The world needs moments where founders, scientists, investors, policymakers, and industry builders stop moving long enough to think together about what comes next. That is what the Hello Tomorrow Summit delivered during three days in Amsterdam.
It began on Wednesday 10 June with Investor Day, a gathering of over 300 venture capitalists and 450 deep tech startups spread across the Straat museum at NDSM, the former shipbuilding yard on the IJ waterfront, which had become the summit’s new home in Amsterdam. Against the backdrop of a series of art installations that brought warmth and light to the industrial space, serious discussions about investment strategies, portfolio gaps and the long-term financing requirements of hard tech took place in an environment that felt more like a curated exhibition than a conference.
The weather, as Amsterdam is known to provide, offered its own editorial comment. The 11th opened with sunshine. By afternoon, the rain had arrived. But NDSM, once built to withstand harsher conditions than a summer shower, held its atmosphere entirely. Over the two days that followed, more than 3,000 founders, researchers, investors, policymakers, and industry builders gathered on the Frontier Stage, the Deep Tech Academy, and the Pioneers Stage to do something that the pace of the industry rarely allows: stop, think, and build together.
Researchers who had made the leap from laboratory to venture presented their breakthroughs to rooms full of people who could help take them further. Investors talked openly about the structural shifts needed to keep patient capital committed to hardware timelines. Policymakers addressed, with candour, what it means to build sovereign technological capability in an increasingly fragmented world, and why the brilliant minds behind Europe’s deep tech innovations need more than recognition, they need funding at scale.
And on the frontier stage on the evening of 12 June, the two days came to a celebratory close when endogene.bio, a French company reading the molecular biology of endometriosis from a sample of menstrual blood, was awarded the €100,000 Grand Prize of the 2026 Hello Tomorrow Challenge.
The AI Horizon Award went to another French company, Rhizome Labs, which develops lightweight neural networks that can run on edge devices with as little as 8 MB of RAM and continue learning from real-world production data without relying on the cloud.
The Emerging Pioneers Award was presented to UK-based Remedium Energy for Limeloop, a carbon-capture solution that combines a sorbent capable of capturing 36 times more CO₂ at 80% lower cost with a heat battery that enables low-cost regeneration and reuse.
In addition to these top honours, the thirteen industry track winners were also announced.
These Hello Tomorrow Challenge winners were selected from over 4,800 applications across 108 countries. Their wins distilled the central argument of the summit into a single moment: hard science, when applied with rigour and supported by the right ecosystem, can solve the most pressing problems.
Read on to find out who won each category and more they key moments of the summit.
A new industrial reality demands a new kind of thinking.
The timing of the 2026 Hello Tomorrow Summit could not be more perfect, as the geopolitical environment has shifted fundamentally and supply chains that once seemed permanent have fractured. Energy markets are under pressure, and the competition for technological leadership between major powers is intensifying. The consequences of falling behind in critical technology domains, ranging from semiconductors to quantum technology and advanced biotechnology, are now a very real prospect.
Resilience, in this environment, is something that must be actively cultivated through the right relationships, institutions, and long-term investments. That insight shaped the summit’s defining theme: Collaborative Resilience.
In his opening address, Arnaud de la Tour, CEO and Co-founder of Hello Tomorrow, set the frame as this:
Photo credit: © Leo Coulongéat & Hello Tomorrow. Not to be used or replicated without explicit permisison.
“What matters is not where we come from, but how accountable we are and how committed we are to finding solutions to all those problems that we are facing together. This collaboration is not only between different countries, but also between different types of organisations that are required to scale deep tech solutions.”
Photo credit: © Leo Coulongéat & Hello Tomorrow. Not to be used or replicated without explicit permisison.
