Writes on pricing strategy, value capture, and win-win ecosystems, covering how every strategic decision should create tangible value for customers, employees, and partners at the same time.
When Alex Atallah described OpenRouter in May 2026 as the payment infrastructure for AI models, few imagined that Stripe itself would end up buying the company. The acquisition marks a defining moment in how the AI industry handles model access and monetization.
Martín Soler8 min
Autonomous robotics has been promising an industrial-scale breakthrough for years — one that never quite arrives. Not for lack of algorithms or ambition, but because the hardware robots need to operate in unstructured environments demands a combination of processing power rarely found integrated in a single accessible system. AMD has just bet it can solve that equation with the Kria AI Robotics Developer Platform, announced at Advancing AI 2026 in San Francisco.
Martín Soler9 min
Morgan Stanley published on Tuesday, July 14, a defense note on Broadcom that deserves careful reading — not for what it says about the stock, but for what it reveals about the value architecture underpinning the semiconductor maker and why that architecture has yet to convince investors. The starting point is the concern that took hold in the market following a report by The Information in March: MediaTek, the Taiwanese chip manufacturer, would be collaborating with Alphabet to develop the next generation of Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) used by Google in its data centers.
Martín Soler9 min
There is a pattern that repeats every time a technology changes the rules of the game fast enough: the first to absorb the cost are those with the least margin to do so. The convergence of artificial intelligence and quantum computing is following that pattern with uncomfortable precision. Attackers benefit from tools that reduce the time and cost of their operations.
Martín Soler9 min
The largest stock market debut in history lasted less than a week before markets started asking questions the narrative couldn't answer. SpaceX priced at $135 per share, raised nearly $75 billion through the sale of 555 million shares, and within days the initial enthusiasm pushed the valuation toward $3 trillion. Then came three consecutive days of declines and more than $400 billion in market capitalization wiped off the map.
Martín Soler8 min
There is an image that captures well what is happening on Chicago's South Side: where steel furnaces from the U.S. Steel South Works complex once stood, cranes are now raising a 65,000-square-foot silver aluminum building. Inside, when ready, it will house what PsiQuantum describes as the largest intermediate-scale test system the company has ever built. Outside, Governor Jay Robert Pritzker calls all of this 'the next Silicon Valley'.
Martín Soler9 min
When a multinational announces plans to grow from seven to fifteen factories in three years, the relevant question isn't whether it has the capital to do so. It's why now, in that specific geography, and what incentive structure sustains that speed. Nippon Paint India has operated in the country for decades, but until barely a year ago its presence in the decorative segment was confined to southern India.
Martín Soler8 min
More than 13,000 humanoid robots shipped in 2025. Eighty-five percent of that volume manufactured in China. Two companies — Unitree and AGIBOT — with more than 5,000 units shipped each. The numbers, read alone, paint a picture of an industry in full expansion. Read more carefully, they describe something different: a productive capacity running much faster than real demand, sustained largely by state purchases, research laboratories, and public demonstrations designed to look like commercial traction.
Martín Soler8 min
Simon Song was 29 years old when he closed a $200 million round and crossed the billion-dollar valuation threshold. VAST, his AI model startup for three-dimensional content, has just become a unicorn. The announcement comes just three months after the company closed its Series A with $50 million led by Alibaba and Hengxu Capital.
Martín Soler9 min
Hugging Face has just published the blueprints, wiring, and software to build a pair of humanoid legs for approximately $2,500 in parts. No arms, no torso, no head. Just bipedal 3D-printed legs assembled with off-the-shelf components. The question this opens is not technical. It is structural: when an AI platform decides to lower the entry cost of robotic hardware to the price of a mid-range laptop, it is moving a piece on the board that does not move out of mere generosity.
Martín Soler8 min
There is a pattern that repeats itself when an industry enters forced transition: the assets that once defined the strength of a sector end up being acquired by those who arrived later, with less history and structurally different costs. The European automotive industry is living through that sequence now, not as a metaphor, but as a concrete movement of capital and productive capacity. What The Telegraph headline captures — China taking control of Europe's decaying factories — does not describe just a one-off transaction.
Martín Soler7 min
When Lior Susan founded Eclipse Ventures in 2015, the prevailing logic in Silicon Valley was simple: software scales without factories, inventory, or workers. SaaS companies captured the attention of the best funds and the best engineers. Betting on semiconductors, industrial robotics, or physical computing infrastructure was, at best, an oddity.
Martín Soler7 min
There's a difference between growing in a market and changing your position within it. Motorola has just proven that both can happen at the same time. According to statements by T.M. Narasimhan, Managing Director of Motorola India, the company went from controlling 2.5% of the smartphone market in India three years ago to the current 8.5%, with expectations of continuing to advance.
Martín Soler8 min
Kanvas Biosciences is not a laboratory story. It is a story about incentives. When the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation decides to fund a synthetic microbiome company to combat environmental enteric dysfunction—an intestinal disease affecting around 150 million children in areas with poor sanitation that blocks nutrient absorption—it is not doing conventional philanthropy. It is betting on an intervention model that the private market cannot yet sustain alone.
Martín Soler9 min
There is a specific moment in the history of domestic robotics where the industry decided that value lay in solving tasks. Vacuuming. Mopping. Monitoring. The logic was flawless: if the robot does something useful, the consumer pays. Colin Angle proved it better than anyone when he launched the Roomba in 2002 and turned a disc on wheels into the first mass-adoption domestic robot.
Martín Soler9 min
When a retail chain with more than 300 stores announces it has spent over a decade working with a price intelligence platform — and has just extended that contract for several more years — the technology headline is the least interesting part. The strategic insight lies elsewhere: how is the value generated by that efficiency redistributed among the company, its suppliers, and its shoppers? Academy Sports + Outdoors formalized a multi-year extension of its agreement with Revionics, a firm specializing in AI-driven price optimization.
Martín Soler7 min
Predicting fluid turbulence with sustained accuracy over time is one of the most costly problems in computational physics. On April 17, 2026, researchers at University College London published in Science Advances a result worth reading carefully: an AI model trained on data preprocessed by a 20-qubit quantum computer achieved 20% greater accuracy in predicting chaotic systems and required hundreds of times less memory than equivalent classical approaches.
Martín Soler7 min
Shareholder activism reached historic highs in 2025, reshaping corporate dynamics and prompting crucial questions about value distribution.
Martín Soler7 min
A MIT project aimed at removing CO2 from the ocean without chemical waste is not just climate science; it’s an honest audit of a $60 billion value chain.
Martín Soler7 min
Trump's blockade of the planet's most strategic oil passage was presented as economic pressure, but the fallout extends beyond Tehran.
Martín Soler7 min