Can you turn science into something that runs reliably at scale?

This question ran through the HackSummit. And as the strong cohort of builders, researchers, and operators who joined us for its 5th anniversary made clear:

Europe has no shortage of breakthroughs, research excellence, or technical talent. What it struggles with is the translation layer between discovery and deployment.

The bottleneck is scale.

Europe already has many of the ingredients it needs: world-class research institutions, industrial depth, early-stage capital strength, and a growing base of ambitious founders.

But the missing pieces are coordination, design, and the willingness to build systems that prioritise value creation at scale rather than innovation in isolation.

Our time spent at the HackSummit made that shift feel both urgent, and possible.

Here’s 15 reasons why Europe has the talent and the vision to lead the next industrial age 👇

“Europe is strong at early-stage funding and financing innovation. The panel kept circling the worry that we still lack the late-stage capital to fuel industrial scale — and the instinct is to close that gap with more European money. I'd reframe it: the question isn't how to keep European companies funded by European capital, it's how to build them big enough to tap global capital from day one.

ASML is globally owned, globally sold, and globally dominant — and more strategically valuable to Europe than any European-only company at a fraction of its scale. We don't need more European-only champions. We need the outliers: European-born, with global ambition from day zero.”

“The Hormuz crisis shows again Europe's vulnerability due to its dependency on external energy sources. The way out is innovation. Europe has the talent, the institutions and the ideas. What we need now is the willingness to back and scale these ideas.”

"It’s crazy that we’re almost going to war over critical minerals. Our job at Altrove is to make sure industry isn’t held hostage by a single supply chain.

All of modern industry, especially anything electrified, depends on a small set of critical materials, and right now a lot of that risk sits in one or two geographies. You can either spend a decade rebuilding industrial capacity somewhere else, or you change the materials without changing the function."

“Critical minerals and materials are finally showing up as a strategic priority. New drilling approaches, better recovery and refining processes. Europe gave away too much of this stack in the name of globalisation. Bringing those competencies back isn't optional anymore.”

“Europe's industrial renaissance doesn't start on the factory floor, it starts 3 km underground. And we are going to unlock it with a laser.

If you look closely, many of the things society says it wants: clean energy, resilient supply chains, electrification, all depend on access to the subsurface. Yet the technologies used to reach that subsurface have improved far too slowly. Drilling remains expensive, slow, and operationally painful, especially in hard rock. That felt like a foundational bottleneck hiding in plain sight.”

Following 160+ applications, Arepa, BioClé, Celleste, Cosaic, Dunia Bora and Kioga took to the stage to pitch in front of our jury for the FoodTech World Cup Final.

Kioga were crowned 2026 FoodTech World Cup Champion.

Their breakthrough technology works with your body’s natural gut-immune-brain axis, targeting the interconnected pathways where inflammation impacts mental and metabolic health. Using advanced soil-derived postbiotics, they have developed a scientifically proven approach to target neuroinflammation and metabolic challenges at source.

“This recognition reinforces our belief that we are at the beginning of a new category in food and nutrition. At Kioga, we are bringing back Old Friends - microbial signals that modern life has removed but that are essential for human resilience. Winning the FoodTech World Cup validates that the industry is ready to move beyond symptom-based solutions toward biology-first approaches".”

Europe’s circularity is still around 12%, with a target of 24% by 2030, but infrastructure, behaviour, and incentives are not yet aligned. And more importantly, circularity doesn’t fail for lack of policy. It fails when systems don’t connect.

“Infrastructure matters more than intention and behaviour change is not just a communication challenge; it’s a system design challenge. And today, geopolitics is inseparable from circularity. Europe doesn’t need to outspend the US — it needs to out-coordinate and out-prioritise.

The circular economy is a strategic lever for resilience, reduced dependency, and smarter resource use. But building circular infrastructure requires the right capital stack: patient and blended finance, de-risking mechanisms, and business models that make the circular choice the easiest one.”

“Building in the physical world remains fundamentally challenging. But having a second-time founder like Tom Hubregtsen on stage (who brings a decade of experience across the full ML pipeline, 20+ patents, and a background at Google) changes the conversation.”

Tom joined Julius to share hard-won lessons and unpack exactly what makes hardware so demanding today and how founders can successfully navigate the transition to industrial scale.

“Just because things get hard doesn't mean we shouldn't do them. It simply means we need to be smarter, work closer together, and ensure that our impact is always backed by a model that makes economic sense.”

For decades, crop protection has mostly asked one question: What kills the weed, pest, or pathogen? So the industry screened. And screened. And screened. It worked, until it didn’t.

“Resistance is rising. Legacy chemistry is being phased out. Farmers are left with fewer tools, weaker efficacy, and a system that often responds by spraying more of what is already failing.

