Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Giulia Spano
Financing the Hard Middle. The new funding layer in Deep Tech
For twenty years, the dominant technology companies trained investors to think of scale as a matter of software distribution. A product could be built once and sold globally. Marginal cost could fall toward zero. Cloud computing could turn fixed capital into variable expense. App stores, APIs, digital advertising, and payment rails allowed small teams to act on large markets without owning much physical infrastructure. That era is not over. But its institutional assumptions are now misleading.
From Venture Capital to Capacity Capital | Deep Tech Briefing 108
Deep Tech is entering a more serious phase. The market is still interested in breakthroughs, but it is becoming more interested in what happens after the breakthrough stops being the main risk. That is when the harder questions begin. Can the customer finance adoption? Can the supplier expand? Can the bank lend? Can the first facility be built without overloading the cap table? Can the grid connect? Can the regulator qualify the product? Can strategic buyers trust the production path?
Engineering the Logic Behind Deep Tech Deals
The strongest fundraisers in Deep Tech are shaped long before legal language appears, because the decisive work happens when scientific risk becomes legible, when ownership is framed with discipline, and when the room is designed before anyone sits down.
This One AI Infrastructure Bet Could Decide Where the Money Flows Next | Deep Tech Briefing 107
What if the next real AI bottleneck is not training at all? That is the question underneath Cerebras’ return to the public markets. Deep tech still gets described as if invention were the hard part. Usually, it is not. The hard part is becoming indispensable inside a system that already has incumbents, procurement logic, budget owners, political constraints, and failure modes of its own. That is why Cerebras matters this week.
Five Customer Discovery Models in Deep Tech
In deep tech, customer discovery is not only about finding people who like what you built. It is about understanding what has to happen f or the technology to be adopted in the real world. That may sound obvious. But in practice, many founders still approach customer discovery as if the main question were, “Do customers want this?” In deep tech, that question is usually too small. A company may want it. An engineer may admire it. A pilot partner may agree to test it. And yet nothing moves.
Why This Market May Be Maturing Faster Than It Can Scale | Deep Tech Briefing 106
This week’s issue kept bringing me back to a question that matters in nearly every serious deep tech category: What happens when capital moves faster than adoption? In defense, for example, that is no longer a niche question; rather, it is becoming the central one. Over the last year, the market has become much more willing to fund technologies tied to autonomy, strategic materials, unmanned systems, industrial resilience, and modern production capacity.
How Deep Tech Exits Actually Happen: Anatomy of 4 M&A Paths
✨ This is the Premium Edition of The Scenarionist. Unlock the full experience by becoming a Premium Member! The Scenarionist Premium is designed to make you a better Deep Tech Founder, Investor, and Operator. Premium members gain exclusive access to unique insights, analysis, and masterclasses with the wisdom of the world’s leading Deep Tech thought leaders. Invest in yourself, and upgrade today! Deep tech exits follow a distinctive commercial logic.
The Hidden Milestones That Trigger Downstream Demand | Deep Tech Briefing 105
Deep tech is entering a phase in which the market is becoming more explicit about what it values. You can see it in how capital is being structured. You can see it in what strategic buyers are willing to pay to accelerate. You can see it in which regulatory milestones suddenly change the tone of a category. And you can see it in the growing importance of infrastructure, supply chains, industrial capacity, and trust layers that once sat outside the center of the story.
Why DeepTech wins or loses earlier than most people think | Deep Tech Briefing 104
There is a stage in Deep Tech when the science is credible, the ambition is clear, and the eventual market is easy to name — yet the company still turns on a much narrower question: Who buys first, and why now? Most deep tech outcomes are decided earlier than they appear. Not in the lab alone. Not in the market everyone points to first. In the sequence of choices that determines who pays, who waits, and who learns.
This Wasn’t Just Another Deep Tech Financing... | Deep Tech Briefing 103
As I put this week’s issue together, I kept returning to a simple thought: deep tech starts to matter differently once other institutions have to organise around it. In the earliest stages, a company mostly asks the market for belief. Belief in the science. Belief in the team. Belief that the problem is real and the timing is right. But a later stage begins when belief is no longer enough, and the surrounding world has to decide how it will actually absorb the technology. Can it be financed?
The race for a faster way to get critical mineral supply | Rumors
By March 2026, the search for new critical mineral supply has become both more urgent and more structurally constrained. New mines take too long, brownfield economics are worsening, and conventional recycling still struggles once feedstock quality deteriorates. Which is part of why this cluster of startup activity has become harder to ignore... The signals started stacking up around November. But they weren’t showing up in the usual places. Not in miner earnings. Not in policy decks.
