The Meaning Gap
Why Brand is Equity-Grade Infrastructure for Early-Stage Deep Tech
Deep Tech is Exploding
By most measures, it’s an incredible time for deep tech entrepreneurs:
Deep tech’s share of venture funding has risen to 33%, up from roughly 11% a decade ago.
A staggering $2.18T in dry powder is ready to be deployed.
The pace of deep tech innovation has accelerated by 22% year-over-year.
Not only has the pace of innovation accelerated, but the domains and depth of progress have expanded dramatically. According to the WIPO 2025 World Intellectual Property Indicators, global patent filings reached an all-time record of 3.7 million applications. Research from David Orban suggests we are entering a phase of “superexponential” growth. The “idea-to-action” interval, the time it takes for a lab discovery to become a prototype, has shrunk by an estimated 30% in the last 24 months.
Additionally, the past year alone has seen the birth of entirely new domains of deep tech: Physical AI, Bio-Convergence, and Longevity Escape Velocity. It is a dizzying amount of innovation. But, the challenge isn’t just the volume or speed… it’s the complexity.
The Sensemaking Gap
As innovation progresses, the concepts that underlie these deep tech innovations aren’t just harder to understand; they’re often structurally hidden.
And that’s the challenge: technological innovation has progressed faster than our ability to understand it. This dynamic, named Martec’s Law by Scott Brinker, shows that human comprehension scales linearly while technological innovation scales logarithmically. This creates a “gap of understanding” that grows exponentially over time.
In extremely complex fields, practitioners’ language evolves to describe increasingly dense ideas. This leads to a Linguistic Interoperability Gap between founders and the rest of the world. A January 2026 report from ISSIP found that most deep tech failures are caused by “linguistic friction.” Founders often use high-decoupling language (technical precision), while investors use low-decoupling language (impact and narrative).
Ironically, the more revolutionary the innovation, the wider this gap becomes. Academics call this a gap of Sensemaking. The more radical a technology is, the less “mental infrastructure” exists to help people understand it.
The Series B Funding Wall
This lack of understanding is why we see a massive “funding wall” between Series A and Series B, where technical innovations transition into market creation. In 2025, the median interval between a Series A and a Series B stretched to 800 days—a 97% increase compared to 2021.
According to 2024–2025 data from Carta, approximately 40% of deep tech rounds at the Series A level are now “Bridge Rounds.”
At Series B, the “Due Diligence Vacuum” sets in. Late-stage institutional capital requires Market Inevitability, not just Scientific Proof. Research from HSBC Innovation Banking (2026) suggests that as deep tech matures toward Series B, there is a dearth of qualified outside expertise available to evaluate the technology.
Brand as Market Engineering
All of this means that the biggest problem to solve in early-stage deep tech is not more innovation—it’s better storytelling.
This is why Demos views brand as “Equity-Grade Infrastructure.” Our unique model brings capital and branding together at the Seed/Series A stage. We ensure that the Narrative Infrastructure is built in parallel with the Technical Infrastructure, effectively “pre-clearing” the path through the Series B Wall.
Great brands define categories: They create new standards and mental models make new ideas feel familiar. They anchor innovation by making the benefits of the category and the brand understood. Great brands align stakeholders: They unite founders, investors, and employees around a common vision. Most importantly, great brands build belief: They don’t simply solve the problem of comprehension; they deliver the power of emotional conviction.
Breakthroughs Don’t Break Through on Brilliance Alone
Don’t take our word for it. Recent 2025 ecosystem reports from Hello Tomorrow have begun moving away from a sole focus on “Product-Market Fit” and toward “Narrative-Market Fit.”
If you’re interested in creating advantage for your early-stage deep tech company reach out to us at hello@demosfunds.io.