$1.6 Billion Deployed, Blue Water, Scout AI, Potato... The Stealth Wave Just Got Funded | Capital Movements Vol. 14
💰The state of deep tech capital: who’s raising, who’s betting, and why.
Welcome back to Deep Tech Capital Moments! Every week, we track funding rounds, new funds, and major strategic moves in deep tech
💡 Got a big deal to share? If your fund just backed something game-changing—or your startup just raised—let’s make sure the right people see it.
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🛡️Palantir Powers NATO AI; 🚚 Self-Driving Trucks SPAC; 🧠 Neuralink Rival Gets FDA Nod; 🚢 Autonomous Naval Ramps Up; 🧱 CO2 Cement Demo Launches | Deep Tech Briefing #57
In Today's Briefing
The Big Idea – A $2.5B autonomous trucking move just reframed what second-wave autonomy looks like. It's not about moonshots—it's about real metrics, patient capital, and vertical focus. The bigger signal? What it tells us about where SPACs go next.
The Key Updates – A naval autonomy player just locked in U.S. production scale. NATO fast-tracks an AI battlefield layer. A Neuralink rival clears FDA. Hugging Face makes a full-stack robotics play. And one stealth company you probably haven’t heard of—until now—just dropped a defense-native foundation model.
Deep Tech Power Plays – Ireland hedges trade through Asia. France shifts its hydrogen posture from scale to realism. ESA enters the defense orbit. The Pentagon bets on tactical microreactors—and rewrites procurement for speed.
Breakthroughs and Discoveries – Gallium oxide goes sovereign in Europe. Drones get 3D-printed at the edge. CMOS behaves like a brain. Graphene breaks into carbon capture. And a tire-to-epoxy pipeline could flip industrial recycling economics.
Dear Friends,
This week, deep tech capital didn’t chase headlines. It redrew the map.
While no single raise grabbed the oxygen the way a mega-round might, the contours of capital flow spoke volumes. This wasn’t a week of hype—it was a week of posture. The kind of posture that reveals where the infrastructure of the future is quietly being laid.
In total, we tracked over 40 deals across North America, Europe, and Asia. But the real story wasn’t just how many—it was where and how. Beneath the surface, we saw deep tech capital do what it rarely does in the open: organize itself around necessity.
Seed-stage funding led the charge, with 14 rounds and +$130M in total, with the most significant raises clustered around dual-use technologies—a reflection of how investors are now prioritizing AI agents, robotics, and infrastructure that operates at the frontier of both commercial and defense applications. The seed stage is no longer just a playground for prototypes; it’s where system architectures are getting locked in.
At Series A, we tracked 9 deals, dominated by