Dear all,

Jerusalem, dawn, first century. Three women walk toward a tomb carrying spices. Not toward hope — toward grief. The practical, dutiful kind. But then: the stone has been moved. The body is gone.

What happens next — depending on what you believe — is either one of the most important events in Western history, or its most consequential misunderstanding. Either way, it is the oldest disruption story ever told — and it has never stopped being relevant.

Two ideas at the core of Easter that the tech ecosystem knows well.

Death is not the final verdict. Almost every transformation journey passes through the moment where funding runs almost out, the market says no, the board or investors lose faith. What looks buried is sometimes just early.

Transformation is not a return. A caterpillar does not recover — inside the cocoon it dissolves completely and reconstitutes into something that cannot crawl back into what it was. Qualitative change. Something that could not have existed before the rupture.

Which brings us to Deep Tech Momentum 2026. We have completely redesigned DTM toward moments of transformation.

Here are five that can happen.

1. Guardians of European Deep Tech | Guardian Becomes Partner
16:00, May 21st. Otmar Schreiner, Head of Innovation and Venture at Aumovio, has spent months searching for a solution to thermal runaway — one of the hardest unsolved problems in battery technology. Hundreds of vendors have knocked. Nothing fit. The last two hours are different. He has submitted his technology search criteria, reviewed 20 curated battery material startups from the DTM team, and just finished eight back-to-back 15-minute meetings with founders who actually understand the problem. Of the 8, he can imagine handing contracts to four. Immediately. Otmar is not alone. Around him, 300+ senior corporate innovators — the Guardians of European Deep Tech — with real problems and real budgets are leading the same kind of conversations.

2. DTM100 | The Pitch That Closes the Round

13:15, May 21st. Amira, CEO of a photonics startup, walks onto the DTM100 Pitch Competition finals stage having heard "not yet" from every major European Deep Tech VC for twelve months. She walks off to two investors already reaching for her contact details. Her own words, afterwards: "We secured term sheets from two top European VCs. The round was totally oversubscribed. We doubled our round size at a substantially higher valuation than we had ever imagined." One pitch. One room. One round closed. Right now, 100 of Europe's leading pre-seed and seed founders across HPC, Energy, Defence, Space, Advanced Materials, Manufacturing & Robotics, and Enterprise AI are taking the same stage. Some of them will leave with the same story.

3. GP-LP Marketplace | The Missing 10 Million

18:30, May 20th. A deep tech investor has been at 90% of her target on her second fund for four months. The final close keeps slipping — one LP committed, then paused, another wants to wait for Q3. At the DTM26 GP-LP Marketplace, a 15-minute structured 1:1 with a Stuttgart-based family office that has never seen the deck ends with a handshake. "Send me the subscription documents on Monday." The fund closes two weeks later. The missing €10M was never really about the money. It was about being in a key room in Europe, specifically designed to make Deep Tech fundraising conversations happen fast.

4. DTM26 Main Stage | The Doubting Thomas Moment

10:00, May 20th. Markus Pflitsch of Terra Quantum walks 400 attendees through a live quantum-safe encryption use case — already running on a reference client in financial services. Simon Thomas of Paragraf follows: graphene-based Hall Effect sensors shipping today to CERN and Rolls-Royce. In the front row sits the CISO of a major European bank who has called quantum security "three to five years away" in every board meeting for the past two years. After the session, he spends twenty minutes with Markus Pflitsch going deeper on the Terra Quantum Secure Network. Then Hermann Hauser — the man who co-founded ARM, and today one of Europe's most active quantum investors — finds him in the corridor. "This is where semiconductors were in 1985. I've seen this movie before." The technology didn't change between Sunday and Wednesday. The CISO's certainty did. His procurement process opens the following week.

5. Signals from the Frontline | From PoC to the Front Line

16:00, May 20th. A founder from a counter-UAS startup joins Signals from the Frontline expecting a policy conversation. The room has other plans. A three-person Ukrainian military delegation — officers with direct operational authority, just back from the eastern front — watches a live system walkthrough in silence. When it ends, one of them leans forward. Not "can we run a trial?" Not "send us a proposal." Instead: "We need this deployed within 30 days. What does that require from you?" Ben Wallace, former UK Minister of State for Security, is three tables away. General Chris Badia, former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Transformation at NATO, one of the most respected military minds in Europe, is leaning in, listening to every word. The founder came prepared to talk about technology readiness. What he gets is a deployment order. 

