The Future of Investment in Deep Tech and the Role of EU Funds

According to data from the European Deep Tech Report 2026, Deep Tech currently accounts for approximately one-third of all venture capital investments in Europe, whilst the US has seen the strongest growth in funding within the Deep Tech sector over the past three years. Deep Tech will continue to require solutions involving new technologies to address today’s most pressing challenges, such as climate change, resource scarcity, and demographic and productivity crises. American companies are leading the way in acquisitions of Deep Tech firms in Europe. They are particularly focusing on start-ups in the artificial intelligence and cyber security sectors. Deep Tech investments span a wide range of areas, from quantum computing and advanced materials to innovative energy, synthetic biology, defence and new artificial intelligence applications.

However, for investment to be considered ‘smart’, it must result in innovations that create widespread impact and added value for the planet. Yet, today, whilst investors fund early-stage start-ups, they are impatient for these ventures to quickly turn into products and services that generate revenue. Consequently, entrepreneurs focus on delivering the product or service that can be brought to market most easily, using whatever resources they have at their disposal to meet the investor’s immediate expectations. Thus, investors’ short-term expectations hinder the realisation of innovations that require a certain development process to be completed. Indeed, for this reason, many Turkish entrepreneurs waste time by launching their products or services on the domestic market first, whilst targeting the global market in the long term.

Collaborations between technology developers engaged in R&D—particularly those emerging from university-based scientific research—and entrepreneurs will foster the creation of innovations that generate added value and create a significant impact.

The approach that investors perceive as risky—namely, focusing on the medium- and long-term returns of innovation—actually poses a far greater investment risk than the returns it might provide in the short term.

In this context, the easiest way to create a quantum leap in Turkish start-ups, positioning them globally, elevating them to the status of an EU company at the very outset, and making them attractive to global investors is through EU funds. A start-up benefiting from EU funding will quickly attract the attention of global investors by collaborating with EU organisations and gaining experience with or acquiring deep technologies. EU funding is the shortest and most effective route to joining the European Deep Tech ecosystem (the New Palo Alto and Alpine Tech Clusters).

There are various funding opportunities available depending on the startups’ TRL (Technology Readiness Level) and the impact of their ideas. These funds, under the Horizon Europe Programme, can be summarised as follows: EIC for disruptive innovations resulting from scientific research; Cascading Funds for new technology partnerships; EIT for market-ready applications; and Digital Europe, Eurostars and Eureka clusters for transforming R&D outcomes into innovation, as well as acting as an application developer in multi-partner industrial collaborations to be part of a long-term, ambitious technology vision.