💸 Space and sovereignty pull capital; Photonic & networking AI infra reprice seed; Geothermal, storage, and bio-inputs scale quietly & more | Deep Tech Capital Movements #54
The Weekly Barometer of Deep Tech Capital Flows.
Greetings!
The data from this week raises several questions that matter for anyone who builds, funds, or regulates deep tech.
One question concerns allocation between AI infrastructure and climate–bio–materials. Frontier AI and AI infra attract spectacular checks. Climate, storage, geothermal, agri-bio, and materials attract steady but smaller rounds and substantial non-equity capital. The long-term balance between these domains will influence which capabilities remain under-funded and which ones accumulate redundant efforts.
A second question concerns the cumulative effect of sovereign ambitions. Several countries advance launch capability, domestic magnet and battery manufacturing, Arctic defense, and indigenous semiconductor tooling at the same time. This produces resilience and bargaining power. It can also produce under-utilized capacity. The adjustment process across borders and alliances will shape trade patterns and security arrangements.
A third question concerns the maturation of capital architecture. Pre-seed deeptech funds, thematic Series A–C vehicles, blended climate funds, impact and venture secondaries, and real-asset strategies give the ecosystem more structure. Coordination between these layers now becomes a central design problem. Poor alignment can trap companies between capital types. Good alignment can reduce friction and shorten time-to-scale for critical technologies.
As of the fourth week of 2026, deep tech capital flows describe an industrial stack under construction: space and orbital infrastructure, AI and compute, energy and storage, biology and materials. The individual rounds name the actors. The patterns describe the system they are building together.
This week’s map tracks 68 capital movements: 52 rounds into operating companies and 16 new pools of capital in the form of funds and vehicles. The mix spans seed and pre-seed bets, Series A–F growth, grants and accelerators, and large-scale debt, giving a single consolidated view of where each layer of the capital stack is currently willing to take risk.
By capital volume, three themes dominate: climate and energy systems (including storage, geothermal, electrification, and critical materials), AI and compute infrastructure (from frontier models to photonics and networking), and space and orbital capabilities (launch, buses, in-orbit logistics, security, and EO). Health and biotech, industrial biology, and advanced materials form a second band of activity where the individual rounds are smaller but the accumulated optionality is significant.
The sections that follow unpack these 68 points in context: which stages are clearing at scale, where strategic and public balance sheets are silently setting prices, and how non-dilutive capital is altering the true cost of capital in climate and deep infrastructure and much more.
Enjoy the read!
WEEK 4, 2026
Sovereignty, compute, and climate–bio: launch, AI infra, and industrial materials as the deep tech backbone
In the final week of January 2026 the distribution of capital in deep tech concentrates on three clear blocks.