI into science and engineering, enabling innovation in areas where rigour and reliability are essential. At the core of this is Mission 10×30: achieving a tenfold improvement in scientific and engineering...
Allen Lau
In 1865, William Stanley Jevons, an English economist, observed a curious phenomenon: as steam engines in Britain became more efficient, coal use didn’t fall — it rose. Efficiency lowered the cost of using coal, which made it more attractive, and demand surged. That insight became known as...
Allen Lau
The cost of intelligence is dropping at an unprecedented rate. Just as the drop in the cost of computing unlocked the PC era and the drop in the cost of connectivity enabled the internet era, falling costs today are driving explosive demand for AI adoption. That demand creates opportunity on the...
Allen Lau
A few years back, Eva met Dr. Scott Stornetta. Later, I did too. Alongside Dr. Stuart Haber, Scott is widely credited as the creator of blockchain. Blockchain is a technology built on a simple but radical idea at the time: decentralization. No single authority, no central point of control, just a...
Allen Lau
A swimming world champion, a cycling champion, and a marathon champion each tried their hand at a triathlon. None of them even came close to the podium. All were easily defeated. Why? Because the swimming champion could not bike, nor could he run fast. The cycling champion did not swim...
Allen Lau
In the history of human civilization, there have been several distinct ages: the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age, and the Information Age, which we are living in now. Within each age, there are different eras, each marked by a drastic drop in the cost of a fundamental “atomic unit.” These...
Allen Lau
In the early 2000s, it was a common joke in the tech world that “next year is the year of the smartphones.” People kept saying it over and over for almost a decade. It became a punchline. The industry nearly lost its credibility. Until the iPhone launched. “Next year is the year of the...
Allen Lau
Humans have conquered land, sea, and space. Yet the ocean remains surprisingly underdeveloped — in fact, it’s the least developed. Land transportation has been electrified. In space, payload costs have dropped drastically. Now, it’s time for marine to catch up. Unlike cars, you can’t...
Allen Lau
When entrepreneurs exit their companies, it is supposed to be a victory lap. But in reality, many find themselves in an unexpected emotional vacuum. More often than you might think, I hear variations of the same quiet confession: “It should have been the best time of my life. But I felt lost...
Allen Lau
Summary Driven by rapid advances in AI, the collapse in the cost of intelligence has arrived—bringing massive disruption and generational opportunities. Building on this platform shift, TSF invests in the next frontier of computing and its applications, backing early-stage products,...
Allen Lau
At Two Small Fish Ventures, we love backing founders who are not only transforming user behaviour but also unlocking new and impactful value. That’s why we’re excited to announce our investment in Fibra, a pioneering company redefining wearable technology to improve women’s health. We are proud to...
Allen Lau
The Two Small Fish team is thrilled to announce our investment in Hepzibah AI, a new venture founded by Untether AI’s co-founders, serial entrepreneurs Martin Snelgrove and Raymond Chik, along with David Lynch and Taneem Ahmed. Their mission is to bring next-generation, energy-efficient AI...
Allen Lau
I’d like to extend my heartfelt congratulations to Richard Sutton, co-founder of Openmind Research Institute and a pioneer in Reinforcement Learning, for being honoured with the 2024 Turing Award—often described as the “Nobel Prize of Computing.” This accolade reflects his groundbreaking...
Allen Lau
“Deep Tech” is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot in venture capital and startup circles, but defining it precisely is harder than it seems. If you check Wikipedia, you’ll find this: Deep technology (deep tech) or hard tech is a classification of organization, or more typically a...
Allen Lau
This is the picture I used to open our 2024 AGM a few months ago. It highlights how drastically the landscape has changed in just the past couple of years. I told a similar story to our LPs during the 2023 AGM, but now, the pace of change has accelerated even further, and the disruption is crystal...
Allen Lau
The next frontier of AI lies at the edge — where data is generated. By moving AI toward the edge, we unlock real-time, efficient, and privacy-focused processing, opening the door to a wave of new opportunities. One of our most recent investments, Applied Brain Research (ABR), is leading this...
Allen Lau
There are three distinct phases in the journey of building a great tech company: technology, product, and commercialization. These phases are sequential yet interconnected and sometimes overlap. Needless to say, mastering each is critical to the company’s eventual success. However, it’s important...
Allen Lau
Those who know me well would tell you I am a pretty boring person. I don’t have many hobbies, but one thing I do love is gadgets. For instance, I’m a big fan of DIY home automation. Practically every electronic device in my house is voice-controlled, automated, and Wi-Fi-connected—if it can be, it...
Allen Lau
This is a follow-up blog post to my last piece about Blumind. More than two decades ago, before I started my first company, I was involved with an internet startup. Back then, the internet was still in its infancy, and most companies had to host their own servers. The upfront costs were...
Allen Lau
The history of computing has been a constant shift of the centre of gravity. When mainframe computers were invented in the middle of the last century, they were housed in air-conditioned, room-sized metal boxes that occupied thousands of square feet. People accessed these computers through dumb...