Dear all,

DTM26 is two weeks away. You cannot imagine how hard our team has worked to make this year's version possible. We are levelling up substantially — and we have designed several experiments we invite you to help make a success.

Our North Star: build a new demand stack for Deep Tech and AI in Europe. Fifty billion from governments acting as anchor customers. Fifty billion from corporates acting as serious buyers. The era of the three-year PoC is over. And a new European Venture Capital Stack: one hundred billion in additional capital deployed with ambition and conviction. No more timid seed cheques. No more handing our best companies to non-European balance sheets at Series B.

To advance this North Star, we are running six experiments at DTM26. Here is what we have built — and how you can be part of it.

Experiment No. 1: The Guardians of European Deep Tech. Three hundred senior corporate innovation leaders with active budgets, representing over €400 billion in combined R&D, M&A, and CVC — accessible in curated 1:1s. If you are joining DTM, check your inbox for an email titled "Activate your account for Deep Tech Momentum 2026." Hundreds are already on the platform — do not miss your window to request meetings.

Experiment No. 2: Three On-Site Summits. The Sovereignty Summit co-hosted with BCG — 50 CXOs and policymakers advancing Europe's Deep Tech Demand Stack. The CVC and Venture Clienting Summit co-hosted with 27pilots — making venture clienting a board-level priority. The AI Productivity Summit co-hosted with Merantix and Harmonic AI — one goal: launch one hundred enterprise AI adoption projects in a single afternoon.

Experiment No. 3: Signals From The Frontline. Fifty of NATO's most procurement-relevant military officers, MoDs, defence primes, and defence scaleups — shaping the capability target picture of the future. Co-hosted with NATO Innovation Fund, Lakestar, and McKinsey. Topics: cost-effective precision strike, drone and aerial defence, space-enabled ISR, and innovation-driven procurement.

Experiment No. 4: The Growth Capital Club. Europe's most relevant growth investors writing €50M-plus tickets. Co-hosted with DCVC and Drumbeat Capital. Funds include Eurazeo, General Catalyst, Headline, IQT, NIF, Vitruvian Partners, EIF, Earlybird, and DST Global.

Experiment No. 5: Deep Tech Exhibition. The most relevant Deep Tech and AI startups and corporates, exhibiting across our key markets — closing with Berlin's first robot boxing match and an epic afterparty on Thursday, May 21st.

Experiment No. 6: Deep Tech Week Berlin. Wrapped around DTM, we are co-organizing a city-wide Deep Tech Week with 40+ side events. 

Five last-minute ways to get involved:

Guardians. Know a senior innovation leader looking for Deep Tech partnerships? Nominate one Guardian for a complimentary DTM26 ticket.

DTM100 Pitch Competition. We screened five thousand startups and selected one hundred for the stage. Almost all slots are filled — but you can still suggest one portfolio company. See the current DTM Selection here.

The GP-LP Marketplace. One hundred LPs and GPs in the room. 95% filled on both sides. GPs get in if they bring LPs. Reach out if you want in.

Deep Tech Week. Host a side event and register it here.

Bring a colleague. 400+ of the world's leading Deep Tech investors, corporate customers, and top European startups — all in one room. Invite a colleague with discount code TakeTheLeap (25% off).

Last-minute idea or nomination? Reach out: [email protected]

Somebody has to build Europe's Deep Tech & AI future. It might as well be us.

With excitement to seeing you in Berlin on the 20th & 21st May,

Martin

→ Breathe Battery Technologies’s software can increase charging speed by up to 30% without accelerating battery degradation—a rare trade-off breakthrough in EV performance. 

→ Accure Battery Intelligence monitors tens of thousands of battery systems globally, effectively turning fleet data into a continuous learning loop for predictive safety. 

→ About:Energy originated from Formula 1 battery research, where milliseconds and thermal limits define competitive advantage 

AI adoption is accelerating—but trust is not keeping pace.

