Top 3 Startup Picks from Hello Tomorrow

Working on scouting for a global corporation, I’m looking for startups and breakthrough technologies across many areas and through different channels, one of which is exhibitions. For that reason, in March 2025 I visited Hello Tomorrow Global Summit in Paris. It is an event that covers many deep tech topics and their strength, in my opinion, is selectivity.

If you go to a “mega expo” with thousands of booths, you don’t discover startups - you discover how many kilometers you can rack up in a day. Here, because the startup set is curated and manageable, you can actually meet a decent amount of startups and discuss their technology in-depth. Being interested in energy, mobility, and computing, here my top three from this year in no specific order:

Black Semiconductor (Aachen, Germany) 

Whenever you talk about AI or tech in general, sooner or later you end up at semiconductors. And once you’re there, you run into the tedious bottleneck: physics.

We keep pushing more compute, but at some point the real limit becomes: how much data can you move around, how fast, through tiny interconnects, without turning your chip into a little space heater? You’re hitting bandwidth limits, power limits, and thermal limits. This isn’t a software type problem - this is hitting the physical limits of your materials.

Black Semiconductor’s approach is: stop trying to push everything through metal wires and move data with light instead - enter photonics. It is somewhat comparable to how our home internet used to come via copper cables and now comes through fiberglass. The general concept of photonics isn’t new - but their specific approach is: graphene-based photonics. Their argument is that it enables very high-speed modulation, higher than compared with the better known silicon photonics. Not only that, their approach integrates directly with existing chip architecture allowing customers to use what they already have rather than asking the world to redesign everything from scratch.

They’re building their fab in Aachen which will allow them to move from a technical solution provider to manufacturer. I will continue to follow their progress not because photonics is new, but because integration + manufacturability is the real hurdle in breakthrough technology adoption.

SpinDrive (Lappeenranta, Finland)

Moving from something physically small to something big: my next favorite startup was SpinDrive from Finland.

I’ve always liked rotating machinery (precondition for a mechanical engineer). As you’re reading this, there’s a very high chance the electricity powering your device comes from a giant turbine spinning somewhere. And whenever something spins, you run into the same, well known issues: friction, wear, lubrication, maintenance, downtime. What if you could get rid of them by solving the core problem - friction?

SpinDrive solves this in the coolest possible way: active magnetic bearings. Instead of the shaft physically resting on bearings and encountering the friction, it levitates in a controlled magnetic field - kind of like maglev trains, but inside industrial machines instead of rails. No more rotating or sliding bearings, just a frictionless air gap instead.

What impressed me most was the realism of the application story - this isn’t a sci-fi component looking for a market. It’s targeting specific OEM use cases where downtime and efficiency actually matter as evidenced by their growing industrial customer base.

Found Energy (Boston, USA)

To round out the list with a process rather than a product startup - I was impressed with what Found Energy from the US has developed. Industrial decarbonization, hydrogen production, and hydrogen storage are all topics that are closely linked. Found Energy has decided to tackle them all through a suspiciously simple approach: aluminum.

In daily life, aluminum is everywhere and almost boring - foil, cans, your Apple products, and so on. It’s “boring” only because it’s protected by a stable oxide layer. But if you can get past that layer, pure aluminum is extremely reactive.

Their concept: using their proprietary catalyst, aluminum can react with water to produce heat and hydrogen, turning stored chemical energy into high-temperature steam and hydrogen. They position this as a way to turn certain aluminum streams (including lower-quality / contaminated scrap) into usable industrial energy. Quite a lot of energy at that - 8.6 MWh per ton of aluminum.

They are also proposing a neat aluminum-loop approach: collect the resulting aluminum hydroxide and “recharge” it back to aluminum using electricity, closing the cycle. That way you extract value from certain aluminum streams (including tricky scrap), generate hydrogen on-demand, and solve hydrogen transport in the form of aluminum rather than compressed gas cylinders. If any of these topics keep you up at night, they’re worth a look.

These three startups show that deep tech startups in Europe and US are pushing the science forward by solving challenging problems in a sophisticated and innovative ways. Their work is moving out from the labs, in front of potential customers and that is exciting to see. I am looking forward to following their journeys and meeting many other startups turning cool science into real-world solutions.