Ecosystems that know how to build trust, align incentives, and move resources efficiently across sectors and borders are the ones that will prove most durable in the decade ahead. That conviction was echoed by Prime Minister Rob Jetten, who addressed the summit’s assembled crowd of over 3,000 participants:
“Deep tech involves healthcare, the climate transition, our security, and Europe’s competitiveness. But it’s also about our digital security, about privacy, about our strategic autonomy. And all these things are deeply connected. They’re developing and unfolding in a lightning speed. And I firmly believe that the idea that deep tech is not an end to itself, but it’s a means to improve our society. And I’d like to see European players taking a much bigger lead in this, in a responsible tech movement that’s going to help the entire world population. It’s a great opportunity and an exciting prospect. And that’s why it’s so important for us as public and private parties to seek each other and to work together much more closely than we’ve been doing. And this is what you will be doing in the next few days here in Amsterdam.”
Photo credit: © Leo Coulongéat & Hello Tomorrow. Not to be used or replicated without explicit permisison.
Deep Tech as a strategic asset in a fragmenting world
One of the most significant moments observed at the 2026 Hello Tomorrow Summit Amsterdam was the tone in which policymakers and industry leaders addressed the conversation around deep tech; it has shifted from viewing innovation as an aspirational goal to recognising technological sovereignty as a strategic necessity.
This shift is, of course, grounded in recent experience. One of them being the dependence on a single supplier for critical materials has proven costly. As we know it, concentrated control over key enabling technologies, including advanced chips, rare earth processing and certain pharmaceutical ingredients, has become a genuine geopolitical vulnerability. The acceleration of the energy transition has made domestic climate technology capability a matter of industrial survival, while the pace of AI development has made the ability to design and operate critical infrastructure within trusted borders an urgent policy priority across Europe.
In advanced materials and manufacturing, the focus was on reshoring capability and shortening supply chains.
In AI and semiconductors, NXP’s Lars Regers put the moment into sharp focus in his keynote, “Low Power Is the New Superpower: How Intelligence at the Edge Makes the World Work,” making the case that the next frontier of competitive advantage lies in deploying intelligence where decisions are actually made, at the edge of industrial systems.
Photo credit: © Leo Coulongéat & Hello Tomorrow
Photo credit: © Leo Coulongéat & Hello Tomorrow
The policy dimension of that argument was made concrete by Heleen Herbert, Minister of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy of the Netherlands, who used her address to announce an additional €360 million for the Deep Tech Fund, provided jointly by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy and Invest-NL. The announcement was a message that public capital is prepared to move with the urgency the moment requires.
That commitment was also highlighted during another event by Invest-NL, at which they presented key findings from its new report, Deep Dive: Strategic Investing in Europe’s Next-Gen AI, which mapped the most compelling investment opportunities in European AI and opened a broader discussion on what the continent must do to turn its existing strengths into genuine global AI leadership.
The need fo bigger fund to drive the European Scale-up initiatives was also addressed head-on in the panel, “Building a Truly European Path to Scale,” which opened with a lightness that quickly gave way to some of the summit’s most substantive exchanges. Commissioner Ekaterina Zaharieva, the European Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation, was joined by Herman Bril, Executive Board Member of Pensioenfonds ABP, Enrique Lizaso, Co-founder and CEO of Multiverse Computing, and Constantijn van Oranje, Founder and Envoy at Techleap.
As one of the advocates of the EU Startup and Scaleup Strategy and the broader EU Inc. vision, Zaharieva brought authority and optimism to the conversation. She echoed a common sentiment within the ecosystem, namely that Europe’s constraints stem from a failure to fully believe in and deploy its existing assets.
We have the best deep tech scientists in the world and the best engineers. We are a rich continent. We have the money. You have in the Netherlands the biggest pension fund in Europe. And we have the biggest single market. So I think that’s a really good start. I wish we would think a bit bigger, beyond our borders, and believe more in our brilliant minds. I wish to see more procurement from our innovators, governments, the Commission, but also corporates buying more from them.”
The panel grounded that ambition in the practical realities of what still needs to change. From mobilising institutional capital that has historically sat at a distance from early-stage deep tech, to reducing the regulatory friction that slows cross-border scaling, to building the kind of procurement culture that gives European innovators a home market to grow into.
The conversation was much needed to address the structural barriers that hold European deep tech back, from mobilising investment and reducing regulatory friction to enabling the kind of cross-border collaboration that allows a startup in Tallinn to scale as readily as one in Berlin or Paris.