The latest report from McKinsey & Company, “State of AI Trust in 2026: Shifting to the Agentic Era,” examines how organizations and users perceive, adopt, and govern increasingly autonomous AI systems. It focuses in particular on agentic AI—systems capable of making decisions and taking actions independently—and highlights a growing disconnect between technological capability and human trust.

Here’s 5 key takeaways:

1. Trust in AI remains structurally low—especially for autonomous systems
While AI adoption continues to scale, only a minority of respondents express high trust in AI systems, with trust dropping significantly when systems act autonomously. Agentic AI introduces a step-change in perceived risk, particularly in high-stakes environments.

2. Only ~20–30% of organizations feel prepared to manage AI risks
Despite widespread deployment, fewer than one-third of companies report having robust governance frameworks in place. This gap becomes critical as systems move from assistive to decision-making roles.

3. Companies using AI at scale are 2x more likely to invest in trust mechanisms
High-performing organizations are significantly more likely to implement:

→ Trust is not a byproduct—it is actively engineered.

4. The biggest barrier to AI adoption is no longer technology—but trust
Across industries, respondents consistently rank risk, reliability, and lack of transparency as top constraints—above technical capability or cost.

→ This marks a structural shift: AI is ready. Organizations and users are not.

5. Agentic AI amplifies both value and risk asymmetrically
The report highlights that agentic systems:

→ A single system decision can have outsized operational or reputational impact

In partnership with Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung co-published last month's Top 50 Deep Tech Innovators in Europe ranking with GlassDollar and Deep Tech Momentum. Two of its products are worth a Deep Tech Now reader's time. Both are free.

Neue Zürcher Zeitung Quantensprung is a weekly science podcast and newsletter from NZZ's Wissenschaft team, launched in September 2025. Every Friday, host Lena Waltle takes one piece of research and walks through what would actually have to happen for it to leave the lab.

Recent episodes have covered the case for fusion power (with Frank Jenko of the Max Planck Institute and the founders of Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Proxima Fusion), the science of lab-grown organs, this year's Nobel-winning work on metal-organic frameworks, AI-based weather prediction, and the ethics of CRISPR embryo editing in Silicon Valley-backed startups.

Each episode runs around half an hour and pairs an Neue Zürcher Zeitung science journalist with external researchers and founders. The companion newsletter lands the same morning with the headlines, source studies, and links to deeper reporting from the NZZ science desk.

Free to subscribe. Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and most podcast apps. In German.

→ Explore Quantensprung

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung app puts Switzerland's main daily on a phone. NZZ covers European politics, technology, science, energy and finance, and is one of the few large German-language papers that treats deep tech as a beat rather than a side topic. The app carries the full daily edition, the NZZ am Sonntag weekend paper, the Wissenschaft and Technologie verticals, and the Quantensprung archive in a single feed. Push notifications can be configured by topic, which means you can opt into European industrial policy and skip the opera reviews.

For non-German readers, the app includes an English-language section with a daily selection of NZZ's most important reporting translated into English. That makes it a useful way to bring a Swiss editorial perspective into a non-German workflow without subscribing to another full publication.

Free to download. Selected content is free; the rest sits behind Neue Zürcher Zeitung's subscription.

→ Download the NZZ app

Fusion is moving from theory to timelines—and the window to understand the landscape is closing fast.

If you want a clear, structured view of where fusion actually stands today—not hype, not headlines—this session delivers exactly that. The Fusion Energy Landscape brings together the core technological pathways shaping the field, from laser inertial fusion to magneto-inertial approaches and magnetic confinement systems.

Hosted at CIC Berlin as part of Deep Tech Week, this is a rare opportunity to get a compressed, high-signal overview of one of the most complex—and consequential—deep tech domains.

Expect:

And just as important:

This is a targeted deep dive into the physics, engineering, and capital stack behind fusion—designed for people who want to understand where the field is actually going.

→ Secure your spot and show up prepared to ask sharp questions.