Gravitate
May | 2025
DEEP MINDS
The Deep Tech Founder Magazine
How Deep Tech startups are disrupting food,
energy and healthcare
A HEALTHCARE
REVOLUTION
TAKING THE GUESSWORK
OUT OF DIAGNOSTICS
GROWING MEAT
IN SPACE
THE FUTURE OF GLOBAL
FOOD SYSTEMS
Why
Deep Tech?
and Why
Now?
Harry Destecroix MBE
Founder, Science Creates
Foreword
01
To ensure the prosperity of our society and our planet, we must make significant
advancements in health and sustainability. Deep Tech startups are our most
powerful economic engines to drive these innovations; they have the power
to transform pioneering scientific and engineering breakthroughs into
groundbreaking products that will impact billions, worldwide.
02
LettUs Grow: reducing the environmental impact
of cultivating crops with futuristic aeroponics
Founded back in 2015 by Deep Tech entrepreneurs seeking essential
resources for growth, I’m proud to say Science Creates’ evolution
has been nothing short of remarkable. But our mission hasn’t
changed. We are committed to building a nationwide Deep Tech
ecosystem that will translate more of the UK’s world-leading
research from the lab into real-world impact.
Over the last decade, we have built two Deep Tech incubators,
launched national accelerator programmes, created an award-
winning VC fund and established our charitable arm. We have
supported hundreds of Deep Tech startups, engaged thousands
of schoolchildren and invested millions into founders. As we
approach our tenth anniversary and look forward to opening our
third incubator, the evolution doesn’t end there.
Continuing on our mission to empower world-class Deep Tech
startups, we’ve leveraged our combined experiences to redefine
our activities into four key pillars: Incubators (infrastructure), VC
(venture capital), Platform (community, programmes and
partnerships) and Outreach (STEM outreach and public engagement).
Historically, there’s been no shortage of investment in traditional
tech companies, but Deep Tech doesn’t fit the conventional
mould. By scaling our four pillars, we will establish a national,
founder-led ecosystem that generates, nurtures and supports
thousands of Deep Tech spinouts, which is where we believe the
real opportunity lies. We will foster a culture of entrepreneurship
within UK academia, unlocking the full potential of science and
innovation. Leveraging advanced technology, these startups will
accelerate the Fourth Industrial Revolution, transforming the UK
economy, accelerating global sustainability and enhancing the
health of millions globally.
‘But why Deep Tech, and why now?’ you might ask. For those not
deeply immersed in the history of technological innovation, it’s
easy to overlook how dramatically the world can change within a
lifetime. Two centuries ago, the average human lifespan was about
three decades. Today, many in the western world aspire to live for
a century. Technology not only extends our time on this planet but
also amplifies our potential achievements within a given lifetime.
And the pace of change is only accelerating. Three decades ago,
Nvidia had just been founded. Two decades ago, there were no
iPhones, and sequencing the first genome cost $3 billion. In the
last decade, we’ve seen the rise of AI transformers and gene-editing
technologies like CRISPR, bringing groundbreaking advancements.
Today, sequencing a genome costs near $100, surpassing
Moore’s Law.
Deep Tech startups
are our most powerful
economic engines
03
Science Creates Founder, Harry Destecroix MBE
To ensure the prosperity of our
society and our planet, we must
make significant advancements
in healthcare and sustainability
04
Science Creates member company Anaphite is working to optimise
lithium-ion batteries for EVs and reduce our need for fossil fuels
05
06
Since the 2000s, the cost of launching tech startups has drastically
decreased due to cloud computing and open source platforms
like GitHub. Standardised hardware, a trend now emerging in Deep
Tech startups, is further bringing down the cost of developing and
achieving proof of concept. Advanced technologies are becoming
more accessible, fundamentally transforming scientific innovation
and enabling startups to develop new product categories that were
previously unimaginable.
These startups, driven by technical founders from leading research
institutions, will be the ones unlocking unprecedented markets in
healthcare and sustainability; it’s undeniable that these
advancements are what’s needed for the prosperity of our society
and our planet.
But while the UK’s Deep Tech potential is immense, it largely remains
just that — potential. Despite being powered by top-tier STEM
(Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) graduates and
world-renowned research institutions producing high-quality
publications, it’s a resource that has been historically underutilised.
The UK’s research commercialisation rate, relative to the size of its
economy, lags behind the US.