Which Bottlenecks Got Repriced This Week | Deep Tech Capital Movements #60
Capital rarely moves all at once. It reprices in clusters. What looks like deal flow on the surface often signals a deeper shift in what the market is willing to underwrite. A layer becomes strategic when capital starts treating the bottleneck as the opportunity. The real signal is not that money is moving, but where conviction is repeating. Investors are increasingly funding the systems that make deployment possible, not just the products that capture attention.
Why critical minerals just changed category | Deep Tech Briefing 102
While putting this week’s issue together, I found myself coming back to the idea of thresholds… Advanced technologies often progress in ways that feel gradual to the people building them and sudden to everyone watching from the outside. A company can spend years working toward something that, once it happens, changes the way the market sees it. A technical capability becomes easier to appreciate because it has entered a real operating environment.
$4.6 Billion Moved This Week in Deep Tech. Here's What It Actually Means | Capital Movements #59
Welcome back to Deep Tech Capital Movements — where every dollar has a direction, and the direction is the story. Seventy-five deals. More than twenty geographies. More than $4.6 billion in disclosed capital. Those are the coordinates of this week’s funding map — but they don’t tell you where the actual story is. The story is structural. Capital is not flowing evenly across the market.
💰Quantum Finds a Valuation Window; ⚛️ Advanced Nuclear Finally Breaks Through; 🧬 AI Biosecurity Emerges as a Category; 🌋 Geothermal Keeps Advancing & more | Deep Tech Briefing 101
This week, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its first construction permit for a non-light-water commercial reactor in more than forty years. Two European quantum companies announced near-simultaneous Nasdaq listings, a $73 million acquisition reshaped the battery materials stack, and a new category began to take shape at the intersection of AI and biosecurity — and more. Welcome to another edition of Deep Tech Briefing.
ğ§ªMaterials Re-Engineer Scarcity; ğIron-Air Lands Its Proof Point; âï¸Reactor Dreams Meet Fuel, Waste, and Capital; â¡Data Centers Buy Stored Days & more | Deep Tech Briefing #100
This is it. Issue #100. One hundred weeks of tracking the companies that are rebuilding physical reality from the atomic level up â the materials, the energy systems, the propulsion hardware, the biological processes. One hundred weeks of ignoring the noise and following the molecules. We started this when most of the venture conversation was still about software multiples. The world has since rotated.
Underwriting Advanced Materials for AI Data Center Cooling | The Scenarionist
Every major technology transition in computing history has, at some point, hit a physical wall. In the 1990s it was clock speed. In the 2000s it was power density in single cores. Today, in the era of exascale AI training and trillion-parameter inference, the wall is thermal. A single rack of NVIDIA H100s can demand 100 kilowatts of cooling. The next generation is heading toward 300. The question of who removes that heat — and with what materials — is not an engineering footnote.
🟦 $1B Spatial Models, $700M Frontier LLMs and $300M Chip-Backed Debt set the tone & more | Deep Tech Capital Movements 58
Welcome back to Deep Tech Capital Movements. Each week, we monitor Deep Tech capital flows across the globe – startup rounds by geography, sector, and technology, plus new and closing funds – and turn that flow into a reference point for dealflow, benchmarking, and strategic focus. In this edition, 58 deep tech capital events were tracked: 50 new company financings and 8 fresh funds and investment vehicles aimed at deep tech.
đ¨ The Working-Capital Trap in Materialsâand the New Structures Trying to Price It | Deep Tech Briefing #99
Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing â the weekly intelligence layer that connects the dots between capital, breakthrough technologies, real-world industry, and the policies that shape them. The detail I couldnât shake this week is simple and brutal: in a lot of industrial deep tech, the moment everybody celebrates as âweâve made itâ â the big contract, the first serious production run â is exactly when the cash risk is highest. Youâve seen this movie.
From Prototype to SPAC: How Three Deep Tech Startups Engineered Their Exit to Public Markets | The Scenarionist
In 2026, deep tech sits at the core of every serious conversation about productivity, resilience, and competitiveness. Energy, defense, manufacturing, mobility, and compute all depend on hardware-heavy systems that blend advanced materials, complex supply chains, and software-defined control. These companies do not scale on brand or distribution alone. They scale on engineering depth, capital discipline, and industrial execution.
