Dear all,

Florence, 1462. The Medici did not build an institution. They created conditions. Cosimo gave a young philosopher named Ficino a villa outside the city and a handful of manuscripts. What followed had no statutes, no membership list. Philosophers, painters, architects, mathematicians, poets, and merchants gathered in gardens, at dinner tables, in corridors after lectures. A sculptor's problem became a mathematician's insight. A merchant's question became a philosopher's life's work. The Medici did not manufacture the ideas. They manufactured the density — and let the disciplines collide.

The bottleneck is rarely talent or capital. It is proximity between people who would not otherwise meet. We have designed Deep Tech Momentum 2026 around exactly this principle — a collision of six deep tech frontier markets with the right customers, investors, and the world's leading founders in the room. A true Deep Tech & AI innovation marketplace, built for density.

Here are five moments we aim to create in May in Berlin.

The Head of Smart Manufacturing at a major European space manufacturer has spent eighteen months building one of Europe's most advanced satellite production facilities. The infrastructure works. But operational equipment effectiveness keeps him up at night — not because the machines are failing, but because the intelligence is fragmented. Automation islands that don't speak to each other. His question is the one every serious industrial leader is carrying: how do you move from isolated automation islands to a truly intelligent shopfloor — and who owns the data, the model, and the decision?

The AI Productivity Summit brings Europe's leading AI and Deep Tech innovators together with enterprise customers in closed roundtables to discuss AI adoption challenges like these. Topics include: AI for Supply Chain, AI for Sales, AI for R&D in Classified Environments, AI for Utilities & Infrastructure, AI Agents in Industry, AI Governance. The objective: One hundred new AI collaborations. In one day.

She has raised €30 million in under two years for a world-model robotics startup — one of the fastest early-stage trajectories in European deep tech. She has had over 100 investor conversations. The feedback never changes: exceptional technology, real traction, and the next cheque needs to be north of €100 million. Which is exactly where Europe's growth capital market goes quiet.

The Growth Capital Salon at Deep Tech Momentum 2026 changes that for her. Co-hosted with DCVC and Drumbeat Capital. Opened by Martin Blessing, Chief Investment Officer of Germany for Chancellor Merz, it brings together some of the world's leading growth investors like Accel, AE Industrial Partners, DCVC, Eclipse, EIF, General Catalyst, Hedosophia, IQT, Headline, EQT, Northzone, Atomico, and others — alongside Europe's soonicorn and unicorn founders — around one objective: catalyse €1 billion in additional growth capital for European deep tech. The €100M+ round rarely starts with a deck. It starts with being in this room.

A Principal at a leading European deep tech fund is not looking for deal flow — she has more than she can process. She is looking for a signal. At most events that means fielding inbounds and hoping something exceptional surfaces. DTM26 changes the dynamic.

Before the event opens, thousands of startups have been screened, 500 startups are profiled in the DTM Lookbook — spanning DTM100 and DTM Selection — vetted by thirty leading funds working together. The curation happened in advance. In the Investor Connect lounge, she is not filtering. She is choosing. Fifteen meetings. Five active targets. Two term sheets likely signed the following week.

One hundred senior venture clienting and CVC leaders. Ten closed, peer-moderated roundtables across six markets. Co-hosted with 27pilots. No panels. No pitches. A senior R&D leader from a major European utility walks in with a challenge that has defeated her team for two years: moving startup pilots from proof of concept to grid-scale deployment. She leaves with three peer connections running the same playbook, a joint search underway along the energy storage value chain, and a framework for her board in June. The goal: make venture clienting a board-level priority. For her, it already is.

A confidential, closed-door space for some of Europe's most senior innovators, policymakers, and founders — co-hosted with BCG.

