Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital: An Analysis of 2025 | Chapter 1
The annual report on the Deep Tech Cycle — 2025 in Data: 200+ hard numbers that matter, mapped month by month — Q1–Q2.
From 345 MWe reactors to asteroid prospecting: the factual ledger of deep tech’s most industrial year so far.
In deep tech, the cycle is rarely a mood—it is a ledger.
What looks like “momentum” is often megawatts, contracts, permits, and capex.
Greetings!
As you know, we believe a sharper vision of what’s ahead begins with a thoughtful and disciplined reading of what came before. So, as we do every January, it is with real pleasure that we introduce this annual, in-depth analysis of the 2025 deep tech startup and venture capital landscape.
Advanced technology does not move only on sentiment; it moves when prototypes become systems, when pilot projects become assets, and when balance sheets begin to carry the weight of factories, grids, supply chains, and regulated distribution. This shift is measurable. It appears in round sizes, project scopes, unit capacities, offtake terms, manufacturing footprints, sovereign programs, and in the increasingly explicit linkage between compute, energy, and industrial policy.
This annual report exists to make that shift legible.
It is structured in 4 chapters that will unfold over the coming weeks.
The first two chapters treat 2025 as a data object, mapped month by month, anchored in concrete numbers and designed to surface what actually changed beneath the narrative.
The second two chapters translate that tape into themes, sectors, and trends: how capital, policy, and industrial demand reorganized across compute and AI infrastructure, energy and climate, critical materials, defense and space, and health and bio.
This opening chapter is the on-ramp into the cycle: 2025 in data, first and second quarter. It covers January to June, the period in which the year’s structure becomes readable. The tape begins with infrastructure-scale AI and nuclear for data centers, platforms for critical materials, and autonomous industrial systems. It moves through sovereign funds, fusion and advanced fission programs, orbital buses and asteroid missions, and closes the half-year with baseload power for AI, mine-waste valorization, and orbital logistics framed as a distinct midstream layer. Each month is introduced by a short synthesis and then grounded in a curated set of datapoints.
Across the first half of 2025, several through-lines consolidate. AI infrastructure is explicitly bound to power, with megaprojects linked to advanced nuclear, geothermal, and grid innovations that treat energy as a central constraint rather than a background input. Upstream platforms for lithium, rare earths, uranium, and mine-waste valorization are positioned as strategic industrial infrastructure, not as niche materials plays. Fusion efforts, molten-salt and waste-fueled reactors, quantum control layers, photonic interconnects, autonomous robotics, radiopharma scale-up, and orbital logistics are increasingly tied to sovereign programs, OEM strategies, and defense procurement—signaling their integration into national and corporate industrial plans.
In parallel, climate tech is recalibrated. Afforestation portfolios, biomass burial, enhanced rock weathering, CCS-equipped industrial plants, and long-duration storage are structured with the durability, verification, and offtake logic expected of enduring assets. Waste streams—plastics, mine tailings, textiles—are redefined as contracted feedstock. Space and defense systems move from experimental payloads to multi-orbit, multi-domain platforms with dedicated manufacturing footprints and recurring demand.
What follows is the ledger of deep tech’s first half of 2025: Q1–Q2, written in numbers.
Enjoy the read!
– The Scenarionist Team
January 2025 – Infrastructure, Autonomy, and Critical Materials
Deep tech steps into an industrial phase, with January dominated by large, asset-heavy platforms rather than small proofs of concept. AI megaprojects and dedicated nuclear for data centers link compute growth directly to firm power, from a 345 MWe advanced reactor design to 2 GW of underground capacity. Direct lithium extraction, rare-earth recycling, and new uranium development are funded as upstream infrastructure for batteries, magnets, and reactors. Integrated photonics, quantum hardware, autonomous robotics, space-servicing standards, nuclear-thermal propulsion work, preventive full-body scanning, and a pharma–VC biotech fund tie capital to systems already interacting with grids, factories, fleets, and regulated care.
€4.75M – the seed round of PHOTON IP to industrialize low-power optical chips signals integrated photonics as a primary lever for reducing AI and networking energy intensity inside the semiconductor and interconnect stack.
$27.5M – the Series A round of Electralith to commercialize low-cost direct lithium extraction shows process innovation being treated as strategic infrastructure for reshoring battery-grade lithium and diversifying away from China-centric refining capacity.
$4.2M – the seed round of ZuriQ to scale a trapped-ion quantum architecture indicates quantum computing is maturing into an engineering-led hardware category where manufacturability, stability, and scaling roadmaps matter as much as algorithmic novelty.
