Dear all,

In the late 1850s, a young French chemist spent hours peering through a microscope, obsessed with a mystery troubling France's wine industry: entire barrels turning sour without explanation. Inside the fermenting wine, he discovered tiny living organisms — some producing alcohol, others producing acid. The decisive insight: fermentation wasn't just chemistry. It was biology.

His name was Louis Pasteur. What began as a problem for winemakers led to microbiology, modern hygiene, and vaccines — a breakthrough born at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and industrial production.

Today's most successful deep tech innovators work in exactly the same way. Here are the 9 most promising Cross-Domain Deep Tech & AI Frontiers that matter now for Europe.

AI is the new control layer for physical industry. The largest funding flows are no longer going into pure software AI — they're going into companies where AI controls expensive physical systems: drones, satellites, labs, factories, chips, molecules, energy. The moat is not the model. It is the coupling between AI and a physical system.

Defence is now the fastest de-risking mechanism in European deep tech — faster than any climate subsidy or grant. Companies founded on climate theses keep finding that a defence customer arrives first and pays more. ICEYE started with flood monitoring. SatVu with building energy audits. Constellr with crop water stress.

The strongest frontiers fuse at least three scientific disciplines. Pasteur's genius wasn't that he was a great chemist or a great biologist — it was that he was both, at the same moment, looking at the same flask. Software-defined warfare, molecular discovery, quantum-HPC — each fuse traditions that had no prior contact.

These 9 frontiers don't evolve in isolation. The most consequential breakthroughs will come from the moment a defence officer meets a photonics startup, a materials corporate talks to a self-driving lab, an investor backs a quantum team because a battery founder explained why they needed them. We built Deep Tech Momentum 2026 precisely for this: to accelerate innovation and commercialisation where deep tech frontiers collide.

This May in Berlin (20–21), we will run Europe's largest deep tech matchmaking programme (20,000+ 1:1s in two days!), a Deep Tech LP-GP marketplace, Europe's most relevant Deep Tech pitch competition (the DTM100), and several invite-only programmes. Spots are limited — and filling fast.

With the hope that your innovations come from different spheres — and that your wine is definitely not sour,
Martin

As Head of BCG Central Europe, Michael Brigl operates at the intersection of industry, policy, and capital — focusing on the deeper questions: where industrial sovereignty will be built, which technologies will truly matter, and how Europe can set the terms of the next industrial era.

You launched "Wachstumspfade für Deutschland" (Feb 2026) at the Munich Security Conference. What made you choose that stage, and what was the reaction in the room?

– We chose the Munich Security Conference deliberately. Security today is not only shaped by military capability but increasingly by technological sovereignty and energy security. Launching our report there sent a strong signal: economic strength and technological leadership are central to sovereignty. The discussion quickly shifted from policy to execution: where are we exposed, what must we build, how we move faster. What struck me most was the response from the founders. There was a strong desire to engage – not just to debate strategy, but to discuss how to actually build. That energy told me we hit a nerve.

You’ve attached a €1.7 trillion number to this potential. To strip away the abstraction, if Germany executes perfectly, what is one specific, measurable difference a citizen or CEO will see in the German tech landscape by 2030?

– If Germany executes well, the difference by 2030 will be mostly visible in domestic value creation in critical technologies. Instead of importing core capabilities, we would build and scale AI infrastructure, advanced semiconductors, climate tech, and biotech here in Germany. This would show up in higher export volumes, more tech scale-ups valued at over €1 billion, and a greater share of strategic technologies produced locally. For CEOs, this means boosting their competitive advantage and strengthening their global position. For citizens and talents, it means high-skilled industrial jobs and globally relevant tech champions headquartered here.

Germany has experimented with innovation clusters before, with mixed results. What have you seen in Germany or elsewhere that distinguishes clusters that produce global companies?

–  What matters now is focus and speed. We do not need more innovation clusters in Germany, but fewer and more powerful ones. Only then will they become powerhouses of transformation. Such clusters only produce global companies when they move beyond networking and create integrated “lab-to-fab” systems. The difference lies in five factors: tight concentration of research, production, and capital; anchor customers who create early demand; access to growth financing in the €20–200 million range; strong industrial integration; and governance that prioritizes speed and milestones over fragmented subsidies. If one element is missing, clusters remain strong research hubs but fail to scale globally. When all five come together, they become engines of global champions.

"Sovereignty" means different things to different audiences. How do you draw the line between building genuine European capability and inadvertently closing markets off?

– Sovereignty, as we define it, is not about isolation. It is about technological leadership. Only if Europe has the competencies to lead in critical technologies is sovereignty realistic. That means securing strategic capabilities in the critical layers of the value chain where dependency creates systemic risk, from compute infrastructure and advanced packaging to quantum and key energy technologies. At the same time, the application and commercial layers must remain open, competitive, and internationally integrated. The objective is simple: increase optionality, reduce dependency. Europe should be able to build and scale critical technologies while continuing to attract global partners and investment. True sovereignty means negotiating from strength, not closing doors.

