DCVC publishes the 2025 Deep Tech Oppor­tu­ni­ties Report: ​“An American Industrial Renaissance”

Whether in times of stasis or change, our job as deep tech investors is the same: to spot skilled entre­pre­neurs with market-ready ideas for solving trillion-dollar problems, and help them find the capital and connections they need to move from prototype to commercial-scale deployment. Toward that end, we seek a constant under­standing of the shifting needs and oppor­tu­ni­ties that deep tech investors and builders can best address. This year, we think the biggest opening is the chance to revitalize domestic manu­fac­turing and supply chains, ensure clean, firm, reliably distributed energy, and restore America’s tech­no­log­ical edge in defense — all while offering better health to more people. 

We have laid out this argument in full in the 2025 Deep Tech Oppor­tu­ni­ties Report: ​“An American Industrial Renaissance,” which we’re releasing as part of SF Deep Tech Week.

This is the third annual edition of the report — you can also download our 2023 and 2024 editions. As always, our goal is to give you a sense of what our investing team and our portfolio companies have been working on over the last year and what they’re most excited about. There’s no question that Donald Trump’s second term is altering the landscape for our portfolio companies, and in our opening essay we try to quantify some of the forces at work. Overall, we see the administration’s focus on American compet­i­tive­ness as a positive, especially given that so many of the companies we back were already working to create cleaner, more efficient, more scalable, and closer-to-home alter­na­tives in wasteful and polluting incumbent industries.

Take the mining and production of critical minerals as an example. So many of the rare-earth elements American companies need to make electronics, electric vehicles, jet engines, and defense-critical tech­nolo­gies are currently sourced from mines in China, which has a monopoly or near-monopoly on magnesium, tungsten, gallium, germanium, antimony, neodymium, graphite, and other important elements. When we’re dependent on a strategic opponent for the production and processing of these critical minerals, we’re vulnerable to artificial shortages and wild price swings. That’s part of the reason we’ve invested in Alta Resource Tech­nolo­gies, which is using compu­ta­tion­ally optimized proteins to pull high-purity rare-earth elements from low-grade domestic sources such as e‑waste, and Tidal Metals, which is developing a proprietary adsorption vapor pump that extracts magnesium from seawater. It’s a best-of-both-worlds situation: Alta and Tidal are helping to bolster domestic supplies of critical industrial minerals while also showing that minerals processing can be clean and safe for the environment.

Beyond reshoring critical supply chains, the 2025 report looks at a range of other important opportunities:

• Finding ways to provide greater computing power to advance the AI revolution without over­stretching the electrical grid
• Automating logistics and fulfillment in ways that let both humans and robots make their best contributions
• Meeting and managing skyrock­eting electrical demand with a new generation of zero-carbon energy sources, including geothermal, nuclear, thermal storage, and smarter grid management
• Making indis­pens­able hydrocarbon fuels in a carbon-neutral way using the CO₂ in the air and industrial waste streams
• Using biotech­nology and robotics to make the production of healthy food cheaper and less environmentally destructive
• Addressing water shortages by finding better ways to clean and treat polluted water and produced water from the oil and gas industry
• Combining computing and lab inves­ti­ga­tion in the form of TechBio to bring new drugs and diagnostics to market faster
• Merging doctors and AI into ​“centaurs” that are more capable than either separately
• At DCVC Bio, reordering the components of biology to create safer third-generation gene therapies, deliver new kinds of protein-based drugs to cells, and rethink the treatment of neurode­gen­er­a­tion and anxiety disorders
• Using ideas from small- and medium-sized companies to update the aerospace and defense industries in order to outpace, contain, and deter the nation’s opponents.

The themes in these reports are generated by our partners and their work assisting our existing portfolio companies and scouting for promising new ones. This year we’re excited to include a major chapter high­lighting the work of DCVC Climate, our first specialized climate-tech fund, which cuts across advanced manu­fac­turing and new forms of energy generation and management. 

The climate team’s work foregrounds a fundamental insight of this year’s report: boosting domestic industrial production, saving the planet, and earning a profit are not mutually exclusive — they’re mutually reinforcing. Milo Werner, a DCVC general partner who helps to run DCVC Climate, argues that ​“the industrial renaissance is about decar­boniza­tion. Advanced manu­fac­turing is solving climate change. They are all the same thing.” We could not agree more, and we see important openings for companies doing the hard work of cleanly solving massive technical problems and relieving market headaches. We hope you’ll see why — and consider joining us in our work — after reading this year’s report.