Thomas Klem Andersen is Executive Director of the DeepTech Alliance, an association of European entrepreneurship hubs connecting founders with international investors to develop science-based innovation.
What does DeepTech Alliance do and how did you come to the association?
I’ve been working for 10 years with DTU Science Park at the Technical University of Denmark, just north of Copenhagen. I worked with their startup and innovation team and I’ve been in charge of building and implementing their mentoring program for startups and connecting researchers from the university with SMEs in the capital region of Denmark.
DTU Science Park had an ambition to become the leading ecosystem for deep tech companies in Europe and in 2018, they launched the DeepTech Alliance initiative. Since Denmark is quite small, this required the Science Park to have collaboration partners outside of the country and to become better connected in Europe.
We needed to provide startups and companies that we worked with in the science park ecosystem access to partners, capital and potential customers outside of Denmark to scale up and go on to become successful companies. We were also motivated by a lot of the issues we face in Europe in terms of struggling to stay competitive on a global level, with the US and China investing much more in research.
We have a lot of great research in Europe and great well-ranked universities, but we need to become much better at commercializing that research and scaling the research-based companies that emerge from these universities. That requires for us to collaborate much more across borders within Europe because it’s often the case that companies, as they scale, will relocate to more attractive ecosystems when they raise bigger funding rounds. It’s much easier to raise those rounds in the US.
It’s a challenge and a problem for Europe if we’re only an incubator for great tech-based ventures and then they relocate to other markets when they are on a trajectory to become successful companies and new industrial pioneers.
Europe is still, despite all the initiatives, quite a fragmented ecosystem, with barriers in terms of language and policy. We need to find ways to connect the dots better in Europe to make this happen. That’s what we’re trying to do with the DeepTech Alliance.
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Does the DeepTech Alliance intend to act like a glue holding together the European deep tech ecosystem?
That’s what we would like it to be but there’s much more to be done. The European Union is also doing a lot, but what I like about what we’re trying to build is that it’s grassroots based. We’re not currently supported by the EU, we’re a fully independent, private initiative but that’s also one of our strengths. It’s a nonprofit association with member organizations from different European ecosystems, in which we have representatives. The good thing about that is we have boots on the ground in all those ecosystems. Our people know those spaces really well and work closely with startups and scale-ups within them.
This collaboration makes it possible for us to build programs with really high-quality startups, which the partners we work with really appreciate – especially our partners outside of Europe who use DeepTech Alliance as a single-point-of-entry to Europe’s learning deep tech ecosystems. The people we work with on the partner side are either open innovation teams looking for new technologies to test and implement, or corporate venturing teams looking to invest strategically.
How does this program work from a founder’s perspective?
We work with a diverse group of member organizations but we have some important common denominators. All of our member organizations work with startups, they’re focused on deep tech, and most of them are very well connected with university research institutions. They’re all super well connected in their own local startup ecosystems and they all have their own early-stage startup support programs – exploration programs, incubation programs, venture building programs.
When we built the alliance, we agreed it would make a lot of sense to build programs that would help those types of science-based startups, and help them in their later phases of scaling and internationalization. We didn’t want to launch more of the same programs that our member organizations were already running for the startups they were already working with. We designed programs that would be a natural next step for them.
Within the alliance, we built a strong community of corporate partners and investors that we can connect our startups with as they graduate from those early-stage support programs. Any startup in Europe can apply for our business creation programs and we’ll base selection on the interests and needs of our corporate partners. But a lot of the active scouting to source startups is done by our member organizations.
It’s really about business creation because it’s helping those startups scale up as they mature to find potential strategic partners, test partners, and customers. Our business creation programs are completely different from typical early-stage acceleration programs, which spend a lot of time working on value proposition development, pitch training, mentoring, and business coaching sessions. All that is really good support in those early stages but we’ve cut almost all of it from our programs because we assume most of our participants have already been through it.
What our program participants do appreciate with us is getting to sit across the table from a potential big industrial client who can test their solution in an industrial setting, potentially be an offtaker of the solution, and roll it out on an industrial scale or invest in the solution strategically.
Is there a typical stage that a startup hits before they enter into your programs?
It’s a spectrum that we work with. It depends on the type of technology you’re working with, the type of market you’re addressing, and the partners you’re looking for. We typically say that the companies participating in our programs should be at a place where they’re able to test their solution in an industrial setting because that’s what our partners would be interested in doing if there’s a good match. Our partners want to test the solution in their own setting, demonstrate value potential, and value creation and, if the result looks good, they might decide to implement the solution or invest in the company.
