The Scenarionist - Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital

The Scenarionist - Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital

Capital Movements

💸 $44M Logistics Agents; $34M Quantum Algorithms; $22M Farm Vision AI; $15M Zinc-Bromine Storage; $14M Plant-Protein Polymers & more | Capital Movements Vol. 34

The Weekly Observer of Deep Tech Capital: where the money moves, who drives it, and why it matters.

Giulia Spano, PhD's avatar
Giulia Spano, PhD
Sep 08, 2025
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Welcome to Deep Tech Capital Movements — the weekly observer of global deep-tech capital shifts.

Dealflow intelligence without noise. Hours of scouting saved. Who invests, in what, and why now — every week.

Top deep tech funding rounds closed this week

This week, capital kept shifting from shiny demos to real deployment—into freight docks, factory floors, hospital clinics, power grids, and even sovereign networks. Agentic software is moving out of the lab and into production, wiring itself into logistics and DevOps, supported by retrieval and real-time analytics that can withstand audits. Industrial and defense OT continue to attract capital because they deliver what buyers value most: time and certainty. Edge platforms that merge local telemetry with prices, weather, and risk are the difference between a flashy slide deck and a functioning system.

Sovereignty also showed up at the cap table, with secure constellations and counter-UAS programs that are funded like long-term infrastructure, not experiments. In quantum and photonics, physics is still setting the pace—hardware raises are being matched with NISQ-honest software, while micro-LED platforms target low-power environments like optical interconnects and AI glasses.

In climate and materials, investors favored drop-in, factory-ready solutions over hype. In bio and diagnostics, the barbell remains: nearer-to-clinic assets with payer logic balanced by data and automation platforms.

Agriculture and construction tools that directly drive throughput continue to outcompete dashboards. And on the GP/LP side, structured liquidity and credit are firmly mainstream; the message for founders is clear—stay disciplined and be capital-form-agnostic.

3 Interesting Deals

  • Xampla — $14M Series A led by Emerald, with BGF and Matterwave, and follow-on from Amadeus and Horizons. The UK startup is scaling its Morro materials—plant-protein polymers that replace PFAS-laden liners, films, and microencapsulates without requiring converters to retool. Xampla aims to eliminate more than 10 billion single-use items over the next five years, expanding across Europe and APAC.

  • IQM (Quantum) — ~$320M Series B, the largest quantum Series B outside the U.S. Led by Ten Eleven Ventures, with major backing from Tesi, pension funds, and strategic investors. The capital will accelerate development of superconducting systems with advanced error reduction/correction, fund chip fabrication in Finland, and support both on-premises and cloud-based QPUs, while expanding into the U.S. market.

  • CVector Energy — $1.5M Pre-Seed led by Schematic Ventures. Based in US, the company is building the data backbone for industrial AI, fusing high-fidelity time-series asset data with external signals like energy prices, weather, and risk. The funding will support product development, early deployments with critical-infrastructure operators, and team growth.


✨ This week we tracked 40+ deals and new funds spanning materials, AI agents, robotics, and the launch of specialist funds across the globe.

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Greetings!

This week made it plain: capital is flowing to teams shipping into the real world. Yes, Anthropic’s $13B confers its own gravity well. But even without that outlier, the week clears meaningful volume into companies that compress cycle times in physical systems—freight, factories, grids, clinics, and sovereign networks. The bias isn’t toward “AI that talks.” It’s toward AI, materials, and hardware that move atoms, verify outcomes, and plug into regulated, mission-critical workflows.

Agents leave the lab and enter the loading dock

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