Meanwhile, pharma drug development went through a different shift: From high throughput screening to target-based discovery. To AI-driven molecular design.

The future of AgChem will require the same leap. We need to move from discovering what works to modelling what should exist. Crop protection should be designed with the same mechanistic precision currently transforming drug discovery. Start with biology, define the target, use computational tools to design interventions, validate the mechanism.

Build new modes of action deliberately, the goal is not one new product. It is a discovery engine to meet the challenge of rising resistances. And Agriculture cannot screen its way out of this problem.”

The biggest shift is that GLP-1s have fundamentally rewired consumer expectations. We are moving away from ‘feeling healthier’ toward ‘measuring the benefit.’

“Today’s consumer is looking for choices that are result and fact-based. They are surrounding themselves with a specialised ‘squad’ of agents, physicians, trainers, and nutritionists to ensure every selection is backed by relevant science and measurable data. They don't just want a snack; they want to see the impact on their health, weight, glucose, and biomarkers in real-time.

The takeaway for the industry is clear: The bar has been raised for food, supplements, and metabolic health. The next wave isn’t just better injections; it’s solutions that activate proven biological pathways while providing measurable evidence.
This is where AI and bioactive peptides become the bridge between biology, food, and behavior.

A final thought: Companies that fail to provide this scientific rigor and measurable proof will simply not succeed in this new landscape.”

The biggest challenge discussed wasn't a lack of brilliance, it was the scaling bottleneck. Too many transformative technologies fall into the "Valley of Death" because the leap from a laboratory bench to an industrial plant is too steep, too slow, and far too expensive.

“To bridge this gap, we need to move away from traditional, rigid scaling models and embrace more disruptive, agile approaches:

“Startups don’t fail to scale because they lack capital, they fail when they try to scale without the right partners.

Corporates don't fail because they lack scale, they fail when they stop innovating.

Partnerships are not a nice-to-have, they are infrastructure for growth.”

“B2B is a space where you can build with real ambition, because the impact is often much larger. The most successful companies don’t just push products—they pay close attention to the market, listen carefully, and let real demand shape their direction. Today, casein and other functional ingredients aren’t just niche topics; they represent how forward-thinking businesses are proactively addressing supply chain risks and strengthening long-term resilience. The industry is ready for this shift.”

By reframing the SaaS vs. deeptech debate, Jonny Everett of Marble explained that SaaS is becoming harder to defend as AI erodes traditional IP moats, calling it increasingly “value-extractive SaaS” and warning that “if you are investing in SaaS you are investing in the biggest CAPEX risk ever, since infrastructure costs are often just hidden on someone else’s balance sheet and we should be braver with some of our deeptech bets.”

William Godfrey at Tangible expanded on this by pushing back on “appeasing VC math,” highlighting how CAPEX-heavy startups are using structured finance and early-stage debt to scale faster, noting that “taking debt earlier in the journey helps scale from science project to real business faster.”

Andrea Casasco at 2100 Ventures added that “deeptech fundraising remains difficult because people don’t know how to price risk, spanning technological, execution, and de-risking challenges.”

Transformation is not about building everything yourself, it is about understanding where you create real value, where you need speed and where partnership is the smartest path to scale.

“This means that:

After 18 hours of building, a heated jury debate, and and lot of energy drinks, the winner of the HackSummit Builder Challenge 2026 was team PRISM with Christian Russo and Tiago Gama.

Working on the PROVE challenge, powered by SICPA, they built a prototype that proves chains of claims and ensures compliance without revealing the data, using zero-knowledge tech. On the HackSummit main stage, they proved that Europe's next generation of builders is ready.

What made PRISM stand out was the technical excellence of their concept, clarity of their thinking under pressure, the quality of their pitch and the progress made between Day 1 and Day 2.

“The Swiss deep tech ecosystem doesn't feel like it's trying anymore, it just works. University pipelines feeding real ventures, corporates actually willing to test stuff, capital density you rarely see outside the Valley.

The shift from ‘we should do this’ to ‘we're doing this’ isn't about ambition. It's about how the ecosystem is designed. That's the lesson. Europe has the pieces. The talent, the research base, the industrial capacity. Stop asking for permission.

Start designing the ecosystem so that value creation is the incentive, not ‘innovation’ as a sterile claim.”

“Although we covered many topics (from students going into consultancy to scaling project based energy innovations to feeling powerless in the COVID crisis), David Oudsandji (CEO and cofounder of our portfolio company Voltfang) and I agreed on one thing on stage: Deeptech & Energy Tech are the low hanging fruit towards European sovereignty and resilience...

...And it is up to us, the ecosystem, to deliver. So let's stop talking about all the barriers and let's fund and build to shape Europe's future.”

Dear Europe,

Europe, let’s build.

Yours Sincerely,

The HackTeam