Each year, Deloitte maps the structural shifts shaping enterprise technology. The Deloitte Tech Trends 2026 report is unusually clear: AI is no longer a layer—it is forcing a full rebuild of how companies operate, build, and scale technology.

1. The “Great Rebuild” is not optional—it’s already happening

Only 1% of organizations report no operating model changes underway, while 64% are increasing AI investments. Enterprise IT is moving from maintenance to reinvention. → Companies are not optimizing — they are rebuilding their core systems.

2. AI adoption is scaling at unprecedented speed

A leading AI tool reached 100M users in 2 months and now exceeds 800M weekly users (~10% of the global population). → Innovation cycles are compressing dramatically — what took decades now happens in months.

3. The agentic gap: hype vs. reality

Only 11% of companies have agentic AI in production, while 35% have no strategy at all and 42% are still defining one. → The bottleneck is not technology — it’s process redesign and architecture.

4. AI economics are breaking existing infrastructure models

Inference costs dropped 280x in two years, yet enterprise AI bills are reaching tens of millions per month due to usage explosion. → Companies are shifting toward hybrid architectures (cloud + on-prem + edge) to stay viable.

5. Innovation is compounding—and widening the gap

AI startups scale from $1M to $30M revenue 5x faster than SaaS predecessors, while knowledge cycles shrink from years to months. → The gap between leaders and laggards is no longer linear — it’s exponential.

→ In traditional chips, moving data consumes more energy than computing it. Synthara flips this logic by computing directly in memory, it tackles what engineers call the “memory wall,” one of the biggest bottlenecks in modern computing.

→ Semron’s analogue AI approach revives a paradigm largely abandoned decades ago. Ironically, what was once considered too imprecise for computing may now be the only viable path to energy-efficient AI at scale.

→ Dresden is often referred to as “Silicon Saxony,” Europe’s largest microelectronics cluster, hosting over 2,000 companies and making it one of the few regions in Europe with a fully integrated chip ecosystem.

DTM26 and INAM — the Innovation Network for Advanced Materials — are launching the first-ever Advanced Materials Qualifier, and we're looking for the most promising startups shaping the future of materials innovation.

We're specifically seeking startups (raised <€5M) working on:

Two prizes up for grabs.

📅 30 April, 2026 👉 Apply here.

Meet Gateway Factory — one of only 10 government-selected deep tech startup factories in Germany. Backed by RWTH Aachen, the University of Cologne, and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Gateway Factory connects 25+ early-stage programs, 1,000+ mentors, and 750+ investors — all with one mission: turn the Rhineland into Europe's next Deep Tech powerhouse.

They're bringing their boldest founders to a live stage for their Virtual Pitch Night. The stakes are real. One team walks away with the Full Wildcard into DTM26:

Golden Ticket to DTM26 + Spot in the DTM100 pitch competition + Startup booth at the marketplace.

*There's also an Audience Award — you vote, and the winner earns a feature in the next Moonitor magazine.

📍 22 April, 2026 | Online 👉 Ready to pitch? Or just want to watch and vote? Apply and register for free here.

DTM26 is just around the corner — and we're opening up a limited number of volunteer spots for the next generation of founders, entrepreneurs, and innovators. So if you have a kid, cousin, intern, or eager graduate in your life who keeps saying they want to "get into tech" — this is the moment to put them to work.

📍 20–21 May, 2026 | Berlin 👉 Don't miss your spot — apply here. 💡 See more info on volunteering at DTM26 here.

Every startup has its "movie trailer" phase — fast cuts, coffee-fueled nights, a scrappy prototype held together by vibes and duct tape, and that magical moment when someone actually pays (!!!). Roll credits… right? Yeah, not even close. Because what comes next isn't a montage — it's the unglamorous sequel where things get weird. Org charts. Hiring decisions. Metrics. The creeping realization that "winging it" is no longer a strategy.

That's exactly where The Builder's Guide to the Tech Galaxy comes in. Together with Thomas Klugkist, Martin Schilling sat down with 100+ operators from Airbnb, Klarna, Salesforce, and Zalando and asked: "How do you actually build this thing properly?"

The result? Not inspiration. Ammunition. 99 concrete building blocks — leadership teams that work, North Star metrics that aren't vanity numbers, operating models that scale, momentum that doesn't burn everything down.

➔ We’re giving away one copy to the beloved DTM community. If you'd like it on your desk, simply reply to this email with “CHAOS”.

Last Week’s Winner: Congratulations to Lisa Langer on getting a spot in the PXR Fundraising Masterclass.