Sometimes we talk about our program participants being “corporate ready.” It is one thing to be able to test the solution in such settings but another to be able to manage the whole business side. It’s not a trivial thing starting negotiations with a big potential industrial client. They might also have to manage a pilot or proof of concept in a different country. If there are only two founders in the company, that could be too much to handle.
What are the unique challenges for a deep tech startup on the pathway to commercialization?
It requires more development time, there’s more risk involved, and it requires more testing. Finding those industrial test partners is key. It’s also a difficult sale. It’s highly technical solutions. It’s a B2B sales process with big industrial clients who are risk averse. It’s a long sales cycle and you can’t make too many missteps. You have to manage that whole process of negotiation very professionally.
It’s probably not as much a case of finding a lot of partners but finding fewer good ones that you have a very close relationship with. That’s because they’re also going to help you develop the solution and give you super critical and important feedback that you can bring into your whole product roadmap.
What do you consider a success story from the DeepTech Alliance programs?
What I really like to see is a collaboration on investment across borders that most likely would not have happened if we hadn’t been the bridge in between. For instance, Aramco Ventures, the investment arm of the Saudi Aramco energy company, recently invested in Ucaneo, a German carbon capture startup. I don’t think would have happened if we hadn’t been in between.
We also had TechEnergy Ventures investing in the Israeli startup Luminescent, who were also in our program. That’s what we’re all motivated by. When we see that these types of deals manifest based on people meeting who we brought together at one of our events or programs, that’s really rewarding.
Your programs focus on specific industry sectors like energy and advanced manufacturing. How do you decide what these will be each year?
That decision is firstly based on the strategic interests of our member organizations. We always review with them which sectors they would like us to have services or programs within. Those will be sectors and tech domains in which they are already strong and have good deal flow.
Secondly, we look at the partners that we work with. Early on, we decided to run a program within clean energy and we’ve been running that for the past four years with great success and a lot of interest. Everyone is in a green transition process and there’s a lot to be done.
We also decided to launch a program on public service infrastructure because we were already collaborating with a lot of utility companies involved in our energy program. Our manufacturing program was the first one we launched based on the fact that a lot of our member organizations were working with startups with sensor solutions, AI solutions, or machine learning solutions relevant for that space. Manufacturing is more of a horizontal than a vertical, so we have a lot of partners participating from different industries. What they have in common are different kinds of big manufacturing setups and they can all benefit from improving their quality control, predictive maintenance or process automation.
What areas of deep tech do you feel Europe has a unique advantage in?
Energy, and within energy, definitely clean energy and green tech. We have a position of strength there. Things are changing a lot at the moment, and it’s going to be interesting to see where things go. There’s still a lot of momentum in Europe on that agenda even though some influential people on the world stage are trying to divert our attention and budgets to more defense-related issues.
We’re also strong in materials, nanotech, photonics, biotech and life sciences. There was recently a good overview in the 2025 European Deep Tech Report launched at the Hello Tomorrow Global Summit in Amsterdam. Some of the breakout sectors they highlighted were AI, future compute, space tech, and novel energies like nuclear fission, fusion, and hydrogen. Those are some of the domains Europe is doing quite well within.
How do you define deep tech?
Deep tech is science-based technology — innovations grounded in scientific discovery or engineering breakthroughs. In the context of startups, it typically refers to ventures developing technologies with a foundation in advanced research, often emerging from universities or research labs.
From a business perspective, deep tech is also characterized by its protectability — it’s often patented or patentable — and its potential to create significant, defensible value. Because it’s rooted in science, it tends to offer genuine breakthroughs with the power to transform industries and tackle complex global challenges.
In recent years, deep tech has drawn increasing interest — and rightly so. For too long, the tech narrative was dominated by software and platforms. But not every problem can be solved with another app or data dashboard. Climate change, energy, health, and industrial resilience demand more fundamental innovation — and that’s where deep tech comes in.
Given today’s geopolitical and economic shifts, deep tech also plays a strategic role. For Europe, in particular, it represents both a challenge and an opportunity: to build greater technological sovereignty, reduce dependencies, and compete globally in critical domains. Europe stands at a critical inflection point. The opportunity is there — but seizing it will demand collective ambition, collaborative mindsets and a truly interconnected deep tech ecosystem.