What’s “Deep Tech,” and Why Are People Excited for It?

If you’re interested in new technology, and maybe even in how investing works, you will have heard the term “deep tech.” What kind of tech is it, though, and what makes it deep?

What’s Deep Tech?

Deep tech is a catch-all term for startups that are working on technological solutions with long-term advantages or particularly tricky challenges. Think of anything that requires significant time and effort to solve using advanced science or engineering.

Where a lot, maybe even most, startups will be focused on products or services they can put together and market relatively quickly, deep tech focuses on the long term. When a deep tech startup sets out, chances are the founders are hoping to put something concrete together in a few years, not a few months.

Examples of Deep Tech

Deep tech is a fairly vague term, so it’s not really possible to give you a list that boldly states what is and isn’t deep tech, but myself I like to think of it as anything you could conceivably find in a science fiction story. If it’s something that could be in daily use on the USS Enterprise, it’s probably deep tech.

Quantum computing would be a good example of deep tech as it directly challenges the status quo in its field and poses serious challenges for people developing it. Any company working on it is in it for the long haul, too: even though it’s becoming more viable by the day, the road to getting here has been long, with some labs working on quantum computing for decades (IBM is a good example).

Another good example of deep tech would be space flight. Though we’ve been working on ways to get into the stratosphere and beyond for decades now, overall it’s been slow-going. In many ways, we’re as far from actual space faring as we’ve ever been, meaning we’re going to need a lot more time, effort, and money to make companies like SpaceX achieve their goals. That said, the Starlink project with its thousands of tiny satellites roaming the skies could be an example of successful deep tech.

A more tangible example in everyday life are things like artificial intelligence, robotics, or photovoltaics. Any of these could radically change the way we live our lives (with AI probably having the most impact right now), but to get where they need to be isn’t something that can be done in a few months’ time.

Why Some Investors Love Deep Tech

Because of its nature, deep tech needs a lot of money, yet not every investor is a big fan of it. While the potential rewards could be massive, the time and money needed scares off many of them simply because there often is no way of telling when an investment will pay off, if at all.

If you’re running some kind of stock fund you want reliable quarterly returns, not some geeky promise of how awesome an idea will be ten years down the line. As a result, investing in deep tech has become somewhat niche, attracting investors driven by the appeal of working on sci-fi tech, or simply looking for a big score.

After all, though deep tech may not make money in the short term, there is the potential to make a lot if any of it comes to fruition. Imagine getting in on the ground floor of Microsoft or Apple back in the day. You could have bought shares for next to nothing and be a millionaire today. This is what drives investment in deep tech: the promise of a better world and wealth beyond imagining.

As a result, deep tech has become the realm of the more adventurous sort of Venture Capital (VC) fund, firms that invest in startups and other nascent companies. VCs, by their nature, like to roll the dice, investing a chunk of money now hoping that somewhere down the line their gamble will pay off.

Deep tech is an almost natural playing field for VC, with many firms even specializing in funding different kinds of deep tech (here’s one list). They’ll often spread their investments across several fields of deep tech, knowing that while many may fail, they only need a few to succeed to make the investment worth it.

Where Is Deep Tech Developed?

However, as interested as VCs may be in deep tech, often the investment needed is too large to be brought up by just one firm. As a result, most deep tech projects end up where most things that will take forever with an uncertain payoff do: in government and academic labs. Quantum computing was born in physics departments across the globe, while many applications in robotics and AI are also developed in an academic setting. As for space flight, most U.S. rocket technology was built by NASA, and continues to be so, as this revolutionary new rocket shows.

Of course, as academic, or academic-adjacent, institutions, not everybody fits in and not every project is created with an actual use case in mind. Many members of these organizations will at some point leave and set up their own company and develop some of these technologies commercially. Sometimes even in conjunction with their university. Many deep tech startups are helmed by people with impressive academic titles after their name—good chance a VC won’t even look at your company if you don’t.

Deep Tech and the Future

The result is that when you take a look at deep tech, you see a lot of different threads running through it. There are academics, university administrators, enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, and moneymen all working alongside each other. Though they may occasionally be at loggerheads, not everybody’s motivation is the same after all, they are all working toward a similar goal.

Though it’s costly and slow, there’s no doubt that deep tech is where the future of humanity is being created. No matter what you think the future of the human race and our planet is, chances are, deep tech is a huge part of it.