25 frontiers in 2025
Calling all Pigeon fanciers!
In this edition we round up the year - expanding from our usual 7 things we like each month to 25 things we like in 2025! (5 min read)
Wishing you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy 2026.
Team 7percent.
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2025: A year of deeptech
January
Andrew became a regular guest on the Upside Podcast getting under the skin of VC, investing, startups, and founder psychology. Latest episodes on Spotify, or in technicolour on EUVC’s YouTube channel.
Harry was part of the founding team that launched Social Mobility Ventures, providing a friends and family round for anyone who went to state school in the UK. Just 9% of the UK’s tech workforce went to a state (government-funded) school compared to 93% of the country’s population.
February
Vaire Computing achieved 1.77x energy recovery with the world’s first adiabatic reversible-computing chip. Vaire Computing has the potential to decouple our demand for compute from our demand for energy, with reversible-computing systems that are up to 5,000x more efficient than today’s “irreversible” computer processors. This has boundless potential to transform the future of AI and computing in general.
SafelyYou, that improves patient care for senior citizens, completed its $43 million Series C round. The SafelyYou Respond platform is proven to reduce falls by 40% and fall-related ER visits by 80% using ambient detection and AI. Foundation Capital, Omega Healthcare Investors, Founders Fund, Cross Creek, Samsung Next and Qualcomm Ventures also contributed to the funding round, bringing the total raised by the company to over $100 million.
March
Gensyn unveiled four core open-source releases, central to their vision for a networked approach to machine learning compute protocols. RL Swarm, Verde, SkipPipe, and Diverse Expert Ensembles, have all been subsequently used to power Gensyn’s Judge Platform and Delphi, an open market for machine intelligence based on real model performance evaluation.
Biological Black Box emerged from stealth with its Bionode platform - a computing system that integrates living, lab-grown neurons with traditional processors. “Over the last 20 years, three independent fields - biology, hardware, and computational tools - have advanced to the point where biological computing is now possible,” said Alex Ksendzovsky, BBB’s co-founder, offering the potential for order-of-magnitude shifts in efficiency and adaptability, compared to conventional GPUs.
Greenjets announced the closing of its $7 million seed round, led by Tanglin Ventures and joined by 7percent Ventures, Spacewalk VC and Z21. In just two years Greenjets has grown from a team of eight working out of a trailer, to a 22-person company with a dedicated engineering facility. They will produce hundreds of their next-generation, ultra-quiet, electric propulsion units in 2025.
April
7percent published our two-part breakdown of our Future Compute thesis (one of four core investment areas at 7percent), with guest writing from Ben Fielding of Gensyn, and Zehan Wang of Paddington Robotics (prev. Cofounder of Magic Pony Technologies. Read part one and part two on our website.
Neurolabs closed its $8m Series-A round led by Nauta Capital, as they continue to unlock the vast potential of computer vision for everyday applications. The company is harnessing synthetic data generation to produce a low-code platform, with a beachhead market of retail, allowing software engineers and citizen developers to integrate computer vision into all possible solutions - onboarding new assets in seconds, rather than days.
Limbic completed the first real-world study on the use of GenAI in mental health treatment within a live, multi-site clinical setting. It found that patients receiving care augmented by GenAI attended 42% more therapy sessions and achieved a 25% higher recovery rate compared to standard treatment. Dropout rates fell by 23% with the program generating an estimated £228 of additional value per patient, based on improved recovery rates alone. Amazing news for mental health.
May
DragonChasers ran its fourth retreat - cofounded by 7percent - bringing together >80 of Europe’s leading GP/LPs in Marrakech and the expansive Moroccan desert.
Aerovolt surpassed 2 million views on the DriveTribe YouTube channel, with their chargers powering the UK’s first race between an electric car and an electric plane - between Top Gear / Grand Tour’s James May and Richard Hammond. The race - featured on the DriveTribe channel - sees a Porsche AG take on Pipistrel Aircraft (piloted by Philip Kingsley-Dobson), using Aerovolt’s easy-to-use charging network to showcase point-to-point flying between multiple airports.
Stotles unveiled its $13m Series-A funding round, led by Headline and Acton with participation from Form Ventures and Seedcamp, as they continue to build the first platform to cover the entire commercial process of selling to the public sector. The team have recently redesigned and relaunched their platform, becoming the leading partner of private sector suppliers in the space. The latest version supports the end-to-end commercial process of creating strategy; building qualified pipelines; finding the right tenders; and qualifying those opportunities to generate a first draft of a bid.