Michiel Scheffer, President of the EIC. Roberto Viola, Director General of DG Connect. Dorothee Bär. Karsten Wildberger. The people actually building AI gigafactories, deploying fusion pilots, securing battery supply chains. A senior EU policy official walks in with a familiar brief: more coordination, slower harmonisation. He walks into a room that has moved past that conversation. The discussion is solution-oriented and unfiltered — focused on the two moves that 10x the European deep tech ecosystem: the state acting as anchor customer to create demand that de-risks deployment, and bold regulatory simplification to make Europe the world's most attractive place to scale hard technology. He rewrites the memo on the flight home.

May 20th and 21st. Deep Tech Momentum 2026. The Medici didn't wait for the Renaissance to happen. They built the conditions for it. The question is whether you'll be in the room.

With the belief that density changes everything,
Martin

→ Originally started by applying AI to optimize individual battery assets, but quickly expanded into running entire portfolios—today effectively acting as a software-native power plant operator.

→ Its core battery models are trained on billions of real-world battery data points, turning what used to be lab-based testing into continuous, real-time software diagnostics.

→ Instead of building new infrastructure, Sympower unlocks capacity by coordinating existing industrial loads—at scale, this can replace entire power plants with pure software-driven demand flexibility.

Europe is not just funding deep tech—it is pre-positioning capabilities at the exact moment before global lock-in.

The EIC Tech Report 2026, published by the European Innovation Council, is a data-driven horizon scan of 25 emerging deep tech signals identified from funded projects and applications—capturing technologies before they become mainstream or strategically locked-in. 

→ Each domain maps directly to critical dependency layers: compute, resources, biology.

→ The bottleneck is no longer a discovery. It is deployment under real system conditions.

Every breakthrough company has an origin story. And more often than not, there's a professor somewhere in it — the one who said "this is worth pursuing" before anyone else did.

University spin-offs are still far too rare in Germany. UNIPRENEURS is on a mission to change that — by finding and celebrating the professors who make the difference. The ones who inspire their students, who plant the idea of starting a company early, and who turn lecture halls into launchpads.

This initiative is personal for us. DTM co-founder Martin Schilling co-created UNIPRENEURS together with investor Matthias Hilpert — because they both know first-hand how much a single professor can change a founder's trajectory.

Backed by the Stifterverband, Startup-Verband, Bitkom, and the Federal Ministries for Research and Economics, this is a national initiative with real weight behind it.

If a professor changed your trajectory as a founder, now is the time to say so. Two simple questions. Two minutes of your time. One mentor who deserves the recognition.

→ Nominate your professor now: unipreneurs.de/nominieren

Fiber-optic FPV drones are bypassing traditional electronic warfare. Detection is no longer a nice-to-have — it is the bottleneck.

Snake Island Institute is organizing a 2-day FPV Detection Crash Test together with frontline units of Ukraine's Third Army Corps. This isn't a lab simulation or a policy roundtable. It's a live field test — with Ukrainian operators who have real combat experience, defense tech startups at TRL 5+, and independent system integrators in the room.

If you're building in counter-drone, acoustic sensing, radar, or battlefield intelligence — this is where theory meets deployment. And where operational relevance gets decided.

What participation looks like:

Taking place late April / May 2026.

→ Apply to join the crash test — pre-registration open

→ Reach out to support — partner on funding or program expansion

Some books ride the AI wave. Reshuffle explains where it breaks.

The thesis is sharp: AI doesn’t just automate work—it reallocates where knowledge lives and who captures value. Expertise gets embedded into systems, margins shift upstream, and new winners emerge at the layer that controls access, orchestration, and distribution.

That’s what makes this a playbook. If you’re building, the question is no longer what you know—but where you sit in the stack.

The perspective comes from Sangeet Paul Choudary, founder and one of the earliest thinkers to map how platforms reorganize markets. He extends his platform thinking into the AI era—mapping how entire industries get “restacked” when knowledge becomes programmable.

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

Last Week’s Winner: Congratulations to Robert Gassemie on winning last week’s Ecosystem Gift — the book Empire of AI by Karen Hao.