Beyond Venture Capital - Industry Report – REQUEST DISCOUNT

Beyond Venture Capital: How European Science Ventures Have Grown Without the Startup Script

Industry Report — Maria Ksenia Witte, Arise Innovations®

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Venture capital became the default answer for deep tech. This report argues it was the wrong one.

Drawing on over a decade of pattern recognition across European science-based ventures, this 40-page analytical report maps the capital and monetization architectures that actually built European deep tech — before VC became the dominant narrative. From IP licensing and R&D-as-a-service to venture clienting and institutional co-development, the report makes these paths legible without reducing them to templates.

What is inside:

• Why VC systematically fails deep tech by design — and why that is a structural problem, not a talent problem
• A taxonomy of six non-VC architectures with logic, conditions, and tradeoffs
• Five detailed case studies: ARM, Sensirion, Brainlab, Menlo Systems, WITec
• A curated dataset of 50+ European deep tech companies that scaled without venture capital
• Implications for founders, institutions, ecosystem actors, and investors

Who this is for:
Founders of science-based ventures. Technology transfer offices. Programme managers. Investors entering deep tech. Policymakers designing innovation instruments.

This report does not provide a playbook. It provides a different unit of analysis — capital architecture — and the reasoning to apply it to your specific context.

PDF download · 44 pages · January 2026 · © Maria Ksenia Witte / Arise Innovations®