European venture capital has a comfort zone, and it looks like enterprise SaaS. For most of the past decade, the continent’s VC ecosystem has gravitated toward software companies with predictable revenue models, short sales cycles, and capital-efficient growth profiles. Hardware, deep science, and anything requiring physical infrastructure have been quietly routed to government grants or corporate R&D labs — places where capital goes to move slowly. Jeremy Teboul has spent his career betting against this consensus.
The Path to Deep Tech
Teboul’s route to deep-tech investing was itself unconventional. He began in the consulting and engineering world at Accenture and ALTEN, where he developed an instinct for how large industrial systems actually work — an instinct that would later distinguish his investment approach from the pattern-matching that dominates generalist VC. From there, he crossed the Atlantic to found MeepLabs in New York, a venture that gave him firsthand experience of the gap between what founders building hard technology need and what the standard VC playbook provides. It was at Promus Ventures that the thesis crystallised: Teboul began leading deals in space technology and robotics, sectors where the technical risk is real but the market opportunity is anchored in structural demand rather than consumer trends.
His move to OTB Ventures brought the thesis to its fullest expression. OTB is a European deep-tech fund with a portfolio spanning applied AI, automation, and frontier technologies. For Teboul, OTB represented the chance to back the kind of founders that most European VCs either cannot evaluate or choose not to — teams building at the intersection of hardware and software, where the moat is physics and engineering rather than network effects.
The Orbital Fund
The most striking articulation of Teboul’s thesis is the Orbital fund — described as the largest early-stage space tech VC fund in Europe. The logic behind it is straightforward once you accept the premise: Europe has structural advantages in space that are being systematically undervalued by the investor community. The European Space Agency provides an institutional backbone that no other region outside the United States can match at scale. The regulatory environment, particularly around satellite operations and launch licensing, is mature and predictable. And the industrial base — from propulsion systems in Germany to satellite manufacturing in France to ground-segment operations across the continent — represents decades of accumulated engineering capability that cannot be replicated quickly or cheaply.
What has been missing is not capability but capital. European space startups have historically faced a funding gap between government grant programmes, which support early research but not commercialisation, and the growth-stage investors who arrive only after American competitors have already set the terms of the market. The Orbital fund is positioned to fill precisely this gap: early-stage capital, deployed by investors who understand the technology, at the moment when European space companies need to transition from demonstrating feasibility to building commercial products.
Applied AI at OTB
OTB Ventures’ approach to artificial intelligence reflects the same structural instinct. Where many European funds have rushed to back horizontal AI plays — foundation models, general-purpose copilots, AI infrastructure — OTB has focused on vertical applications: AI embedded in automation systems, industrial processes, and operational workflows where the value comes not from the model itself but from the domain-specific data and integration layer around it. This is AI as an engineering discipline rather than a research one, and it maps naturally onto Europe’s strengths in manufacturing, logistics, and industrial automation.
Why Vienna
Teboul’s cross-continental biography — France, Shanghai, New York, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Luxembourg — gives him an unusually wide lens on where Europe actually leads and where it merely participates. The Human × AI Conference’s thesis about European sovereignty and ecosystem-building resonates with an investor who has seen firsthand how different regions approach the relationship between government policy, capital deployment, and technical innovation. Vienna, positioned at the crossroads of Western and Central European tech ecosystems, is a natural setting for the conversation that Teboul’s career has been building toward: what does it mean to invest in European deep tech not as a contrarian bet but as a structural thesis?
His presence at the conference brings the investor’s perspective to a question that founders, policymakers, and corporate leaders are all circling from different directions. If Europe’s deep-tech advantage is real — in space, in industrial AI, in automation — then the capital allocation decisions being made today will determine whether that advantage compounds into market leadership or dissipates into academic papers and pilot programmes.
Implications
- For deep-tech founders: The funding gap between government grants and growth-stage capital is beginning to close. Investors like Teboul and OTB Ventures are actively seeking founders who build at the intersection of hardware and software — but they expect domain depth, not pitch-deck futurism. Founders in space, robotics, and industrial AI should be telling their story in the language of structural advantage, not hype cycles.
- For investors: Europe’s deep-tech sectors — space, automation, industrial AI — represent a class of investment where the risk is technical rather than market-based. The demand signals are structural: defence procurement, ESA contracts, industrial decarbonisation mandates. The question is not whether the market exists but whether the capital will arrive in time for European companies to capture it.
- For conference attendees: Expect an investor’s perspective on why Europe’s deep-tech ecosystem is better positioned than the consensus view suggests — and what the capital allocation landscape looks like from someone who has deployed across six countries and three continents.
Jeremy Teboul joins Human × AI on May 19, 2026, in Vienna.