At Science Creates, we are dedicated to bridging this gap. With
the four pillars of our ecosystem, along with all the brilliant, contrarian
and impact-driven minds amongst us, we look to support and
foster the progress of scientists and engineers — the rock stars of
our time. In doing so, they will accelerate global sustainability and
improve the health of millions.
In this edition of Gravitate, you will find in-depth articles on the
future of health, energy and food — three sectors in need of radical
transformation that some of our member companies are at the
forefront of. You will also read opinion pieces from thought leaders
within our organisation, each offering unique insights into the
opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
At Science Creates,
we are dedicated to
bridging this gap
07
When
Food
Systems
WHAT DO WE DO WHEN THE STATUS QUO
JUST ISN’T CUTTING IT? WE NEED TO THINK OUTSIDE
THE BOX — AND GO INSIDE THE LAB
In 2017, 165 Holstein dairy cows were packed onto a Qatar
Airways cargo plane and flew from Germany to Doha,
bringing an all-too-literal meaning to the term ‘cattle class’.
The cows landed and headed off to their new Qatari home:
a purpose-built dairy farm where they were shortly joined by
a few thousand more airlifted bovine compatriots. The cows
were unwitting participants in Qatar’s efforts to circumvent
embargoes placed on the country by Saudi Arabia and its
other Gulf neighbours, from which Qatar imported around
80% of its dairy needs. With the embargoes firmly in place,
Qatar didn’t have enough milk for its population, so it swiftly
flew in an emergency cohort of milk producers.
Today, Qatar produces all the milk it needs in-country,
and then some. The cows did the job! However, the
situation only served to highlight Qatar’s heavy reliance
on a fragile and unstable food system — one that could
quickly fail if anything were to change.
“Our global food system emerged from the 1970s and
‘80s and is very, very linear”, agrees Jack Farmer, Co-
Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of LettUs Grow, an
aeroponic farming company based in Bristol. Jack is quick
to emphasise the simplistic, and hugely wasteful, ‘grow it,
ship it, waste it’ nature of our global food chain — one
that applies far more widely than just in Qatar.
“You grow everything where it grows well, ship it to the
consumer, they eat it and they waste loads of it. The
inherent assumption is that nothing major will ever go
wrong. It’s not at all resilient, and global instability such as
a conflict, climate crisis or political shift can cause it all to
fall over.”
08
Nicky Jenner, Science Editor
A plant biologist by trade, Jack is passionate about creating
a more sustainable, circular system that puts power back
into the hands of producers. We need to produce food in a
more localised, transparent, controllable way, he says. “The
food system of the future must be more local to where
people are actually consuming the food, and for this to work
we need to develop technology and practices that work in
environments that are limited by things like water or
temperature. Controlled-environment agriculture works
really well here.”
The global aeroponics market is
booming, and expected to grow in value
by around 20% annually in the next few
years as we increasingly favour fertiliser-
and pesticide-free food.
LettUs Grow is one of a growing number of companies
worldwide focusing on aeroponics, a futuristic system
that suspends plant roots in air and bathes them in a
nutrient-dense mist of water. This mist is produced by
firing sound waves at water, causing ripples that throw
droplets up into the air like a wave breaking at sea. LettUs
Grow’s greenhouses are filled with tray upon tray of
delicate leafy greens bathed in sunlight. Viewed from
beneath, the perforated trays reveal gnarly, finger-like
root systems, all naked of soil and cloaked in mist.
Aeroponics delivers win upon win: it can use less water,
reducing the environmental impact of cultivating crops;
and plant roots can be fed precisely controlled amounts
of water and nutrients while not being waterlogged,
improving yield. The reduction in water is especially
important, says Jack, and may even be the difference
between parts of our planet remaining populated or not.
Many regions are becoming starved of water, causing
them to either import large quantities of food — via long,
complex and unstable supply chains — or to make
inefficient use of the limited water they have — a strategy
that has a short shelf life.
“Most equatorial regions are growing produce using
groundwater. It’s just not sustainable or feasible for the
next 50 years, as they’ll deplete their reserves and run
out”, says Jack. “As rain patterns change with our climate,
people are going to have to start making serious choices
about whether they adopt agricultural practices that use
less water, or migrate out of those areas completely.
There’ll be a laser focus on which food products use the
most water… and it’s no surprise that the one where you
just spray loads of water on the ground is the most water-
intensive. A system where you use and recycle water more
efficiently is really the only way forward.”
While controlled-environment agriculture uses more
electricity to cultivate a crop than traditional farming
methods, it also requires far less fertiliser and no diesel
—something that will prove more favourable to the
environment in most cases, says Jack, as our energy
grid shifts away from fossil fuels and towards
renewable sources.