$520M Humanoids, $450M Fusion lasers and $350M Reusable Launch set the pace; seeds concentrate in Materials, Ag robotics and Bio; SAR, Photonic chips and grid twins attract growth capital | DTCM 57
Welcome back to Deep Tech Capital Movements. Each week, we monitor Deep Tech capital flows across the globe – startup rounds by geography, sector, and technology, plus new and closing funds – and turn that flow into a reference point for dealflow, benchmarking, and strategic focus. In this edition, 59 deep tech capital events have been monitored: 53 new company financings and 6 fresh funds and investment vehicles aimed at deep tech.
Surfaces Turn Active, Orbits Turn Serviceable | DTB 98
Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing! The weekly Deep Tech inflection points through a multi-stakeholder lens: startup milestones that signal scale, incumbent moves that reset the playing field, and policy levers that open—or foreclose—entire value pools. Interesting Reading – your Deep tech reading list, pre-filtered.
Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital: An Analysis of 2025 | Chapter 4
Deep tech spent 2025 proving that “industrial” is no longer a metaphor. It showed up in trucks and ports, launch pads and lunar landers, reactors and robots, fermenters and hospital corridors. What used to look like separate verticals—mobility, space, defense, food, health, automation—behaved as a single cycle of infrastructure, regulation, and cash flows. As you know, we believe that a sharper view of what’s ahead begins with a disciplined reading of what already happened.
Wafer-scale AI and robotaxis pull in mega-rounds; fusion, LFRs, and silicon quantum ride mixed public-private capital; circular composites, pigments, and pollination turn infra-grade & more | DTCM 56
Welcome back to Deep Tech Capital Movements. Each week, we monitor Deep Tech capital flows across the globe – startup rounds by geography, sector, and technology, plus new and closing funds – and turn that flow into a reference point for dealflow, benchmarking, and strategic focus. In this edition, 57 deep tech capital events have been monitored: 51 new company financings and 6 fresh funds and investment vehicles aimed at deep tech.
The First-Token Premium. Why “How Fast It Feels” Is Repricing the AI Stack | DTB 97
Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing, the weekly intelligence for people who build, fund, and shape Deep Tech. Every week we analyze Deep Tech as a chain of linked milestones: startups hitting key milestones, established players adjusting around them, and public programs opening or closing paths for value to be created. Interesting Reading – your Deep tech reading list, pre-filtered.
Deep Tech Monthly in Review - January 2026 | The Scenarionist
Resilience is often a material outcome: corrosion resistance, durability, and safety margins. it’s a pleasure to meet you again at the start of a new year with our monthly deep tech review. The last cycle has been a stress test: higher rates, tighter capital, and sharper demands for measurable impact. Work moved forward where it could be counted—in contracts signed, megawatts reserved, factories commissioned, and supply chains pulled into focus.
Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital: An Analysis of 2025 | Chapter 3 - Act II
And here we are at the II act of Chapter 3. Chapters 3 and 4 retrace the deep tech cycle by theme, and this act focuses on how, in 2025, a set of technologies moved out of the realm of promises and into the income statements of factories, utilities, and infrastructure operators. Here, the industrial machine and advanced manufacturing come into focus, with robotics, computer vision, and “physical AI” judged by unplanned downtime avoided and by the productivity of assets already in the field.
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
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.
š Geothermal IPO Comes Back; šŖØ Rare-Earths from Scrap Scale; š§± Underwater Concrete Rewrites Ports; š Data Centers Move Macro Numbers & more | Deep Tech Briefing #96
This week, a prominent geothermal developer is preparing to approach public markets just as firm power becomes a central input for AI infrastructure and reindustrialization. A business built on substantial upfront capex, drilling, and reservoir engineering is now seeking to be treated as infrastructureāanchored in long-term contracts, repeatable project delivery, and a defined role in the power stack rather than a permanent technological option.
Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital: An Analysis of 2025 | Chapter 3 - Act I
Deep tech startups turn hard science into hard power: energy, materials, defense, health, and much more. The real story is in wafers, tailings, turbines, data centers, advanced materials, and drill bits. What follows is a deep dive to follow and understand the power of deep tech unleashed in 2025—and to be ready for 2026. Greetings! Welcome back to The Scenarionist’s annual Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital report, which retraces the deep tech landscape of 2025.
💸 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 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.
