Focus Area
Deep Tech
Science that has left the laboratory. The fund backs companies built on a result that is hard to reproduce — in quantum technologies, photonics and sensing, advanced materials and advanced manufacturing — where the technical risk is retired early and a commercial buyer is already in view.
What we back.
- Quantum technologies
- Sensing, timing and secure communication built on quantum effects, and the enabling hardware around them — lasers, control electronics, cryogenics and packaging — where a product can be specified, qualified and sold rather than promised on a distant roadmap.
- Photonics
- Optical components, integrated photonics, lasers and the packaging around them, where the difficulty sits in the physics and the calibration rather than in anything written on top of it.
- Advanced sensing
- Lidar, spectroscopy, imaging and metrology instruments that measure something a customer already pays to measure — more precisely, more cheaply, or somewhere the incumbent instrument cannot be put.
- Advanced materials
- Materials and processes that change what a product can survive, weigh or cost — composites, coatings, ceramics, semiconductor materials and membranes — with a manufacturing route that holds at volume.
- Advanced manufacturing
- Production equipment, process control and inspection that make hard hardware repeatable, and shorten the distance between a working prototype and a qualified unit.
Why now
Why this sector, in this corridor, now.
Much of what the other five areas depend on starts here: a material, an optical component, a sensor or a process that was not yet a product. The companies worth backing have moved past the laboratory result and can name the customer, the specification and the unit cost they are building toward. That is the point at which technical risk becomes something diligence can measure, and where capital does the most work.
The United States holds deep research and specialist engineering; the UAE and the wider MENA region are building advanced industry and manufacturing of their own. A company with a proven result and a route to production can find a technical base on one side of the corridor and a first industrial customer on the other.
What we look for
What a company in this area has to show.
The five criteria in How We Invest apply to every opportunity. These are the questions this area adds on top of them.
A result that has left the lab
Performance reproduced outside the founding team's own setup, on units built by someone else, against a specification a customer wrote.
A route to manufacture
A credible path from prototype to repeatable production, with the yield, the suppliers and the unit cost named rather than assumed, and an honest account of the steps still done by hand.
A first buyer before a platform
One application with a customer who will pay for it, rather than a general-purpose capability that still has to find its market. A platform is earned by the second and third application, not declared in the first deck.
Intellectual property that can be held and moved
Clear ownership of the core patents and know-how, including anything licensed from a university or laboratory, and a view on export control for the technology and its technical data before a cross-border structure is drawn.
Across the corridor
Why the corridor matters here.
Deep tech companies usually need two things that rarely sit in one place: a research and engineering base, and an industrial partner willing to qualify and deploy something new. The United States supplies the first in depth. The UAE and the wider MENA region are building the second, with new manufacturing capacity and industrial operators that have hard problems to solve. The corridor can join the two, provided export control and the ownership of intellectual property are settled before a structure is drawn rather than after. The fund is built to do that work early, alongside the company, and to say plainly when a technology cannot lawfully make the journey.
What that support consists of in practice is set out under Capital + Capability, and how the markets are covered under Global Network.
Next
Building in Deep Tech?
Founders in the United States, the UAE and MENA can submit their company for review, or read how the fund decides first.