$20M – the Series B round of Ati Motors for autonomous industrial robots underlines how India-based deep tech platforms are now raising growth capital to supply global automation demand as manufacturers diversify hardware supply chains away from single-country dependence.
345 MWe – the Natrium design’s 345 MWe sodium-cooled fast reactor with integrated molten-salt storage positions advanced nuclear as flexible zero-carbon capacity able to follow renewables and data-center load rather than acting purely as static baseload.
$500B – the planned Stargate initiative in the United States, with up to $500B of AI infrastructure investment, frames compute and dedicated power as sovereign-scale assets at the center of long-horizon industrial and geopolitical strategy.
$5B – the targeted valuation of Shield AI at $5B suggests investors are increasingly willing to price autonomous defense platforms as durable infrastructure companies rather than episodic beneficiaries of short-term security cycles.
$55M – the Series B round of Cyclic Materials, joined by JLR’s InMotion, highlights rare-earth recycling as a strategic upstream capability for EV supply chains, turning circularity into a tool for permanent magnet security rather than a purely reputational exercise.
2 GW – the partnership between Deep Fission and Endeavour to co-develop 2 GW of underground nuclear capacity for data centers illustrates how next-generation nuclear is being integrated directly into hyperscale compute planning to bypass constrained public grids.
$6.2B – the valuation of Mistral AI at $6.2B following a roughly $640M Series B creates a European benchmark for foundation-model companies, shaping expectations for capital intensity, strategic exits, and eventual public listings across the region.
$500M – the $500M commitment of Eli Lilly to the Biotech Ecosystem Venture Fund run with Andreessen Horowitz operationalizes a hybrid pharma–VC structure aimed at compressing timelines from platform science and health AI into scalable, regulated therapeutics.
$1.5M – the pre-seed round of OrbitAID for its SIDRP docking and refueling interface reflects an emerging push to standardize on-orbit hardware, enabling reusable architectures and future satellite-servicing markets instead of single-use spacecraft.
2,600 K – the successful hot-hydrogen tests of General Atomics’ nuclear-thermal-propulsion fuel at 2,600 K at NASA Marshall move high-ISP propulsion from concept toward engineering viability, reshaping mission mass, risk, and transit-time budgets for cislunar and Martian logistics.
$1.6B – the investment agreement of Orano with Mongolia for the Zuuvch-Ovoo uranium deposit diversifies nuclear-fuel supply away from fragile regions, underpinning expansion plans in markets that see nuclear as a backbone for long-term decarbonization.
$1B – the nearly $1B Arsenal-1 manufacturing investment of Anduril in Ohio shows defense-tech evolving into a heavy industrial sector, with hyperscale plants, thousands of jobs, and throughput more typical of aerospace primes than software vendors.
$260M – the Series B round of Neko Health for full-body preventive scans channels substantial capital into data-rich diagnostics that must now demonstrate measurable impact on morbidity, payer economics, and system-wide healthcare costs.
February 2025 – Infrastructure-Grade Bets Across Compute, Energy, and Climate
Power systems and carbon balance sheets move to the center of deep tech investing. Financing for thorium-HALEU fuels, modular and sodium fast reactors, geothermal across four countries, and superconducting lines shows energy being structured as a constraint to solve, not a background input. In parallel, afforestation platforms, biomass burial, and battery-metal recovery treat carbon removal and cathode supply as long-lived infrastructure categories. On the compute side, independent GPU clouds, LPU-based inference, spreadsheet-native foundation models, quantum notes, and “physical-world” models for robots all expand where and how AI runs. Orbital buses, asteroid missions, radiopharma scale-up, and autonomous shipyards extend the same logic into space and defense.
$1.5B – the commitment from Saudi Arabia to Groq to expand LPU-based AI inference and a data center in Dammam shows sovereigns explicitly bundling compute and local AI model capacity into national industrial strategies.
300 days – the 300-day flyby trajectory of AstroForge’s Odin mission to asteroid 2022 OB5 marks one of the first commercial deep-space attempts to characterize metal-rich bodies as future mining targets, turning in-situ resource assessment into a venture-backed activity.
400 MWt – the 400 MWt modular sodium fast reactors in Hexana’s platform, coupled with thermal storage, exemplify Gen IV nuclear systems optimized for high-temperature industrial heat and flexible power, aligning reactor design with process-industry decarbonization needs.
$15.5M – the Series Seed round of Clean Core Thorium Energy to advance ANEEL, a thorium-HALEU fuel for existing reactors, highlights investor appetite for