June
Volantis announced its $9m Seed Round, having secured backing from the likes of OpenAI’s Sam Altman and ScaleAI’s Alex Wang, as it builds the future of photonically integrated computers. The company intends to use the funds to continue refining its chip architecture, grow its world-class engineering team, and begin early customer engagements. Using a different approach, direct laser modulation and wafer-scale integration, it enables communication across highly connected compute systems. This architecture packs the power of a server rack into a chip-scale package, reducing energy consumption and cost while dramatically increasing compute speed.
7percent had two companies go into orbit on a single launch, with Magdrive launched and performed the first in-orbit demonstration of its Rogue propulsion thruster and BioOrbit testing a passive payload of antibody crystal with the Exploration Company. The mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, was onboard SpaceX’s Transporter 14, supported by the European Space Agency. Magdrive also announced a $10.5 million seed round led by Redalpine and Founders Fund earlier in 2025.
July
Dylan Bourguignon joined the 7percent team, as a Partner. Dylan was previously a founder for 10 years; also as part of the 7percent portfolio, running SO-SURE, an insurtech MGA that created win-win insurance for consumers which exit to Open Technologies. Before that he spent 10 years in private equity. Welcome!
Universal Quantum announced a major strategic partnership with Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH) – backed by a multi-million Euro support package from a German development bank – to develop a next-generation software interface for fault-tolerant quantum computers up to the 100,000-qubit scale. The team also recently joined the Open Quantum Institute on July 24, 2025 for endometriosis drug discovery via quantum computing, applying quantum simulations to accelerate discovery of non-hormonal therapeutics. This healthcare application represents a major commercialization pathway for their million-qubit quantum computer technology.
August
Kaikaku unveiled Fusion, the world’s best bowl robot. It also launched Epicure, the world’s most advanced culinary AI, powered by actual science of how food ingredients are paired. The platform reached >17k users in less than 1 week. Epicure builds on two key recent papers: ”Flavor network and the principles of food pairing” (2011) and “FlavorGraph: a large-scale food-chemical graph...“ (2021). Refining these data, the team has created a 300-dimensional, best-performing food pairing model to date, spanning >1000 food ingredients. Try pairing flavours and generating recipes in seconds - try it here!
Harry featured on the Nothing Ventured podcast, reflecting on tackling world-shaping problems and the role of government in de-risking science.
September
Edison Watch launched OpenEdison, the AI agent firewall, blocking data exfiltration & dangerous agent action, following a viral demo on AI + crypto vulnerabilities. Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin weighed in with his thoughts.
October
Beyond Aero reached full scale power as it showcased a full-scale propulsion system for their hydrogen-electric aircraft. This came shortly before the team unveiled its plans for a hydrogen business jet factory in Toulouse, France. The team released a refined concept for its light jet earlier this year.
Charter Space made it to the final 5 at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt in SF, showcasing its vision for faster, cheaper, and more reliable risk evaluation for spacecraft insurance, and eventually to power new forms of credit and nondilutive funding for space companies looking outside venture capital and the public markets.
November
Camera Intelligence incorporated Google’s Nano Banana model into its camera, allowing AI photo manipulation on the fly, and unveiled v2 of its Caira model - enabling AI-Native workflows for content creators - closing a $459,668 kickstarter campaign. Tony Northrup, one of the most well-respected camera reviewers and content creators in the world with 1.65m subscribers on YouTube, reviewed Alice Camera’s V1 product, calling it “The Camera Apple Should have made.”
December (so far…)
Nu Quantum closed a $60m Series-A led by National Grid Partners, marking the largest ever Series-A round for a UK quantum company, as featured in Bloomberg. Nu Quantum’s quantum networking stack opens the door to a new approach: enabling quantum computers to scale by weaving individual processors into a modular, distributed computing fabric.
Castelion featured in Forbes as “The SpaceX Alumni Building Missiles 5x Faster Than The Speed Of Sound,” after announcing the close of its $350m Series B led by Altimeter Capital and Lightspeed. The team also recently secured contracts to integrate its Blackbeard hypersonic weapon with the Army and Navy.
Onwards and upwards!
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