What specific topics or themes is the content team aiming to explore through this year’s diverse lineup of speakers on stage?
This year, our stage program is built around 7 main themes:
- Energy Transition & Clean Mobility
- Healthcare for All
- Climate Change Resilience & Biodiversity
- Decarbonized Manufacturing & Buildings
- Sustainable Food Systems
- Advanced Computing: New frontiers
- Scaling for Global Impact
Throughout the two days, experts in their fields coming from a diverse range of perspectives will take to our three spectacular stages to take part in panel sessions, keynotes and fireside chats delving into cutting-edge innovation across these topics and how, collectively, they can be harnessed for positive impact. The focus is on anchoring deep tech innovation into real-world challenges, sharing experiences, tangible insights and advice on what is needed to advance the field and what the potential impacts are.
Many international investors will take the stage to share insights on fundraising, and there will be various sessions specifically focusing on important aspects of the deep tech entrepreneurship journey: collaboration with large companies, IP management, co-founders dynamics… We want the event empower entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and ecosystem builders with crucial insights and concrete business advice and foster a collaborative environment where groundbreaking ideas transform into successful ventures.
How will the “Investor Day” enhance opportunities for startups to connect with top-tier investors?
Our Investor Day is a dedicated day of 1-on-1 meetings between top deep tech startups and the most prominent VCs and CVCs in the world. We designed the Investor Day to be the most efficient connection platform to organize only relevant meetings:
- The event digital app gives access to the full list of participants with all the necessary tags and filters to find the right match (technology, industry, maturity, fundraising stage, geography, etc.).
- All meetings have to be approved by both startups and investors.
- All participating investors are interested in deep tech solutions and are well aware of the specific challenges faced by the startups building them.
Beyond the meetings, the Investor Day provides great opportunities to engage in casual conversation with investors in-between meetings, during lunch time and the networking cocktail. All the investors have a dedicated table with their name on it, organized by alphabetical order at the venue. This, combined with having early access to the full list of investors with their investment focus, makes it extremely easy to spot the right ones and have impromptu discussions in-between meetings.
On average, every startup that attends has around 4 qualified investor meetings and makes an additional 5 contacts during the networking breaks. Many of our startups have met some of their main investors during these meetings, including Dendra Systems and Skypull. Peter Rowe, the CEO of Deep Branch also told us how he met Total Ventures for the first time at our event when Deep Branch was only a few months old, and stayed in touch until the time was right to reach out regarding their Series A, as they already knew the strategic value of their investment.
Even outside of our events, we continue to share investment opportunities and connect deep tech startups from our community with our network of investors, which today includes over 800 VCs and CVCs.
Do you have advice on how best to maximize our networking experience during this year’s Global Summit?
Facilitating networking opportunities really is our primary aim, because, after all, collaboration is the key to scaling deep technology. We’ve never expanded our event to tens of thousands of attendees because that is not where the value of our event lies. We prioritize the relevance of our participants to ensure that each of them can navigate their day effectively, with valuable meetings and serendipitous encounters that just aren’t possible otherwise.
We are proud of our app, where it’s possible to search through all your fellow attendees with filters regarding industry and type of actor and directly book meetings with one another that fit around your agendas. More than 200 meeting tables are available for all attendees.
“Meet the Speakers” is a 30-minute period that follows the majority of our on-stage sessions where the speakers are available in a designated location to meet with the audience.
There is also a whole range of smaller side events throughout the week that are much more exclusive to specific sectors, creating dedicated moments to bring the right people together. You can find out more about those here (the list will be growing in the few weeks before the Summit).
What sets this year’s batch of DeepTech Pioneers apart at the Hello Tomorrow Global Summit?
Our Deep Tech Pioneers are a community of over 3,000 of the best startups that we’ve selected through 9 editions of our annual Global Challenge. Every year, we identify hundreds more game-changing startups from around the world and invite them to join the community and attend the Global Summit. In all honesty, the quality of these startups remains consistent every year; it’s something we take a lot of care over.
They are selected because they are the most promising projects in their sector, using science and advanced engineering to build something truly cutting-edge that has a positive impact on our planet and society. Something that does, however, set this year’s batch apart is their resilience in the face of the current economic environment, which has not affected the huge number and high quality of startups that have been selected from every corner of the globe.
Recognizing and highlighting these companies during the Global Summit is one of our fundamental priorities every year. They are really the heart and soul of the event. First, there is the Pioneers Stage. This is where the startups that are through to the finals of our Global Challenge pitch to win one of the 10 categories and eventually the Grand Prize. The audience at this stage is always buzzing with investors, industry leaders, and ecosystem builders, all coming to see which hidden gems will be unearthed this year in their industry.
Then there’s the Deep Tech Exhibition. We’ve designed this to be an interactive, fully immersive experience for our attendees to preview the emerging technologies on the horizon. Our Deep Tech Pioneers are set up there, ready to answer questions, showcase their products, and discuss their project all throughout the two days.
What about success stories from previous editions of the Global Summit?
We think our startups say it better than we do! Many of our startups have found their lead investors during the Global Summit and Investor Day, including Skypull and Dendra Systems. Here are a few other success stories, and some quotes directly from them.
- “We had the privilege to experience how you connect businesses, capital and government, and how you genuinely want to help founders make things happen in the market.” Sebastian Bhakdi, CEO of X-Zell.
- “We were able to explore opportunities with many potential corporate partners like SABIC, Total, Solvay, etc. and that really accelerated relationship building for us.” Jonathan Tan, CEO & Co-Founder of Coreshell.
- When Lilium won the Grand Prize in 2016, they were, in their own words, “4 students with big dreams and not even a full scale prototype” and the Hello Tomorrow Global Summit was “the first time that [they] got public recognition”. Since then, they built and flew their prototype, raised hundreds of millions of euros and went public through a SPAC merger in 2021!
- “Shortly after winning at Hello Tomorrow we got coverage in Bloomberg, Associated Press and the BBC. It was quite fun to have that kind of exposure and that also helped connect us to new partners.” Lorenzo Conti, Founder & Managing Director, Crover.
Have you secured your spot at the deep tech event of the year yet?
Tickets here!
Don’t miss out on the upcoming exclusive session we are co-hosting with Hello Tomorrow, ‘Backstage at Hello Tomorrow 2024’, where we will dive into all of this and more!
Tuesday, February 13th, you can sign up here.