How deeptech can positively change the world. Interview with Tess van Stekelenburg from Hummingbird Ventures
Summary
Examples of deep tech are photovoltaic cells in solar panels for sustainable energy generation, immunotherapies to combat cancer or satellite infrastructure for internet connectivity and agricultural surveillance. Our European portfolio includes Anima Health (online triage for doctors speeding up the clinical workflow 10x), Automata Tech (leading robotic automation platforms for the life sciences that handled the bulk of the UK’s COVID testing), Basecamp Research (Oxford spin-out building out a metagenomic database to characterize functional proteins from extreme nature) and Ladder Therapeutics (computational drug discovery platform to illuminate the uncharted regions of our genome). One option is that they pursue their own internal products in a ‘full stack’ approach, similar to Apple’s PC, Impossible Food’s heme protein burger or Moderna’s mRNA vaccine. If you take cellular agriculture, plant-based meat and precision fermentation as methods to reach the same goal of replacing animals from our food system – consumers ultimately will care less about what technology made their product as long as it tastes good and it’s not prohibitively expensive. One trend I am seeing across Europe that is solving this is the formation of new student led-organizations like Nucleate UK or other accelerators targeting academics like Deep Science Ventures and Entrepreneur to create ecosystems for them to spin-out their work.