When was the last time you tapped your card or phone to pay for something? Streamed a documentary on the go? Spoke to a device for travel tips?
I did most of that before I arrived at the office this morning.
I’ll confess that not once did I stop and think about the decades of engineering beneath each moment. But that’s also the point. As Mark Weiser puts it, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.”
Technologies don’t just sit on top of society. They become one with us, they shape us as much as we shape them, and this invisible utility becomes the point. In a way, ultimate success is to be taken for granted, to be unremarkable.
What’s obvious today, rarely happened by chance. There may be serendipitous externalities along the way, but there is always a central vision, a deep conviction at the very start of that society-shaping journey: it is technically possible, and now is the time.
The window to back a future technology is narrower than one would imagine. First mover advantage is real.
Amadeus Capital has repeatedly captured these moments in time for nearly thirty years.
In the late 1990s, we backed Entropic on a single conviction: that we would soon talk to machines as we do to people — paving the way to the voice AI technologies that orchestrate our lives today. When we backed CSR, we weren’t just backing a chip company, we were backing the future of mobile connectivity. The world was still tethered by a chaotic web of cables. The idea was a single-chip radio that could handle short-range communication. At the time, it wasn’t obvious that every human would eventually carry a device that could talk to their headphones, car, or heart rate monitor.
Similarly, Element14’s DSL semiconductor platforms went into hundreds of millions of homes before most investors had decided broadband was inevitable. Icera then engineered modem silicon for a mobile internet that barely existed.
The same pattern kept repeating, and the same instinct kicked in each time.
ForeScout built agentless network security for a world filling up with hospital equipment and factory sensors that couldn’t run security software. Solexa collapsed the cost of genome sequencing not incrementally, but completely. Two decades later, three quarters of all DNA analysed every day in the world is still done using their sequencing technology.
Each time, the potential was there but the value needed to be surfaced.
That dynamic continues to play out. Photonic, Riverlane, and Nu Quantum are not just building quantum infrastructure, they are enabling a future where cryptography makes us safer or drug discovery healthier. ConstructiveBio is writing whole genomes and engineering new life. Xampla is replacing micro-plastics with materials derived from plants. Paragraf is building semiconductors from graphene, for a world where biocompatibility and energy efficiency matter.
In a few years, most of this will, once again, be taken for granted. And that’s exactly the point.
Read on for more news from our portfolio and partners across Intelligence, Human, and Planet this month.
Intelligence
Stateful Robotics raises $3.8m. We co-led the pre-seed round to help Stateful Robotics bring long term memory and intelligence to robots. The embodied AI company is already live with pilot customers in infrastructure and logistics. Read the announcement.
Robots needed longer-term thinking. In Sifted, Stateful Robotics CEO Kirsty Lloyd-Jukes explained why “long-horizon thinking” remained one of robotics’ hardest problems. The piece highlighted Stateful’s work on robot-agnostic software built for memory and decision-making under uncertainty. Read the feature.
Mapping the supply chain before China does. Altana AI’s CEO Evan Smith warned that Beijing can see, divert, and disrupt Western supply chains in real time — citing defence contractors by name. The comments landed at a moment of peak geopolitical tension around trade. Read the interview.
Scaling up at Mansion House. Sprout.ai and Sitehop took the stage at the Lady Mayor’s Tech Scaleup Showcase, presenting to investors and City leaders alongside some of the UK’s most promising scale-ups. Both highlighted the kind of deep tech innovation needed to help more ambitious companies scale in the UK. Read the post.
Quantum moved into procurement. The UK Government committed more than £1bn over four years to quantum, spanning computing, networking, sensing, skills, and infrastructure. Partner Dr Manjari Chandran-Ramesh comments in the release “The last decade has positioned the UK with real strengths,”. Read the full release.
A £2.5bn package backed AI and quantum. HM Treasury and DSIT outlined plans to roll out quantum computers at scale, including a first-of-its-kind procurement programme worth up to £1bn. The announcement also featured Nu Quantum CEO Dr Carmen Palacios Berraquero, signalling growing recognition of quantum networking’s role in deployment. Read the announcement.
Quantum meets the factory floor. planqc is leading a €2.3m project with BMW, Infineon, and Saarland University to pre-process complex industrial optimisation problems on its neutral-atom quantum computer. The goal: make classical algorithms faster by letting quantum tackle the hard part first. Read the announcement.
PolyAI had a big month. Gold Stevie for Best Customer Support Solution, #1 enterprise AI company in Europe in the FT 1000, and number 12 on The Sunday Times 100 Tech. The company also published its annual CX 100 list, spotlighting leaders at Visa, Tesco, and Nationwide.
Riverlane published its QEC roadmap. The plan sets out how its error correction stack can bring utility-scale quantum computing three to five years closer. Read the roadmap.
Automating the work that AI forgot. V7 Labs launched its “Finally, Free to Think” campaign, positioning V7 Go as the tool for eliminating the document-heavy operations layer that sits beyond simple AI tasks. New AI Skills give teams a framework to deploy intelligent agents at enterprise scale. Check the announcement.
Human
Rewriting life’s blueprint. In our In Focus interview, Constructive Bio CEO Ola Wlodek shares her personal journey to becoming the leader of a biotech company rewriting the blueprint of life. Watch the interview.
A profound shift in computational biology. Partner Pierre Socha contributes his views to the 2026 European Deeptech Report. Notably, the convergence of Agentic AI, Quantum-Classical Hybrids, and Spatial Multi-omics. Read the full report.
A big jump in the Sifted 100. Nuclera climbed 37 places to number 10 in Sifted’s latest ranking of the UK and Ireland’s fastest-growing startups and scaleups. It was a strong sign of momentum for the Cambridge team building automated protein making and testing infrastructure for life science research. Full list here.
Planet
Lululemon backs Epoch Biodesign. The enzyme recycling company closed a $12m round this week, with Lululemon as a new strategic investor. The funding builds a demonstration facility near Imperial College London on the path to a 20,000-tonne commercial plant by 2028. Recycled nylon 6,6, no fossil feedstock required. Read the TechCrunch exclusive.
Just Eat going plastic-free. Xampla is entering 10 European markets in partnership with Just Eat Takeaway with a new packaging range from Huhtamaki. Morro Coating is made entirely from natural plant proteins and directly replaces plastic coatings. Read the full release.
News from the team
Science or subservience? Partner Pierre Socha published a blog on the erosion of public trust in science and how this is a systemic risk to the global economy. This also appeared as a shorter column in UKTN. Read the blog.
From paint factory to venture capital. On the UKTN podcast, Amelia Armour shared her path into investing, alongside her views on female co-founders and how AI could widen access to entrepreneurship. It offered a sharp perspective on the future of tech and venture capital. Listen now.
London’s deep tech investors. We released a blog which covers how founders can prepare to approach London’s deep tech investors. Structured outreach, evidence pack prep, and realistic timelines are all covered. Read the blog.
How to raise on proof. James Baker, Principal in our Early Stage team, published a practical guide for founders on raising pre-seed funding for deep tech. Read the guide.
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