09
“
THE FOOD
SYSTEM
OF THE FUTURE
MUST BE MORE
LOCAL TO WHERE
PEOPLE ARE
ACTUALLY
CONSUMING
THE FOOD
”
10
LettUs Grow’s aeroponic farming technology
for greenhouses and vertical farms
THE ELEPHANT
IN THE ROOM HERE IS
ANIMAL AGRICULTURE:
AN INDUSTRY WITH
A COLOSSAL WATER
FOOTPRINT
FARM
TO
FORK
FROM
11
Will Milligan,
Founder and CEO of Extracellular
Around one-quarter of the freshwater we use globally
each year goes straight to producing meat and dairy via
factory farming. The industry is notorious for both using
water unsustainably and being a leading polluter of our
water systems, and is at high risk from water-related
issues like flooding and drought. Water is used at every
step of the animal-rearing process — from growing and
producing feed to actually feeding and hydrating animals,
cleaning their facilities and, eventually, their slaughter. A
single slaughterhouse can use millions of gallons of water
every single day.
While aeroponics systems can minimise the water needed
to take a plant from farm to fork, a less water-intensive
future for factory farming looks like an even greater
paradigm shift: it looks like not rearing animals at all.
“Ultimately, we have 2 billion more people to feed in the
next 30 years, and as a global population we’re consuming
more meat, not less”, says Will Milligan. Will is Founder
and CEO of Extracellular, a Bristol-based research,
development and manufacturing company of cell-based
products — including cultivated meat.
“We’d need to rear twice as many animals as we do today
to feed that growing population given the amount of meat
we consume, but we simply don’t have the land or
resources. As meat is societally and culturally embedded in
our food system, alternatives just aren’t cutting it — we
need to come up with better alternatives for the real thing.
To meet demand, we need better, more efficient, novel
ways of producing real meat.”
Cultivated meat is a hugely promising way to do just this.
Instead of leading animals to an abattoir, meat could be
grown cleanly and without cruelty in a kind of meat
microbrewery. A single small cell sample is taken from a
living animal, given everything it needs to grow in a big
tank, and can go on to produce the equivalent of
hundreds of meat products — all thanks to a single animal.
Rather than being a pipe dream, cultivated meat is already
on sale in the US and Singapore, and was served to global
leaders at 2022’s COP27 conference in Egypt.
Creating meat products in this way drastically cuts
carbon emissions; reduces land, water and energy use;
and could enable countries across the world to be more
self-sufficient in their food production (without the need
for emergency cows). “Countries that don’t have the
traditional basis for raising animals — maybe they don’t have
the rolling green hills of the UK, for instance — may be able
to feed their populations more effectively and securely with
this technology”, adds Will. “That’s a really exciting prospect
for me.
“In short, when we look at the future of our food system,
it’s all about feeding the planet more sustainably: feeding
more with less. Cultivated meat is really the key solution
to eating meat in a sustainable way. Who knows — in 20
or 30 years’ time, it might be seen as crazy that we used
to kill animals for food, in the same way that the idea of
smoking in a pub right now is a foreign concept. Just 20
years ago, you’d walk into a smoky haze.”
THE EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY
IS LOOKING AT GROWING
MEAT IN SPACE, POSSIBLY
IN EARTH ORBIT OR ON LONG-
HAUL TRIPS TO MARS. YOU
CAN’T TAKE AN ANIMAL WITH
YOU, BUT YOU COULD TAKE
THEIR CELLS.
12
Charlie Proctor
Head of Outreach, Science Creates
13
Charlie Proctor, Head of Outreach, and Founder and
CEO of independent charity Science Creates
Outreach, discusses the importance of education and
outreach in diversifying and empowering the future of
science entrepreneurship, and shares the long-term
commitment of the charity to tackle career aspirations
in STEM.
Bringing the local community along on our journey of
scientific discovery and wonder has run through Science
Creates’ veins since the company’s first incubator
opened in 2017, when we started inviting local schools to
visit our labs and participate in workshops with our
members. In 2022, these efforts continued to be
cemented through the inception of Science Creates
Outreach — the company’s own registered charity —
dedicated to shaping the scientists and innovators
of tomorrow.
Deep Tech
Pioneers of
Tomorrow
Future pioneers.
Children from St Barnabas Primary School
in The Learning Lab
14
15
16
These manifestos are from the minds
of 10-year-olds. Children know, just as
we do, the challenges that await us;
they share many of the same worries.
