Deep Signal

Edition 01, October 2026

Deep Signals 2026

Where deeptech technology, capital and risk are heading, and why the UK keeps inventing what others scale.

  • The five signals that matter most for deeptech founders and investors this year
  • A sector scorecard for robotics and defence, space, quantum, photonics, energy and compute
  • What seven global investment banks are saying about defence, robotics and quantum
  • Practical moves for founders and investors, drawn from 25+ flagship 2026 reports

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Cover of Deep Signals 2026, a state-of-the-nation report on deeptech, capital and risk

Five signals from this year’s research

A preview of the executive summary. The full report adds the evidence, a sector-by-sector scorecard and what to do about it.

8 of 10WEF emerging technologies that act on physical systems

Physical AI is the consensus frontier

Robotics and space investment are on pace to more than double in 2026. The bottlenecks now are power, chips and actuators, which is exactly where deeptech founders work.

86%of US venture dollars went to AI in H1 2026

Capital is record-high but narrow

With money crowding into one theme and a handful of megadeals, physical-world companies with real moats are less efficiently priced. That is the opening for specialist capital.

2,133UK deep science startups, third in the world

The UK invents but stalls at scale

WIPO finds deep science firms stall exactly where Series B and C capital is thinnest. Scotland sits inside the same pattern.

~950 TWhglobal data centre demand by 2030

Energy is the binding constraint

Data centre power demand roughly doubles by 2030, and thousands of gigawatts of projects wait in grid queues. Every watt saved is worth more.

€1.6TEuropean NATO defence spending by 2035

Geopolitics shapes markets

Sovereign capability and security have become buying criteria. Defence budgets are committed; the bottleneck is now industrial delivery.

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About the author

Allan Cannon is the founder of Deep Signal Advisory, which works with deeptech founders and their investors across the UK, US, Gulf and Japan. He is Entrepreneur in Residence (Deeptech) at Codebase and has been a Creative Destruction Lab mentor since 2017.

He founded satellite IoT company Krucial, was Head of Missions at Clyde Space delivering spacecraft for NASA, ESA and the UK Space Agency, and spent eleven years at MBDA and Thales in defence systems.