Photo credit: © Leo Coulongéat & Hello Tomorrow
Photo credit: © Leo Coulongéat & Hello Tomorrow
The industrial perspective came from Christophe Fouquet, President and CEO of ASML, whose fireside chat “Who Builds the Future? Ecosystems in the Age of AI” offered one of the summit’s most grounded takes on what productive collaboration between large companies and early-stage ventures actually looks like in practice. Asked how important startups are to ASML, Fouquet was direct about where the real value lies:
I think you need to want more than funding. In ASML, we’re looking for real opportunities to engage with a new startup on a new field. But we only do that if we believe that the competencies we have in the company, whether that’s engineering, operations, or many other things, can genuinely help. All the learning we have had in ASML over 40 years, with all the mistakes along the way, we think that if we can help a few companies to skip a few of those mistakes, that can be a real benefit. So if you’re going to work with a bigger company, that’s the real question you should be asking: how can that company actually help you?”
The message reframed what corporate partnership should mean for a deep tech founder: not a funding relationship, but an accelerant built on decades of hard-won operational knowledge. From the leader of one of Europe’s most strategically significant technology companies, it was a perspective that carries weight precisely because ASML has lived every stage of that journey itself.
Photo credit: © Leo Coulongéat & Hello Tomorrow
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Photo credit: © Leo Coulongéat & Hello Tomorrow. Not to be used or replicated without explicit permisison.
Ideas worth spreading: Keynotes, panels, and side conversations
A summit is only as good as the quality of thought it puts on stage. By that measure, we had high ambitions for this edition of the Hello Tomorrow Summit. Throughout bboth days on the Frontier Stage and at the Deep Tech Academy, over key speakers addressed important topics that society has been grappling with for years. Many of these topics were discussed with the ambition and candour they deserve. Some notable keynotes and panels, include:
On finding the edge of impossible
Astro Teller, Captain of Moonshots at X, The Moonshot Factory, delivered with a lively presence, his keynote, “Finding the Edge of Impossible: How to Build a Culture Where Radical Innovation Can Flourish,” and took on a question that sits beneath almost every deep tech venture: not whether a technology works, but whether the organisation building it has the psychological and cultural conditions to survive the long process of finding out.
Teller’s central argument was counterintuitive enough to land hard in a room full of founders and industry leaders trained to celebrate wins. Learning, he argued, only happens when you are wrong. Every confirmation of what you already knew adds evidence but teaches you nothing new. At a moonshot factory, that means the entire process is structurally oriented toward being wrong, which creates a problem, because society has conditioned most people to experience being wrong as something to feel guilty or ashamed about.
“If you’re taking moonshots, especially if you’re viciously attacking your own ideas, the entire process is about learning. But if the entire process is about learning, then you are constantly trying to be in a moment where you’re wrong. And that ends up, because of how society trained us all, leaving you feeling some feelings of guilt or shame because you got a no on the thing you tried, and that feels bad. But that means if we all work at X, I need you to not have that feeling. Because if you feel guilt and shame, you will unconsciously avoid the most important thing at the moonshot factory, which is learning.”
If you are a deep tech founders navigating the long process of developing deep technology, the implication is that creating the right technology is not enough. You’ll need the ability to build an organisation that can learn quickly and effectively that actually determines whether the technology ever reaches the world.
On making medicine that think
Andrew Hessel, Chairman of the Human Genome Project-Write, introduced a new perspective to the programme. In his keynote address, he asked a question that sounds like science fiction until you understand how close it is to becoming a reality: can we make smarter medicines? Working at the intersection of synthetic biology and programmable DNA, Hessel’s research confidently suggests a future where biological systems are designed with the same intentionality as software. In this future, therapies can be written, compiled and personalised for individual patients.
Notable panels worth a watch
The summit’s panel programme was built around the most important questions in deep tech right now. Why do the best deep technologies still fail? Is the energy transition genuinely at risk? How can corporations move beyond pilot schemes to establish genuine partnerships with early-stage ventures? What is required to generate revenue while building towards a moonshot? How are AI and biology redefining food and health? How is dual-use innovation reshaping the boundary between defence and civilian applications? And how are industrial leaders actually integrating deep tech into sustainable manufacturing at scale?
