What Happens When Deep Tech Moves From the Lab to the Market?

The UK has some seriously impressive scientific talent.

The challenge is turning that talent and research into companies.

That was one of the themes running through a recent episode of Nothing Ventured, where Aarish Shah sat down with Maureen Haverty, Principal at Seraphim Space, to talk about deep tech, space and what’s changing in the venture ecosystem.

Maureen knows the journey from research to startups first-hand. After completing a PhD in nuclear engineering and working at the National Nuclear Laboratory, she moved into the startup world, eventually working on satellite propulsion technology.

And one thing became clear during the conversation:

Great science is only the beginning.

Getting researchers closer to startups

Universities and national labs are built to do something incredibly important: push the boundaries of what we know.

But building a company requires a different skill set.

You need to work out what problem you’re actually solving, who has that problem, whether they’ll pay for a solution and how to turn the technology into something commercially viable.

Those aren’t necessarily skills researchers get to develop while working in academia or national laboratories.

That’s where startups can offer a very different learning environment.

Maureen argues that someone can learn more about commercialisation in a couple of years at a startup than they might expect. You learn how to build products, speak to customers, raise money and deal with things going wrong.

Even if the company doesn’t work out, the experience doesn’t disappear.

It becomes part of your career.

Hiring for what someone can learn

That also feeds into how technical talent gets hired.

Maureen points to a difference between the UK and US approach: in the US, there can be more willingness to hire someone based on their ability to learn and solve problems, rather than requiring them to have already done exactly the same job.

For deep tech, that’s particularly relevant.

If you’re building something that hasn’t existed before, there isn’t necessarily a perfect candidate with five years of experience doing exactly that thing.

Sometimes you need someone who can figure it out.

Space is much more than rockets

The conversation then moved into Maureen’s specialist area: space.

And “space tech” covers a lot more than rockets and satellites.

It can include communications, Earth observation, intelligence, navigation, space manufacturing and the software built around space-derived data.

Some businesses might not look like space companies at first glance.

A company using satellite connectivity to operate maritime systems, for example, can be heavily dependent on space infrastructure without actually building anything that goes into orbit.

That’s one of the interesting things happening across the sector.

As the underlying infrastructure improves, entirely new businesses become possible.

Starlink is a good example.

The question isn’t always, “What can we build in space?”

It can also be:

“What can we build now that this infrastructure exists?”

Space is attracting more generalist capital

Space has also become increasingly interesting to investors who wouldn’t traditionally have considered it part of their remit.

Maureen describes a pretty dramatic change in just a couple of years. Investors who once reacted to “I invest in space” with an “oh, cute” are now pitching everything from lunar mining to defence applications.

She sees the influx of generalist capital as a positive thing.

Space companies can require significant amounts of capital and often operate on long development timelines. Having larger funds involved can give companies more financial resilience when things inevitably take longer or go wrong.

That doesn’t mean specialist investors become less useful.

Quite the opposite.

A specialist can help investors understand whether a delay is normal for the industry or a genuine problem. They can bring relationships with customers and governments and understand the nuances of a market that can be difficult to navigate from the outside.

The two types of capital can work alongside each other.

What has SpaceX changed?

SpaceX has arguably done more than any other company to change perceptions of commercial space.

For Maureen, its IPO has been hugely positive for the wider ecosystem.

It’s demonstrated that space can support a very large, commercially successful business. That matters because it changes the question investors are asking.

Instead of asking whether space can produce enormous companies, investors can focus on which companies can capture specific parts of the opportunity.

It also creates more interesting conversations around exits.

Historically, there haven’t been huge numbers of deep-pocketed strategic acquirers in space. As more major technology companies become interested in areas such as orbital infrastructure and space-based data centres, that could create more potential routes for startups.

That doesn’t mean every space company is suddenly IPO-ready.

But the ecosystem is certainly looking very different from a few years ago.

The bigger opportunity

The most interesting part of the conversation wasn’t really about space.

It was about what happens when scientific expertise meets commercial ambition.

The UK already has strong universities, research institutions and technical talent. There are also more investors paying attention to deep tech and more founders building businesses around technologies that would have seemed far too early a few years ago.

The opportunity is connecting those pieces.

Getting researchers closer to startups.

Making it easier for technical people to develop commercial experience.

Giving founders access to the capital and expertise needed to navigate long development cycles.

And creating careers where moving between academia, startups and larger companies is a normal part of building experience.

Because the journey from lab to market isn’t straightforward.

But when the right people, capital and commercial expertise come together, that’s where some of the most interesting companies can emerge.

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