đ¸ Seed rounds for rare earths and CO2-negative materials; Series A backs TRISO fuel and industrial AI; Series CâD fund robots and cell factories & more | Deep Tech Capital Movements #55
The Weekly Barometer of Deep Tech Capital Flows.
Greetings!
This weekâs capital is showing a sharper preference for technologies that can be operated, audited, and scaledâthen only secondarily for those that are merely impressive.
A few categories are now being treated as infrastructure with infrastructure expectations.
Others are being financed as factories, capacity lines, and supply assurance. And in biology, the center of gravity continues to shift from âplatform potentialâ to manufacturing reality.
Large rounds in AI inference, chip-design automation, and chiplet connectivity sit alongside financings for nuclear fuel, rare-earth recycling, battery ecosystems, industrial solar heat, and CO2-negative materials.
Defense and autonomy raise capital together with automated manufacturing, while biology appears as therapeutics, delivery hardware, biosecurity, and agricultural resilience.
Around all of this, the capital stack itself is becoming more layered and specialized, with different instruments now filling distinct roles rather than competing for the same slot.
This edition tracks 53 capital movements: 44 financings into operating companies and 9 new funds and vehicles.
The largest rounds cluster around AI and compute infrastructure, energy and climate-aligned materials, and defense and autonomy, with health, biotech, biosecurity, and CO2-negative materials forming a tightly connected second layer.
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WEEK 5, 2026
Nuclear, AI infra, and climateâmaterials as the current backbone
The most immediate signal comes from energy and materials, where capital is being deployed to secure the physical inputs that electrification and compute depend on.
Standard Nuclear raises $140 million in Series A to scale TRISO fuel production for advanced reactors, treating fuel manufacturing as a dedicated industrial capability rather than an adjunct to reactor projects. In parallel, Cyclic Materials commits $82 million to a rare-earth recycling facility in South Carolina, targeting critical rare-earth materials from end-of-life products and industrial scrap to support domestic supply chains tied to electrification and advanced manufacturing.
Those steps upstream are mirrored downstream in storage and batteries.