Corporate Venture Capital
This Week's Deeptech Rounds Aren't All Made of the Same Money
Three deeptech companies announced funding this past week, and if you only read the headline numbers, they’d blur into the same story: hard-tech startup raises tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Look at how each round is actually built, though, and they’re telling three different stories about who’s willing to bet on what, and how. One is half debt, collateralized against a backlog you can go check. One has no new investor in it at all, and the company says so itself. One isn’t venture capital in any conventional sense. The size of the check is the least interesting number in all three.
The Difference Between a Checkable Claim and a Checked One
Two early-stage deeptech companies made news this month with claims worth checking against reality. One got there by getting two rival defense giants to independently decide it was worth backing before it had shipped a single unit. The other got there by naming a specific date on the calendar and daring anyone to hold it to that date. Both are legitimate ways to earn trust at the earliest stage of a company’s life. Only one of them has actually been tested yet.