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From scientific breakthroughs to industrial impact
Understanding the practical requirements of sovereignty and resilience leads directly to the most fundamental challenge in deep tech:
How can a genuine scientific breakthrough be moved from the laboratory to an industrial scale?
Early-stage companies require access to facilities, testbeds, pilot plants and specialised equipment, which is beyond the financial means of any startup need capital that understands hardware timelines and remains committed throughout long development cycles.
They need industry partners who are willing to experiment, absorb early-stage risk and integrate solutions that are still being refined.
They also need networks that can connect all of these resources at the right moment. Every company that has successfully navigated this process has one thing in common: a government programme, a corporate partnership or a patient investor who recognised the long-term nature of the process and the potential value of the commitment.
The cohort that brought this point to life most vividly was the 2026 Hello Tomorrow Challenge.
Meet the 2026 Hello Tomorrow Challenge champions
The Hello Tomorrow Challenge is the summit’s defining moment as the global competition was created to identify early-stage ventures with the greatest potential to transform genuine scientific breakthroughs into practical solutions for the world’s hardest problems.
This year’s competition attracted over 4,800 applications from 108 countries. A jury of scientists, entrepreneurs, investors and industry leaders first selected 100 finalists as the Deep Tech Pioneers of 2026, and then named the thirteen track winners, the AI Horizon award winner and the Grand Prize winner.
Together, the Pioneer cohort showcased their scientific solutions that are emerging to address the most pressing issues that will need to be solved in the next decade.
Grand Prize for the Medical Biotech & Pharmaceuticals track: endogene.bio (France)
Endogene.bio won the €100,000 Grand Prize in the Medical Biotech & Pharmaceutical category. The company has developed a molecular infrastructure for the precise development of drugs for uterine conditions, enabling the non-invasive identification of the cells that drive endometriosis from a sample of menstrual blood. It uses whole-genome methylation and single-cell RNA sequencing to identify diagnostic biomarkers and predict how individual patients will respond to treatment. endogene.bio is supported by three clinical studies, five patents and advisors from Merck, Bayer and Oxford. The company is already generating revenue through collaborations with pharmaceutical companies.
Endometriosis affects an estimated 190 million people worldwide, and diagnosis currently takes an average of seven to ten years. The work endogene.bio is doing, moving from symptom management to molecular precision, is exactly the kind of durable, defensible science the Challenge was designed to surface.
AI Horizon Award: Rhizome Labs (France)
Rhizome Labs won the AI Horizon award for its lightweight, autonomous neural networks that run on edge devices with as little as 8 MB of RAM. This technology brings sophisticated machine intelligence to standard hardware, enabling systems to learn from real production data without requiring cloud connectivity or incurring latency. As the importance of AI capability at the point of action increases, this approach opens up significant possibilities for industrial, medical and environmental applications.
Emerging Pioneer Award: Remedium Energy (United Kingdom)
Remedium Energy took the Emerging Pioneer Award in Climate Tech for Limeloop, a sorbent that captures 36 times more CO₂ at 80 per cent lower cost than existing solutions, paired with a heat battery that recharges it cheaply for reuse. Industrial carbon capture at this cost structure has the potential to reshape the economics of the entire sector.
Industry track winners
The breadth of the 2026 track winners offered one of the summit’s most vivid demonstrations of how wide and deep the current wave of deep tech innovation has become.
Advanced Computing & Cybersecurity (supported by @NXP Semiconductors)
Delft Circuits (Netherlands) designs flexible cryogenic cabling that helps quantum computers scale; its Cri/oFlex product line is already in use in quantum and cryogenic labs worldwide.
Aerospace
Eddytec (Netherlands) uses eddy-current sensing for fast, affordable, non-destructive testing of carbon composites, helping aviation, automotive, and energy manufacturers scale advanced materials adoption and move toward predictive maintenance.
Semiconductor & Advanced Electronics (supported by ASML)
TracXon (Netherlands) develops roll-to-roll hybrid printed electronics with more than twenty times the throughput of traditional circuit boards, ten times less material, and no fresh water consumption, making the sustainable reshoring of electronics manufacturing genuinely viable.