In 2025, we’ve taken this even further with our Outreach
pillar: an extended offer with yet more fundraising events
and STEM workshops to make sure that everyone can
learn and engage with the world of science startups,
Deep Tech and entrepreneurship. Why? Because
changing the world is a group effort that needs diverse
ideas and colourful approaches.
In a world grappling with climate change, pandemics,
resource scarcity and healthcare disparities, the need for
innovative solutions has never been more urgent. To tackle
the scale of these global issues effectively, we need more
scientists and Deep Tech entrepreneurs, and we need to
train them now.
Education and outreach play a vital role in shaping the
scientists and innovators of tomorrow, who will be at
the forefront of finding solutions to our complex,
upcoming problems. Children possess a remarkable
ability to envision a better future, untainted by the
limitations of the present. This inclination, plus their
natural curiosity, needs to be harnessed and kept
alive. We believe encouraging and nurturing this
mindset will lead to a pipeline of young scientists,
engineers and entrepreneurs with a passion for creating
a better, cleaner world for all of us.
However, career aspirations are not where we need
them to be. In fact, just 16% of 10- to 18-year-
olds aspire to a career in STEM*. From the science
programmes of the 1960s, the introduction of the
GCSE double science award at the end of the 80s and
the more recent increase in science in the current
curriculum, there have been continued attempts
to improve the way we teach science. Yet, science
still remains unapproachable and unappealing for
some. The point here is that just introducing more
science into the curriculum without thinking about
how or why it is being taught is not increasing the
likelihood of more people wanting to take it as
a degree or aspiring to it as a career.
Our charity, Science Creates Outreach, has a unique
approach. Nestled amongst world-changing science
and engineering companies at our Old Market
incubator is The Learning Lab — a dedicated space for
welcoming in the Bristol community and a hub for
STEM entrepreneurship education for young people.
Within the heart of working science laboratories,
surrounded by founders of groundbreaking startups,
we immerse young minds in the how and the why
of Deep Tech. School classes, community groups
and education networks can book tours of the
incubator, participate in hands-on workshops
in the lab and meet the people behind today’s
scientific advancements. By providing real-world
experiences alongside pioneering entrepreneurs,
the charity instils a passion for problem-solving and
innovation. These interactions with a diverse range
of role models help to demystify scientific careers,
making them more tangible and achievable for
aspiring young students.
It cannot be overlooked that the future of innovation
lies in embracing diverse perspectives. Right now,
the STEM workforce lacks representation across
dimensions like gender, ethnicity, age and socio-
economic background. Diverse perspectives have
been proven to yield more creative and effective
solutions to complex challenges, yet women make
up just 28% of the workforce in STEM and only
12% of this workforce are from ethnic minorities**.
Addressing these disparities is crucial if we are to
encourage a more inclusive and innovative scientific
community. That’s why we target specific schools,
work with community groups and encourage young
people from all backgrounds to pursue careers
in STEM fields, in order to build a workforce that
reflects the diversity of our global society.
We’re fully committed. This is a long-term and
large-scale project, in which we want young people
to visit repeatedly to increase their awareness,
skills and connections with today’s scientists and
entrepreneurs. We are targeting all stages of the
15- to 20-year education and innovation lifecycle,
designing our programmes to make real impact in the
UK — in line with government objectives in STEM and
the economy.
By empowering the next generation with the
skills, knowledge and confidence to tackle global
challenges, the charity is unlocking a brighter
future for science innovation and the wellbeing of
our planet. The young minds inspired and educated
through this initiative will become the catalysts for
meaningful change in society. Not only will they
lead scientific advancements in the future, but also
inspire adults to take greater actions to protect our
planet today. There’s a difference between liking
science and aspiring to be a scientific founder, and
Science Creates Outreach aims to bridge that gap.
Soon we will not be holding their hands — our future
will be in their hands.
*Archer, L., DeWitt, J., & Osborne, J. (2020). ASPIRES 2: Young people’s science and career
aspirations, age 10–19. UCL Institute of Education.
** UK Government All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Diversity & Inclusion in STEM. (2020).
Diversity and inclusion in STEM: A report for UK Government.
17
18
Our methods of diagnosing disease are fundamentally
flawed, and ever-smarter bacteria are triggering a crisis of
global warming proportions. What can we do to keep our
healthcare system healthy?
We need a healthcare
revolution — and we
need it
now
19
Nicky Jenner, Science Editor