Three conversations, one problem

Flat vector illustration of a hammer poised above a screw, representing deep tech companies aiming the wrong solution at a customer's problem

Cambridge Tech Week, September 2026

Three separate sessions at Cambridge Tech Week covered the same problem by accident: a podcast on the train ride, a panel on UK deep tech investment, and a keynote from Innovate UK. All of them described a marketing failure without ever realising it was a marketing problem.

The problem is the distance between building good technology and being able to explain its value to the people who fund it or buy it.

De-risking is their duty

Tom Adeyoola, Exec Chair of Innovate UK, put the establishment framing plainly:

"De-risking is what we are trying to do."

Tom makes a good point, because it describes what public money is for. Innovate UK does not exist to pick winners. It exists to take enough risk out of a technology that private capital will follow, and that a customer will sign.

Risk is not only technical. A buyer looking at a novel compute architecture or a quantum security product is weighing two risks at once: will it work, and will it solve the thing I need solving. Grant funding and technical milestones address the first, yet almost nothing in a typical deep tech company addresses the second.

A separate Tech Week session on the UK investor landscape made the same point from the other side. Risk appetite among UK investors is low, which everyone in the room already knew. But the question is: how much of that gap is the technology, and how much is the articulation of it. An investor who cannot understand what the company does, who needs it, and why now is not assessing a technical risk. They are assessing a comprehension risk, and they price that in.

The 1 in 1,000

The wonderful Anne Dobrée, was a guest on the BritChips Podcast and accompanied me on the train ride to Tech Week and framed it as a numbers problem. Most companies never break through to get noticed or funded. She put it at roughly 1 in 1,000, and her point was that the 999 are not failing on technology. They are failing to stand out. The credit for that framing is hers, and it stuck with me because it names the thing everyone avoids saying: the technology being good is not the differentiator as plenty of good technology dies quietly.

So what separates the 1 from the 999?

The answer showed up in a quote from a defence sector buyer, talking about the quantum companies pitching him later that day:

"Please solve the problems I have, not the problems quantum people think I have."

That is the whole disparity in one line. Brilliant technical people build forward from what is possible. Buyers live backward from what is needed. Often, deep tech companies build the technology first and then go looking for a use case that fits it, which is exactly the wrong order, and the buyer can tell immediately.

Working back from customer value

The fix isn’t about producing more content. The fix is starting from a real customer problem and working back.

That sounds obvious written down. It is rare in practice, for reasons that are easy to sympathise with:

•    Founders are often the strongest technologists in the room, and the technology really is novel, so the temptation is to lead with the novelty and to showcase how smart they are.

•    Roadmaps get built around technical milestones, because those are the things the team controls.

•    Customer problems are messy, specific, and unglamorous next to a nice benchmark number.

A company that works back from customer value answers the de-risking question without being asked. The buyer sees their own problem described accurately, which removes the comprehension risk. The investor sees a defined market with a named pain and a reason to pay, which removes a chunk of the commercial risk. Nothing about the underlying technology changed. What changed is that the risk is now legible.

What marketing is actually for

Marketing in deep tech is not awareness. Marketing is the translation layer between what the technology can do and what someone needs done, and it is the cheapest de-risking available to a company that already has the hard part solved.

This is the gap Latent was set up to close. Simon and I spent years at Arm watching strong technology struggle to find its story, and that’s becoming even more prevalent the more time we spend with these brilliant founders: the companies that break through are the ones that can explain themselves in their customer’s words, not their own.

The technology is rarely the bottleneck. The articulation of it usually is.