⚛️ Fusion SPACs Test Public Appetite; 🛰️ Thermal-IR & Sovereign Space as Utilities; ✈️ Hydrogen Jets; 🌾 Spray Drones Localize Under Security Rules and more| Deep Tech Briefing #95
Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing! This week, fusion edges toward an asset class—SPAC paths, stellarator testbeds, and tritium supply chains pulling it onto infrastructure timelines—just as sovereign-but-commercial space systems, micro-GEOs, and AI-native weather constellations turn orbit into a regulated utility layer.
Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital: An Analysis of 2025 | Chapter 2
From fusion PPAs signed before electrons to humanoids-as-a-service and microreactors built on factory lines: the closing ledger of deep tech’s most industrial year so far. By the second half of the year, the tape stops hinting and starts committing: power is pre-bought, robots are put on subscription, and sovereigns step in as LPs of last resort. Greetings! As you know, we believe that a sharper view of what’s ahead begins with a disciplined reading of what already happened.
đ¸ 5 unicorns, plus a decacorn; 9-figure defense OS, robotics & next-gen aircraft; big fusion & BCI rounds, plus quantum cameras and lithium refining | Deep Tech Capital Movements #53
Welcome back to Deep Tech Capital Movements. This week, capital moved from GPU routers and robotics brains at unicorn valuations down to microbes squeezing more copper from rock and modular reactors for ammonia and fusion. AI isnât getting funded as a story anymore; itâs getting funded where it owns a control plane â over compute, over code, over missions, over materials.
đ§ąHydrogen Steel & EACs; âď¸ Nuclear Tranches for Data Centers; âď¸ Solid-State Cells Eye Aviation; đ Gen-AI Freight Autonomy; đ Reusable Rocket Push & more | Deep Tech Briefing #94
This week, the stack runs from 750 MW of wafer-scale AI compute and zero-water heat plants, through sodium-ion and biochar-glass storage, down to microbes squeezing more copper from rock and new ammonia routes for fertilizer and fuel. On top of that, SAFE defense loans, chip onshoring, and quantum alliances show how policy is hard-wiring national strategies into your deal flow. Interesting Reading â our collection of readings that are worth sitting with.
Deep Tech Startups & Venture Capital: An Analysis of 2025 | Chapter 1
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.
💸 A $20B Series E that trades like infra; nuclear and hyperscale for AI; defense platforms and clinical bio scale up | Deep Tech Capital Movements n.52
If you Build or Back Deep Tech, you can’t afford not to know where capital moves. Deep Tech Capital Movements is your weekly, global read on who got funded, which funds wrote the checks, and what that means for your next investment, raise, or strategic move.
đ IPO Gravity in Orbit; â˘ď¸ Data Centers Pre-Buy Nuclear; 𧏠Regulated AI Goes Vertical; âď¸ Fusion Twins De-Risk Build; đ 6G Goes National Security & more | Deep Tech Briefing n. 93
Happy New Year again, everyone, and welcome back to the first Deep Tech Briefing of the yearâour weekly intelligence on global deep tech startups and private markets! This week, the stack comes into focus: new-space IPOs recast launch as core infra, tiny nations sign MoUs for turnkey orbital capacity, and hyperspectral data goes on tap via marketplaces, just as ChatGPT Health formalizes models as a clinical front door, Mobileye buys a humanoid body for its autonomy stack, fusion twins and...
Deep Tech Monthly in Review - December 2025
As we open a new year together, we’d like to use this edition of our Deep Tech Monthly in Review to wish you a great 2026!! 🚀✨ May it bring you real opportunity, clearer conviction, and the kind of calm focus that lets you navigate volatility without losing sight of the long game.
From a “Magnificent Christmas Present” to a New Industrial Wave | The Scenarionist
On a cold afternoon in late December 1947, a small group gathered in an executive office at Bell Labs’ Murray Hill campus to watch a fingernail-sized device do something no vacuum tube could. They weren’t thinking about smartphones or cloud computing. They were thinking about the Bell System’s actual constraint: millions of fragile, power-hungry tubes keeping a continental phone network alive, and the possibility that a sliver of germanium might someday take their place.
Series D nuclear unicorn; Ag autonomy seed-to-pre-IPO; Biotech lands nine-figure rounds as AI governance & Cyber verification trade like utilities | Deep Tech Capital Movements n.51
If you Build or Back Deep Tech, you can’t afford not to know where capital moves. Deep Tech Capital Movements is your weekly, global read on who got funded, which funds wrote the checks, and what that means for your next investment, raise, or strategic move. See how capital from pre-seed through late-stage and structured vehicles concentrated around microreactors and distributed energy, ag autonomy and food systems, AI-native security/governance, and multi-program biotech platforms.