Automotive, Maritime, Rail Transportation & Operations (supported by Damen, GTT Strategic Ventures, Honda Xcelerator Ventures)
Alteva (Germany) has developed ultralight lithium-sulphur batteries up to three times lighter than current cells, built entirely on European supply chains, designed to electrify drones, aircraft, EVs, and heavy vehicles.
Energy (supported by Breakthrough Energy Discovery and Honda Xcelerator Ventures)
Naco Technologies (Latvia) produces nano-coatings for green hydrogen systems that more than double their operational lifetime and reduce the use of expensive noble metals like platinum and iridium by at least tenfold.
Climate Tech & Environmental Protection (supported by L’Oréal)
Jiva Materials (United Kingdom) makes Soluboard, the first recyclable, biodegradable circuit-board substrate, which delaminates in hot water to recover copper and components and cuts embodied carbon by up to 70 per cent. Validated through paid pilots with Bosch, Siemens, Infineon, and HP, it brings circular economy principles to one of electronics manufacturing’s most persistent waste problems.
Resource Efficiency & Circular Systems
FluoRok (United Kingdom) produces fluorochemicals using fluorinated waste as feedstock, creating a safer, lower-cost, and circular route to materials vital for electrification, food supply, and health.
Sustainable Construction & Infrastructure
Ureaka (United Kingdom) turns captured CO₂ and recycled mineral waste into a calcium-carbonate binder for cement-free, carbon-negative construction materials, designed to integrate into existing precast and brick production lines.
Industrial AI & Robotics
TETMET (France) manufactures architectured lattice structures at industrial scale using robots, lasers, and AI, delivering up to 80 per cent better strength-to-weight ratios for aerospace, automotive, and construction applications, with proofs of concept developed alongside CNES, Safran, Stellantis, BMW, and Airbus.
Digital Health & Medical Devices
UNOMR (Switzerland), an ETH Zurich spin-off, is building a nanopore-based protein-sequencing platform capable of detecting diseases such as cancer years earlier than current methods allow.
Food & Agriculture (supported by DSM-Firmenich)
DARWIN Bioprospecting Excellence (Spain) turns microbial diversity into industry-ready solutions across food, agriculture, and industrial biotech.
Industrial Biotech & New Materials (supported by Syensqo)
Westra Materials (Sweden) develops PFAS-free conductive polymers, produced in a single-step process, that boost battery performance, extend EV range, and enable more efficient solar cells.
Taken together, these companies are working on structural changes in materials, diagnostics, manufacturing, and energy that take decades to fully propagate and reshape everything they touch. Their presence at the summit was a reminder of how much is already underway.
The new era of collaborative resilience is a team sport.
The underlying idea at every stage of the Hello Tomorrow Summit Amsterdam, from the main panels to the side conversations, was that resilience is built collectively. The companies and ecosystems that will define the next decade of industrial transformation will be those that can absorb shocks, redeploy resources quickly and maintain momentum through uncertainty. This kind of structural resilience emerges from relationships, such as those between start-ups and research institutions, private capital and public funding, and industry incumbents willing to take risks with agile teams ready to meet them.
The world’s most advanced deep tech clusters are not defined by the volume of capital flowing through them. What proves far harder to replicate is the institutional trust, the shared history of collaboration, and the informal networks that develop when an ecosystem is built with intention over many years.
The 2026 Hello Tomorrow Summit made that dynamic visible. Over 120 deep tech startups filled the exhibition floor at the summit, spanning every domain from AI and quantum to climate tech, advanced materials, and biotech. More than 40 national delegations arrived from across Europe and further afield, including Australia, Colombia, Germany, Lithuania, Ukraine, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, and Chile, each with their own innovation priorities and ecosystem strengths. What emerged from those encounters was a genuine exploration of complementarity, where your capability meets my need, and your market problem intersects with a solution being built in my region.
That spirit now defines the most effective deep tech collaborations.
Browse the full list of exhibitors that were present at the summit.
