Deep Tech Brief #09

Welcome to this week's issue of Deep Tech Brief.

Every Saturday, we break down deep tech companies building genuinely hard things, in plain language. No jargon, no hype.

Three companies this week: carbon-negative concrete in Finland, laser power beaming in Turin, and cancer drugs crystallised in orbit.

Let’s dive in.

Cement is responsible for 7% to 8% of global carbon emissions, more than aviation and shipping combined. Most of that comes from the chemistry itself rather than the fuel, so you cannot electrify your way out of it.

Meanwhile the world has spent a decade getting good at capturing carbon dioxide, which created an odd problem: a growing supply of captured CO2 and nowhere durable to put it. Most disposal means pumping it underground, which is expensive, geologically fussy and generates nothing you can sell.

Carbonaide, a spin-out from VTT, Finland's national research centre, points at the largest pile of man-made material on Earth and suggests putting it there instead. Concrete naturally absorbs a little CO2 as it hardens. Carbonaide does it on purpose, feeding captured carbon dioxide into precast concrete while it cures so the gas mineralises and becomes part of the stone permanently.

The commercially important detail is that it happens at normal atmospheric pressure. Rival approaches often need a pressurised chamber, meaning a plant has to buy new equipment and rebuild its line. Carbonaide's system bolts onto the automated production a factory already runs. In its pilot the company reported cutting the emissions of ordinary concrete by 45%, and by also swapping some cement for industrial slag it reported a finished product at minus 60 kilograms of CO2 per cubic metre. Conventional concrete sits at roughly 250 to 300 kilograms.

The business model is neatly double-sided: Carbonaide sells the curing system to concrete producers, and the carbon it locks away can be sold separately as credits.

Where they are: founded in 2022 by Tapio Vehmas, a concrete chemist of twenty years, and Jonne Hirvonen, on research that began in VTT's lab in 2018. A €3.7 million round in January, led by existing backers including Vantaan Energia and Redstone, follows a €1.8 million seed. Systems are being installed with two Finnish concrete manufacturers, Lakan Betoni and Lipa-Betoni, and the company sold its first certified carbon credits to a Finnish law firm this year.

Worth watching, because this is one of the few carbon storage ideas that pays for itself through a product people already buy by the truckload. The milestone ahead is geography: the technology is proven in Finnish factories, and the next step is producers outside a supportive home market retrofitting their lines for it.

Learn more: carbonaide.com

Launch costs fell, and the result was a lot of satellites. Europe's space startups alone raised about $2 billion in the first half of this year, more than in all of last year. That surfaces a constraint nobody worried about when there were only a few hundred spacecraft up there: every one runs on a solar panel and a battery, and neither can be topped up.

That sets hard limits. A satellite passing through Earth's shadow runs on stored charge alone. One that wants to do something power-hungry has to carry bigger panels, which means more mass and a more expensive launch. And when the battery degrades, an otherwise healthy spacecraft becomes debris.

ORiS, founded in Turin in 2024, wants to make electricity something you can buy in orbit. Its system uses a laser to send power from one spacecraft to another across open space. The elegant part is the receiving end: the target satellite catches the beam on the solar panels it already has, no modification and no docking. One spacecraft simply shines energy at another.

This is not a thought experiment. Caltech demonstrated beaming power from orbit in 2023, so the physics is settled. What is unsettled is doing it reliably, at useful power levels, between two objects moving at 28,000 kilometres an hour. ORiS has been proving the pieces on the ground first with a prototype called LOONA, developed inside NATO's DIANA accelerator, which has beamed power to a drone hovering more than 100 metres away. It has also worked with Thales Alenia Space on powering rovers on the Moon.

Where they are: four aerospace engineers who founded the company while finishing their master's degrees at Politecnico di Torino, backed by €5 million announced in July, comprising a €4.5 million pre-seed led by Earlybird with Pitchdrive and a €500,000 regional grant. The first orbital test comes in early 2027 with the German firm Dcubed, launching on a SpaceX rocket, and it is deliberately modest: beaming power across ten metres.

One to watch. The dual-use approach is smart: charging drones on Earth is a real business today while the orbital market is still forming, and it lets the team prove the hardware with revenue attached. The milestone that matters is that 2027 demonstration, which turns a well-understood piece of physics into a service satellite operators can buy.

Learn more: oris-space.com

Around 70% of the world's highest-grossing drugs have to be delivered intravenously in a clinic. Keytruda, one of the most successful cancer immunotherapies ever made, means a four to six hour infusion every three to four weeks for months, with vein scarring along the way.

The reason is not the drug. It is the formulation. Antibody drugs are large, awkward molecules, and at the concentration needed for a quick injection they become too thick to push through a needle. Crystallising them would fix that, and gravity gets in the way. As crystals form on Earth they sink and clump, producing a mixture of sizes rather than the uniform batch you need.

In orbit they do not sink. In 2017 Merck ran Keytruda crystallisation on the International Space Station and the difference was stark: the space samples came back as a single uniform population around 39 microns, while the identical ground experiment produced a split batch of roughly 13 and 102 microns.

So the science was proven nearly a decade ago. What changed since is the price of getting there. BioOrbit, founded in Cambridge in 2023, is betting that cheap launch has made orbital manufacturing an industrial proposition rather than an experiment. Its answer is BOX, an autonomous crystallisation unit about the size of a microwave that flies as a payload, works unattended and comes home. The smallest version, Baby BOX-E, has gone up to the space station as the first attempt at doing this at manufacturing scale.

Where they are: £9.8 million raised in April, co-led by LocalGlobe and Breega, reported as the largest seed round yet for in-space manufacturing. Founders Dr Katie King, a Cambridge nanomedicine PhD who interned at NASA, and Dr Leonor Teles, an oncology researcher, have brought in a chief science officer with two decades at Eli Lilly. The company holds a UK Space Agency grant and is working with the MHRA on how a medicine manufactured off the planet gets approved, a question no regulator has answered before.

One to watch, carefully. If it works, a patient's hospital day becomes an injection at home, and a pharmaceutical company gets years of new life out of a drug coming off patent, which is a powerful commercial reason for this to succeed. The open questions are the ones ahead of any orbital factory: proving the crystals hold their quality at production volume, then walking a genuinely novel product through a regulatory path being written as they go.

Learn more: bioorbit.space

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See you next Saturday.