Berlin. May 20th and 21st. Deep Tech Momentum 2026. The question is whether you'll be in the room.

With hope your breakthrough doesn't need a burial first — just a great conversation at DTM26,
Martin

→ As cislunar traffic increases, propulsion will evolve from a subsystem into core infrastructure, defining how and by whom movement in deep space is controlled.

→  Venturi previously built record-breaking electric vehicles on Earth, including cars designed for extreme environments like Antarctica.

→  Laser communication can achieve data rates up to 100x higher than traditional radio frequency systems under optimal conditions.

→  A single lunar night lasts about 14 Earth days, making continuous power generation one of the hardest engineering challenges for any surface system.

Europe does not lack innovation capacity. It lacks conversion velocity.

That’s pretty much what The European Dynamism Report by redalpine and Sifted is telling us. It’s a forward-looking thesis document and argues that Europe’s next wave of global tech leadership will emerge from a specific intersection: science × software × industrial depth.

 Rather than benchmarking Europe against the US, the report reframes “dynamism” as the ability to build globally competitive companies in strategically critical sectors.

“Dynamism” here does not mean speed alone. It means resilience, scientific depth, and system-level innovation—especially in areas where Europe already has structural advantages, from advanced manufacturing to research infrastructure. The report’s core claim: Europe may not win every tech cycle, but it can dominate selected deep tech domains where complexity, regulation, and engineering depth matter.

Here are 5 key takeaways:

This marks a shift: innovation is no longer just economic — it is geopolitical infrastructure.

We're proud to announce our media partnership with Neue Zürcher Zeitung Deutschland — one of Europe's most respected publications for economic and geopolitical analysis.

Founded in 1780, NZZ has been published without interruption for over 245 years — making it one of the oldest continuously published newspapers in the world. Since the Cold War years and beyond, it has won wide acclaim for its balanced, independent coverage, with regular readers in every major world capital. In short: NZZ reaches exactly the people who shape the decisions that matter to deep tech.

This partnership isn't just about a logo on a banner. NZZ brings the kind of rigorous, independent journalism that the deep tech conversation deserves — sharp perspectives on the forces shaping markets, policy, and technology at the European and global level.

You may have already spotted it: DTM26 was featured in the Easter issue of NZZ on April 4, 2026. A meaningful signal that deep tech is no longer a niche conversation — it's centre stage.

At DTM26 in Berlin on May 20–21, NZZ will be there in person. Stop by their booth, pick up a complimentary copy of the latest edition, and discover why their coverage resonates with founders, investors, and policymakers alike.

And as a member of the DTM community, you'll have access to an exclusive discounted subscription — available throughout the event.

Smart people read widely. We're making that a little easier.

It started with a simple question: Can we identify Europe’s most promising deep tech startups before they become obvious? So we built a system around it.

Right now, the DTM team is reviewing 10,000 early-stage Deep Tech & AI startups across Europe. From that pool, we curate the DTM100 Watchlist — spanning 7 core technology tracks. Together with 30+ leading VCs and industry partners, we then select the hundred to take the stage at DTM26.

But here’s where it gets interesting: More than 100 founder–investor introductions have already happened — and we’re just getting started.

A few companies already catching attention:

And the audience? Exactly who you’d want in the room: Earlybird, HV Capital, Lakestar, NATO Innovation Fund, redalpine, HTGF, Elaia, OTB Ventures, Vsquared, IQ Capital, APEX Ventures, SPRIND, Extantia, FORWARD.one… and more.

Event Details:

👉 Secure your ticket for DTM26 now and be part of the room where Europe’s next deep tech leaders get discovered.

AI is not just a technology shift. It’s a power shift.

Empire of AI unpacks how a handful of companies are quietly building control over the foundations of the AI economy—compute, data, and talent. What looks like an open innovation race is, in reality, consolidating into a new kind of infrastructure layer with geopolitical implications.

Karen Hao, a former reporter at MIT Technology Review and one of the most respected journalists covering AI, takes you inside this system: from the rise of foundation models to the industrial-scale resources required to train them, and the growing tension between openness and control.

The result is a clear-eyed view of AI not as a product wave—but as a strategic stack shaping markets, states, and power structures.

→ We’re giving away one copy. Reply with “AI AI AI” and we’ll randomly select a winner.

Week’s Winner: Congratulations to Jannis Duckek on getting the book The Builder's Guide to the Tech Galaxy by Thomas Klugkist and Martin Schilling.