🛡️$2B Defense Unicorn; ⛏️MiningTech Acquisition; 🌱Farming in Orbit; 🪨 Membranes for Rare Earth Extraction; 🚤 Maritime Hardware in 100 Days & more | Deep Tech Briefing #59

Weekly Intelligence on Deep Tech Startups and Venture Capital.

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Dear Friends,

If you listen closely, you can sense it—beneath the noise of announcements and the theatrics of valuation, a more deliberate rhythm is emerging. Less the sound of disruption, more the undertone of realignment. Systems are shifting—not in concept, but in hardware. Not in theory, but in throughput.

This week was a case study in how capital, technology, and geopolitics are no longer orbiting in parallel—they’re converging, fast. The most consequential companies we observed aren’t building toward abstract futures. They are intervening directly in today’s logistical, military, and industrial architectures.

One platform, still early in its lifecycle, has absorbed nearly half a billion dollars in under three years. It has no public deployments, and yet it has become a strategic placeholder inside the future defense stack. That tells you something fundamental has changed—not just in investor appetite, but in national intent.

Elsewhere, a European partnership is rethinking thermal continuity for heavy industry. The ambition isn’t flashy—it’s technical coherence under thermodynamic constraints. In a continent where industrial decarbonization is more necessity than vision, this kind of quiet engineering rigor is exactly where capital is beginning to settle.

Meanwhile, in naval autonomy, a vessel delivered in just 100 days challenges not just incumbents, but procurement cycles themselves. Speed, once antithetical to defense hardware, is becoming the metric. It’s not acceleration for its own sake—it’s tactical adaptability by design.

We also observed moves in mining tech, where a major industrial group consolidated upstream software capabilities in a bid to shorten decision loops from discovery to operation. These aren’t product plays. They’re architectural controls. And the acquirers are not chasing optionality—they’re buying the tempo.

In orbit, the market for in-space servicing is no longer speculative. As satellite constellations proliferate, maintaining them has moved from an edge case to an economic inevitability. The winners here won’t just offer capability. They’ll align with the cadence of defense logistics and space-based infrastructure at scale.

Taken together, these signals suggest that the next cycle of deep tech won’t be defined by breakthrough alone. It will be defined by integration—into systems that matter, timelines that are compressing, and geopolitical contexts that are no longer optional.

The real moat, increasingly, is operational fluency: knowing how to engage with public procurement without losing speed, how to industrialize novel science without theatricality, how to execute when the rules aren’t written for you.

This is the shape of deep tech in 2025. Less pitch, more production. Less potential, more positioning.

Enjoy the reading.

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In Today's Briefing:

• The Big Idea – A $2B defense valuation redraws the line between venture asset and strategic infrastructure—capital conviction meets national urgency.

• The Key Updates – Maritime autonomy ships in 100 days. Industrial heat gets modular and dispatchable. Space servicing consolidates. Mining software scales upstream. Swedish cleantech relocates to LA. Rare earth membranes signal extraction shift. Battery deals anchor IRA compliance. Green hydrogen hits economic friction. Flow batteries test grid viability.

• Deep Tech Power Plays – Europe deploys €910M in defense R&D. UK drafts integrity standards for carbon and nature markets. Hawaii reopens nuclear policy debates.

• Breakthroughs and Discoveries – Microgravity fermentation for food sovereignty, fusion magnet milestones, nature-inspired ion separation, algorithmic efficiency for field robots, ammonia-free urea production, rapid gene editing in corn, cleaner fly ash cement, reflective plasma heat, and quantum algorithms that may finally deliver.

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Interesting Reading:

The deeper you dig, the weirder, wider, and more telling the world of deep tech becomes. Here are a few standout reads from this week:

• France suffers worst quarter for VC dealmaking in 5 years. Europe's second-largest startup ecosystem hits a five-year low in venture activity, signaling broader caution in the EU's tech landscape. PitchBook

• Ukraine, U.S. Sign Economic Deal for Minerals. The U.S. and Ukraine formalize an economic partnership focused on critical minerals, reinforcing shared interests in industrial security and supply chain resilience. The Wall Street Journal

• Elon Musk can now add 'city founder' to his résumé after SpaceX employees vote to create Starbase, Texas. SpaceX’s company town prepares for its first vote on incorporation, spotlighting the intersection of private industry and municipal governance. Business Insider

• Defense VCs firm up priorities with $1 trillion Pentagon budget in play. The U.S. defense sector is opening up to startups, as the Pentagon’s shifting budget priorities attract growing interest from venture capital. PitchBook

• Why Investors Are Souring on This Once Red-Hot Climate Tech.
  Direct air capture, once the darling of climate tech, faces investor skepticism amid high costs and uncertain scalability. Bloomberg

• Europe’s tech sector braces for a ‘lost quarter’. European tech firms confront a challenging quarter, with funding slowdowns and market uncertainties dampening growth prospects.
  Financial Times

• Natural hydrogen mining: giants and Big Oil jump on the bandwagon. Major energy players invest in natural hydrogen extraction, eyeing it as the next frontier in clean energy. CNBC

• Geothermal energy emerges as rare bipartisan priority in divided US energy landscape- Industry leaders call for increased investment and policy support to unlock geothermal energy's potential. DigiTimes

• Europe spacetech startups need more money and talent to compete. European space tech startups face challenges in securing funding and talent, hindering their competitiveness on the global stage. Global Corporate Venturing

• The Guardian view on owning the heavens: the perils of letting capitalism colonise the cosmos. An editorial cautioning against the unchecked commercialization of space, advocating for shared stewardship of the cosmos. The Guardian

• UK must use existing strengths to lead in critical minerals. The UK aims to leverage its existing capabilities to become a leader in the critical minerals sector essential for tech industries. Mining Technology

• IBM plans to invest $150 billion in U.S. over next five years. BM's strategic focus on AI may buffer the company against potential impacts from new US tariff policies. Fortune

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The Big Idea: Inside the $2B Valuation of CHAOS Industries

One of the most significant signals this week isn’t just that CHAOS Industries raised $275 million, bringing its valuation to $2 billion. It’s that this round happened just six months after a $145 million Series B—and all this for a company that’s less than three years old. And let’s not forget: the round was led by names like Accel and NEA, with participation from players such as Valor, StepStone, and Overmatch.

What used to be an edge case in a VC portfolio is now being treated as a strategic industrial asset class…

So what’s going on?

Source: CHAOS Industries

This shift isn’t just about capital flows—it’s about the logic of capital.