The Scenarionist - Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital

The Scenarionist - Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital

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The Scenarionist - Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital
The Scenarionist - Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital
💸 CellCentric $120M; Rivan £10M; Persist AI $12M; AstroLight €2.8M & more...| Deep Tech Capital Movements Vol. 19
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Capital Movements

💸 CellCentric $120M; Rivan £10M; Persist AI $12M; AstroLight €2.8M & more...| Deep Tech Capital Movements Vol. 19

The Week’s State of Deep Tech Capital: who’s Raising, who’s Betting, and why.

Giulia Spano, PhD's avatar
Giulia Spano, PhD
May 26, 2025
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The Scenarionist - Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital
The Scenarionist - Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital
💸 CellCentric $120M; Rivan £10M; Persist AI $12M; AstroLight €2.8M & more...| Deep Tech Capital Movements Vol. 19
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Welcome back to Deep Tech Capital Moments — the weekly analysis from The Scenarionist that tracks and highlights capital dynamics in deep tech, from early-stage funding rounds to major fund launches.

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Dear Friends,

Roughly $1.5 billion in new capital moved into deep tech this week, across both startups and funds, reflecting not just momentum, but a more deliberate capital posture. Investors are no longer pursuing category expansion or abstract scalability; they’re deploying into systems that reduce friction—technically, operationally, and geopolitically. What’s clear is that this new cycle of deep tech capital is being shaped by constraint awareness, not thematic enthusiasm.

Space infrastructure offered a clear view of this logic in motion. Sophia Space raised $3.5 million to bring compute to orbit—processing imagery and running inference closer to where data is captured, rather than relying on energy- and bandwidth-heavy downlink pipelines. AstroLight’s €2.8 million round, focused on MEMS-based optical terminals, reinforces the same principle: simplify architectures, shrink mass, and harden comms systems for small-sat deployment. PiLogic’s $4 million seed, enabling real-time probabilistic reasoning in constrained orbital environments, closes the loop: sensing, processing, and deciding—at the edge, by design.

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