Today, we’re launching a Physical Innovation Lab for venture scientists working on the next generation of hardware, powered by Positron. We think this is huge, and couldn’t be more excited to build it alongside one of Europe’s few dedicated pre-seed funds explicitly structured to back physical science founders from inception. Here’s why.
The opportunity for physical technology, defined by scientific and engineering advances that produce new capabilities in the physical world, has changed dramatically in recent years. We’ve effectively entered a new era in deeptech: while AI is accelerating scientific discovery and technical development, new tools are opening up previously unthinkable possibilities in biological and materials engineering, private and public investment is flowing more confidently into science companies, and governments are taking a closer interest in industrial technologies with strategic geopolitical importance.
This is changing what can be built from scientific research – and the type of company that can emerge from it.
At Conception X, we’ve seen this for a while. Since we launched in 2018, the composition of university startups and spinouts entering our programmes has changed substantially. Physical tech accounted for around a quarter of companies then; today, it’s closer to 70% of our teams. Across nine cohorts, we have supported 40% more hardware companies than software – mostly concentrated in the last three years.
As the nature of our portfolio evolved, we knew our support model had to evolve with it – so we spent the past year speaking to hardware founders across the UK and Europe to map out the most common friction points and understand where we could have the most leverage.
From data and conversations, we identified five priority areas where early-stage physical startups face particular difficulty:
1. Technoeconomic analysis and scale-up economics
Unlike software, where marginal distribution costs are near zero, physical products can face steep unit-cost differences between lab prototyping and commercial production. Founders can build functional lab prototypes using low-volume techniques such as 3D printing at £1,000 per unit, without modelling whether the materials, components and manufacturing processes can eventually bring that cost down to a commercially viable £10 per unit through methods such as injection moulding. Delaying technoeconomic analysis can lead startups to develop against a cost model that no longer holds at commercial scale.
2. Manufacturing and first production
Moving from prototype to first production creates a different set of problems. Manufacturers may be geared towards much larger orders, leaving startups struggling to find a partner willing to produce an initial run of 50 units. For hardware companies in heavy industry, the problem can become a catch-22: manufacturers may want to see investment secured before committing to a fixed price, while investors may want to see a manufacturing contract before committing capital. For a first-of-a-kind product, founders can end up needing both before they can get either.
3. Regulation and clinical compliance
Physical ventures in medtech, diagnostics, life sciences and advanced materials face regulatory requirements that can take substantial time and capital before a product can reach market. Clinical, safety and performance data often need to be generated over several years and across multiple jurisdictions, requiring significant upfront planning.
4. Leveraging universities for specialised lab infrastructure and technical de-risking
Physical innovation requires access to infrastructure that most early-stage companies cannot afford to build themselves: wet labs, tabletop bioreactors, cleanrooms, analytical chemistry facilities and specialist testing equipment. For academic founders, university lab access can be strategically important at the earliest stage: it can provide the infrastructure and technical expertise needed to de-risk engineering and regulatory milestones.
5. Specialised engineering design – from lab prototype to in-situ demonstration plant
Scientists building heavy industrial or energy startups sometimes struggle to bridge from lab prototypes to scaled demonstrators – with complexity compounding exponentially. Specialised engineering design expertise can help surface the ‘unknown, unknowns’ so that academic founders can effectively hit critical technical milestones as they build at larger scales.
This is the context in which we are launching the Physical Innovation Lab.
We’re approaching it at two levels, embedding it within our programmes as an additional layer of targeted support. First, we’re building a stronger infrastructure around hardware founders: a community of peers working on similar problems, a network of experienced founders who have built physical tech companies before, and relationships with manufacturers, specialist facilities and technical providers. Second, we’re creating a pool of specialist expertise that can be brought in when a company hits a particular point of difficulty.
Since physical tech is a category that contains radically different company-building problems, the support will vary by company and stage, so we don’t expect every team to use the same resources or follow the same sequence.
We are already testing and refining the Lab with six startups from our 2026 cohorts – across life sciences, advanced manufacturing and heavy industry – and this will inform the full rollout across our 2027 intake.
“We’ve built exceptional infrastructure for producing new scientific knowledge in Europe – but much less for turning that science into physical companies,” Riam Kanso, CEO at Conception X, says. “The next generation of hardware founders shouldn’t have to assemble that infrastructure company by company. With Positron, we’re building a new model for how physical deeptech companies get built in Europe; we want to make the path for physical founders less fragmented, less dependent on luck and much easier to navigate.”
Joseph Peeraer, Founder and GP at Positron, said: "The constraints on a clean and prosperous future are increasingly physical: we need new materials, new energy, new biology. Europe's academic labs produce much of that science. But far too little of it becomes world-changing companies. What's missing is scientists who become founders. That's why Positron is backing Conception X's Physical Innovation Lab: a new model for building physical science companies in Europe."
If you’re looking for support to accelerate your hardware research, apply for Venture Scientist 100 or Raise by 6 December 2026 and you’ll be automatically considered for the Physical Innovation Lab.
