This Bittensor Subnet Could Cut Drug Discovery Costs in HALF | E2267
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.2 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2026
⏱️ 73 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
Luma AI - https://lumalabs.ai/twist
Lemon.io - https://Lemon.io/twistPlaud - https://Plaud.ai/twist
Today’s show:
What do drug discovery, the creator economy, and AI vision models have in common? In the case of Metanova, Bitcast, and Score, the answer is Bittensor. Yes, each of the three companies leverages the Bittensor network to get more work done, more quickly, in a completely decentralized fashion.
Metanova uses its subnet to run developer competitions to find exciting molecular candidates, parsing through a mountain of possibilities to pluck out the most promising for further investigation.
Bitcast uses its subnet to collect visibility demand from brands, which is served by video creators. The company is focused on the crypto niche to start, but will expand in time to other technology topics.
Score uses its subnet to generate highly performant, specialized vision models, which it then sells to customers through a platform (Manako).
In each case, the Bittensor’s economic engine unlocks global creativity to tackle tasks that were previously time-consuming, fragmented, or expensive to complete. Let’s see how quickly each company can scale and whether startups building on Bittensor can grow faster than their non-decentralized peers.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
2:19 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off!
3:40 What is Bittensor?
7:22 Metanova Labs joins the show
9:28 Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist
17:16 How Metanova tackles the multi-billion dollar cost of drug discovery
20:48 Every.io - For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io
30:20 Bitcast joins the show
31:23 Luma AI - Luma builds accessible, professional-grade AI tools for creatives. Try Luma Agents for free at https://lumalabs.ai/twist
32:30 Mining crypto with YouTube
36:48 Why Bitcast is focused on the crypto space to start
39:11 How healthy is the creator economy?
47:26 When will the AI bubble collapse?
53:44 Score joins the show
54:42 How Score will make vision AI more accessible
57:16 VLMs v. LLMs
1:01:14 Demo of the Manako platform
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome back to Twist. |
| 0:02.0 | Today is March 25th, |
| 0:04.0 | 2026. |
| 0:05.0 | My name is Alex and I am joined today by my dear friend Lon Harris. |
| 0:08.0 | Hey. |
| 0:09.0 | Lon... |
| 0:10.0 | This week in startups is brought to you by Luma AI. |
| 0:15.0 | Luma builds accessible professional-grade AI tools for creatives. |
| 0:19.0 | Try Luma agents for free at Luma Labs.AI slash twist. |
| 0:24.5 | Every. |
| 0:24.8 | For all your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office |
| 0:31.1 | administration needs, visit every.io. |
| 0:34.3 | And Lemon. |
| 0:35.7 | Building a great team is essential to any business. |
| 0:38.3 | Lemon is a marketplace of vetted, experienced engineers ready to take your company to the next level. |
| 0:44.3 | Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at lemon. |
| 0:48.3 | . |
| 0:49.3 | How you doing? |
| 0:52.3 | I'm doing pretty good. |
| 0:53.3 | What day A.O. is it? What day after Claw? Is it Alex? We didn't. It's 40, 47, 48. It's in the late 40s or something, folks. We kind of lost track of that. Much like Lon himself in the late 40s and has somewhat lost track. Importantly, though, we are not going to be spending all of our time on OpenClaught today. Instead, we are going to be drilling down even further into the world of BitTensor. We have three different subnets on the show today, Meta Nova, BitCast and Score. I've actually really excited about each one of these companies for different reasons, Lon. Yeah. a diversity of projects of projects all part of that tensor because it shows what the project can do as a whole. It's a really cool thing about doing, you know, we were so focused on OpenClaught for a while, and it's cool. I still enjoy OpenClaugh. I've bonded with my agent. But a lot of the OpenClaugh projects are kind of similar. It's people doing kind of similar things. Here's how you can use |
| 1:44.7 | your open claw. Here's how you can make multiple agents. Here's how you can do this workflow and that. |
| 1:49.5 | And the great thing about making a show about BitTensor is that every one of these subnets, they're doing |
... |
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