Inside the Cap Tables of Kyiv's Dual-Use Hardware Startups

Capital is returning to deep tech at a pace few predicted eighteen months ago. Term sheets that once took quarters to close are now being signed in weeks, and the venture firms leading these rounds are not the generalist funds of the last cycle — they are sector specialists who spent the downturn building conviction rather than chasing momentum.

What changed is not sentiment alone. The underlying unit economics of several previously "too early" categories — climate hardware, sovereign compute, and frontier manufacturing — have crossed a threshold where venture-scale returns are once again mathematically plausible within a single fund's life.

This is the first of several structural shifts we are tracking this quarter.

The specialist premium

Generalist multi-stage funds are increasingly playing follow-on rather than lead in these rounds, ceding price-setting power to smaller, deeply technical funds who can underwrite risk that a public-markets-trained analyst cannot. That premium shows up directly in ownership: specialist leads are commanding board seats and pro-rata rights that would have been unthinkable in 2021.