Inside Hard2beat

Most founders pitch with a deck. The best come with a diligence-ready data room – a clear signal of execution that speeds up fundraising, especially in deep tech.

While the world was busy with New Year’s resolutions and holiday leftovers, European R&D labs were hard at work. In January, investors backed 74 companies tackling “absurdly hard” challenges – from treating brain tumors with electricity to wirelessly powering artificial hearts and manufacturing quantum computers in smartphone factories.

December is when productivity usually flatlines – but European Deep Tech didn’t get the memo. While everyone else was eating chocolate for breakfast, VCs shoved ~$1.5B into startups rewriting physics, manufacturing, and biology, as the market keeps shifting hard from bits to atoms. Here’s what happened in December 2025.

A VC take on the photonic chip market, from Moore’s Law limits to AI data center power use – and where ambitious founders can build enduring companies.

Raising money for a deeptech startup is tough — long R&D, tricky IP, high risk. Here’s how to build a 10-slide deck that shows your edge and vision.

I invest in hardware. I split my time between factory floors and investment committees, so I see how money works in the real world. The last decade in robotics tells a clear story: Robotics has broken its curse-of-growth loop and is compounding on real deployments.