🚚 AI Freight Hits Public Markets; 🚢 Ammonia & Methanol at Sea; 🧬 Synbio Slips Into Supply Chains; ⚛️ Microreactors for Mines & Data & more | Deep Tech Briefing #87

Weekly Intelligence on Deep Tech Private Markets.

Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing — the weekly space by The Scenarionist where we analyze and discuss the key events of the week shaping Deep Tech Private Markets.

✨In Today’s Briefing:

• Editorial

• Interesting Reading

• The Big Idea:

  Autonomous Freight Steps on Stage: Einride’s SPAC Is a Test of “Hard AI” Logistics

• Deep Tech Key Moves:

  Microreactors, giga-scale AI campuses, sodium-ion blocks, asteroid “capture bags,” maritime fuels, enzyme distilleries, the carbon math of moving stuff — A week When Atoms, Electrons, and Enzymes Start to Rhyme

• Signal in the Data:

  Deep Tech Moves From Side Pocket to Front Page

  European LPs are treating it like a core venture allocation

• Deep Tech Power Play:

  From Brussels to London, from Washington to New Delhi and Perth — clean fuels for jets and ships, non-animal safety testing, critical-minerals security, IP-led rare-disease R&D, and procurement-backed green steel.

---

Greetings!

In this mid-November 2025, Deep Tech is showing a surge that’s increasingly tangible and industrial. On one side, autonomy and electrification in freight are finally colliding with public markets.

A logistics platform built around software, hardware, and guaranteed capacity is preparing to test whether investors are ready to treat industrial AI less like a growth story and more like regulated infrastructure. On the other side, a familiar list of “asset-light” logistics experiments is being repriced in courtrooms and fire sales. Same sector, same buzzwords, wildly different outcomes. The difference is not branding. It’s whether unit economics, grid constraints, and labor politics have been underwritten as seriously as the pitch deck.

Energy is going through a similar transition. Small reactors are edging closer to deployment, not as abstract climate instruments but as candidates to serve mines, processing plants, and data campuses. Critical-minerals policy is being quietly rewritten to favor domestic and allied supply.

Giga-scale AI campuses are forcing utilities and regulators to admit that interconnects and transmission are the real bottlenecks, not marketing campaigns. AI is no longer “just software”; it’s a power user of the grid.

Around that core, other pieces are sliding into place. Shipping is running a live experiment across fuels, engines, wind assistance, and onboard carbon strategies. Enzyme and synbio platforms are slipping into supply chains that used to belong only to petrochemistry and legacy pharma.

Government roadmaps now call out very specific targets: cleaner fuels for jets and ships, alternatives to animal testing, rare-disease IP, low-emission steel. Procurement and regulation are being used, quite openly, as levers to pull private capital into particular parts of the stack.

All of this is good news for anyone who actually believes in reindustrialization and capitalism with a spine. It also raises the bar. Deep tech can no longer be treated as an optional sleeve parked next to “real” infrastructure and “real” commodities; it’s increasingly the thing that determines who controls both.

The rest of this week’s briefing digs into where those shifts are already visible in freight, power, fuels, biology, and capital flows—and where the edges still look mispriced.

Enjoy the read!

- Giulia

✨ For more, see Membership | VC Guides | Insights | Rumors | Exit

---

🔸 Interesting Reading:

• UK’s biggest VC LP eyes more defence deals Sifted — The British Business Bank leans harder into dual-use: procurement-anchored theses, spin-outs with clean IP, and funds that speak MoD as fluently as SaaS.

• Nuclear startup Fermi invokes the Manhattan Project: ‘We are at war’ Bloomberg — Rhetoric follows reality: compute growth is forcing a firm-power sprint, and founders are framing it like mobilization.

• Global cocoa shortage pushes chocolate toward sustainable innovation Food Chain Magazine — Formulation pivots, supply-chain redundancy, and new fermentation tricks as commodity shocks meet brand promises.

• How Big Tech is rewriting the rules of venture capital Vestbee — Distribution + subsidy capital + captive workloads; platform companies turn venture into a supply-chain for their own demand.

• Microsoft announces new AI data center under construction in Atlanta WABE — Southeast load, long-haul fiber, and utility cooperation: another proof that latency maps redraw capex maps.

• How the data-center boom brought down the Texas Energy Fund Latitude Media — Incentives met physics: interconnect scarcity and megaproject timelines overwhelmed policy scaffolding.

• What will it take for India to lead on deep tech and the global space race? World Economic Forum — Talent density plus state offtake plus manufacturing cadence; sovereignty as go-to-market.

• Japan’s €33B bet on Europe: deeptech/AI lead as cross-border investment surges Tech.eu — Industrial alliances with checkbooks: LP capital and corporates stitch EU supply chains to Japan’s roadmap.

• Israel’s innovation engine keeps revving The Jerusalem Post — Defense-tilted AI, sensors, and compute: resilience through dual-use revenue.

• China planning renewable expansion beyond the power sector Reuters — Sector-coupling at scale: electrons for heat, fuels, and industry, not just the grid.

• Norway’s wealth fund may invest in top defence firms after 21-year ban Reuters — Defense exposure normalizes in mega-capital; procurement pull trumps legacy exclusions.

---

🔒 You’re reading the Lite edition of Deep Tech Briefing.

For full access to this week’s analysis, context, and implications for deep tech private markets, join The Scenarionist Premium.

---

---

🔸 The Big Idea:

Autonomous Freight Steps on Stage: Einride’s SPAC Is a Test of “Hard AI” Logistics

Autonomous freight is back in the spotlight, and this time the stakes are higher than a catchy demo video. Swedish startup Einride plans to go public via a SPAC merger with Legato Merger Corp. III, targeting the first half of 2026, at a pre-money valuation of about $1.8 billion and seeking additional PIPE capital.

Beyond the headline, the deal is a live test of whether public markets