Ouster
The person behind Very Frontier
India
Piercy
Founder and editor covering the people, companies, and decisions shaping the next generation of technology.
About the editor
India Piercy is the founder and editor of Very Frontier, an independent publication about the technology companies and operators worth paying attention to.
She writes about artificial intelligence, robotics, startups, and venture capital, with a particular interest in what happens behind the headline: how a product is built, why a company changes direction, and what founders are really betting on.
Before starting Very Frontier, India worked in communications and completed a master's degree in international relations at the London School of Economics. Her reporting combines that background with conversations, research, and a close read of the businesses behind the technology.
Coverage
AIRoboticsStartupsVenture capital
On the site
Recent reporting
0111 September 2026Inside Ouster: Angus Pacala on LiDAR and Physical AIOuster CEO Angus Pacala explains how the company survived a decade of deep-tech execution, the lidar industry crash, and multiple near-death moments to become one of the companies powering the Physical AI era.0211 September 2026Inside Glimpse: The Hard Pivot That Led to a $35M a16z RoundGlimpse CEO Akash Raju explains why his team killed a working startup, spent 15 months searching for product-market fit, and ultimately raised $35M from a16z.0324 July 2026Tinker Tutorial: Fine-Tuning LLMs With Thinking Machines LabA practical guide to fine-tuning and adapting LLMs to your own data using Tinker by Thinking Machines Lab. Using LoRA to train Qwen3-8B on chain-of-thought financial data as a concrete example, the article covers installation, Tinker's core API primitives, data preparation, training and validation loops, checkpoint selection, optimization for generalization, and LLM-as-judge evaluation. The same general methodology can be adapted to other Tinker-supported models, including Inkling and models from the Kimi and Qwen families, with the appropriate model-specific configuration and data formatting.0430 September 2026Apple Pay Arrives in India After 12 Years, Still Without UPIThe service launches with Axis Bank credit cards at contactless terminals, while the system behind 84% of the country's digital payments remains out of reach.0528 September 2026Starship Reaches Orbit on Its 14th Flight, Opening a New Phase for SpaceXAfter three years of testing, the rocket completed an orbital mission, deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites, and ended the flight with controlled splashdowns in the Pacific.0628 September 2026Instinct Raises $1 Billion at a $10 Billion ValuationThe personal-agent startup raised a new round led by Sequoia, Benchmark, and Coatue, four weeks after its previous funding valued the company at $2.5 billion.
Conversations
Selected interviews
Glimpse
Akash Raju, CEO
Why the team shut down a working startup, spent 15 months searching, and started again.Read the conversation ↗Thinking Machines
Tinker, the fine-tuning API
What Mira Murati's new company is building for developers and model researchers.Read the conversation ↗About Very Frontier
A closer look at what is being built.
Very Frontier is a weekly publication about the companies, capital, and ideas moving technology forward. The newsletter brings together original interviews, reporting, and analysis without trying to cover everything.
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