Europe's DeepTech Decade Starts at Pre-Seed
The continent's hard-technology advantage is being built in labs and small teams long before it reaches a Series A term sheet.
Europe has never lacked scientific depth. What it has lacked is capital willing to sit next to a team for the eighteen months between a working prototype and a first paying customer. That gap is where conviction is actually formed.
We spend the majority of our diligence on two questions: what has to be true about the technology, and what has to be true about the market pulling on it. Everything else — the deck, the round dynamics, the crowd — is secondary information.
Our expectation for the next decade is that the defining European outcomes will be infrastructure companies whose first cheque was written when the story was still difficult to tell.