đBattery SPAC Is Back; đ§ŞSelf-Running Labs Scale; âď¸ Photonics M&A From Bankruptcy;đ§ Geologic H2 Exploration; đ Autonomous Logistics Goes Defense đ NATO Lunar Power | Deep Tech Briefing n. 92
Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing! This week, a solid-state battery de-SPAC becomes a live test of whether public markets will still finance capex-heavy hardware, just as energy splinters into financeable wedgesâfusion fuel handling, geologic hydrogen, enhanced weathering, and even off-world generation.
Manufacturing Moats: How Hard Infrastructure Becomes Defensive Tech | The Scenarionist
When software eats the world, it leaves the crumbs of physical production to others. But in 2025, some of the savviest deep tech upstarts are instead feasting on those “crumbs” – building factories, mastering hardware processes, and turning heavy infrastructure into high-ground advantage. In an era when supply chains became strategic choke points and capital flooded back into industry, manufacturing is no longer a dirty word in venture. It’s a secret weapon.
đ¸ A seed that looks like a Series C; Series A stacks in satellites, undersea, and closed-loop labs; growth capital backs execution | Deep Tech Capital Movements n.50
If you Build or Back Deep Tech, you canât afford not to know where capital moves. Deep Tech Capital Movements is your weekly, global read on who got funded, which funds wrote the checks, and what that means for your next investment, raise, or strategic move.
⚛️ Fusion PPAs Before Electrons; 🛰️ Space Nuclear Fuel Steps Up; 💧Microbes Turn Oil Wells into Hydrogen; ⚡Power Beaming Inches Toward Orbit & more | Deep Tech Briefing n. 91
Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing! This week, we move from fusion offtake contracts as the real product to a wider pattern of industrialization-before-science-fiction: space-solar powering orbital data centers, hydrogen business jets turning into factories on the ground, glyphosate-cleanup microbes slotting into existing ag, and AI radiology chains scaling through public markets. Interesting Reading – our collection of readings that are worth sitting with.
Reverse Diligence: How Two Next-Gen Compute Players Challenge the GPU Monoculture with Photonic and Analog AI Chips
In the high-stakes arena of advanced computing hardware—where artificial intelligence workloads push silicon to its limits—the journey from a lab-bench innovation to a data-center or edge-device deployment is a perilous odyssey. Many bold chip architectures and novel computing paradigms falter not due to a lack of technical merit, but because they fail to bridge the chasm between invention and industrial adoption.
If you Build or Back Deep Tech, you canât afford not to know where capital moves. Deep Tech Capital Movements is your weekly, global read on who got funded, which funds wrote the checks, and what that means for your next investment, raise, or strategic move. See how capital from pre-seed through Series F concentrated around AI-native infrastructure, dual-use space and defense stacks, industrial and climate chemistry, and clinical research networks.
⚛️ Factory-Grade Fission and Waste Solutions; 🌋 Geothermal Expands the Map; 🤖 AI Runs EDA and Health Ops; 🛰️ Reusable Reentry Closes the Space Supply Chain & more | Deep Tech Briefing n. 90
Welcome back to Deep Tech Briefing! This week, we move from Marvell’s balance-sheet engineering around AI photonics to a wider pattern of reindustrialization: sovereign LPs in chip tools, district geothermal, quantum alliances, and PE using aerospace as a buyout engine for deep tech. Interesting Reading – our collection of readings that are worth sitting with. The Big Idea – a critical inflection, unpacked into a strategic view.
Deep Tech Monthly in Review - November 2025
November felt less like a “news month” and more like someone quietly redrawing the blueprint beneath Deep Tech. The physics barely moved; the assumptions did. Power stopped being a backdrop. Magnets, mines, polymers, and molten salts stopped being niche. Capex, grids, exits, and rate bases stepped out of the appendix and into the first slide.
💸 Growth money backs SMRs and counter-UAS; early-stage cash targets fusion, HALE aircraft, and oncology platforms & more | Deep Tech Capital Movements 46
If you Build or Back Deep Tech, you can’t afford not to know where capital moves. Deep Tech Capital Movements is your weekly, global read on who got funded, which funds wrote the checks, and what that means for your next investment, raise, or strategic move. See how capital from pre-seed to Series D concentrated across compute & data infrastructure, climate and industrial decarbonization, defense-grade autonomy, and biotech / medtech.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Giulia
Contact Giulia, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack