Periodically at Crunchbase News, we take on the joyous pursuit of reading through 800 or so recent seed rounds to get a sense of what’s trending.
Soon, an AI agent may be better at this (a seed trend we will explore in a companion piece). For now, however, it’s still a human-powered project, and one that leaves us with ever-growing awe at the ambitious ventures founders are willing to tackle.
This time around, we identified four areas 1 where seed investment is trending this year. These include: longevity, defense, waste reduction and spacetech.
If all goes according to plan, we may see a future of living long lives in well-fortified locales where we actually do a credible job recycling our waste. Meanwhile, expect our skies to become increasingly crowded with ever more sophisticated satellites.
Without further ado, here are the four areas where seed-stage companies are delivering on that vision.
Longevity
Virtually all of us would like to live long, healthy lives. But aside from basics like exercise and healthy meals, there are relatively few obvious measures to further this goal.
Not so for startups. From ultrasound treatments for Alzheimer’s to gene therapy to restore aged cells to regenerative medicine, seed-funded companies are working on a wide array of treatments aimed at extending lifespans and quality of life.
And, even when we do inevitably die, there’s another startup offering whole-body or brain-only cryopreservation.
To demonstrate where seed investment is going, below we put together a list of seven companies funded this year with longevity-related business models.
Defense tech
Venture funding for defense tech has been on the rise, and this trend has extended to seed-stage dealmaking.
The lineup of deals this year includes two very large investments. El Segundo, California-based Amca, which develops aerospace and defense products, launched with a $76.5 million initial funding round backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Caffeinated Capital and Lux Capital.
Another newcomer, Dallas-based Union Technologies, announced a $50 million seed round in April, to focus on rapid, high-tech manufacturing for national security, including production of munitions.
For a broader picture, we used Crunchbase data to put together a list of 11 representative defense-related startups that raised seed rounds this year.
Recycling and waste reduction
While this isn’t shaping up as a robust year for cleantech and sustainability-related startup funding, there is still a good bit of seed dealmaking around recycling and waste reduction.
Much of it is happening outside the U.S., including startups working on new approaches to plastics recycling, wastewater treatment and reducing food waste.
To illustrate, we put together a list of the 13 sustainability-focused startups that raised seed funding this year. Just four are U.S.-based, with the remainder in Europe, the U.K. and Canada.
Among U.S. seed-funded companies, meanwhile, standouts include Jacksonville, Florida-based OnePlanet Solar Recycling and MacroCycle, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based developer of plastic bottle and polyester textile waste upcycling technology.
Spacetech
Spacetech is a major area for venture funding these days, with startups in the sector collectively pulling in over $35 billion since 2021. This year is off to a good start as well, with Crunchbase data showing spacetech funding poised for an annual gain.
The most high-profile action has been at later-stage and beyond, including last week’s well-received IPO of Denver-based space and defense tech unicorn Voyager Technologies. But data shows there’s plenty of activity at seed-stage as well.
To show where seed dealmaking is taking off, we put together a list of nine spacetech-related startups that raised financing this year.
Hard to launch successfully
While our picks of hot seed investment spaces may seem rather disparate, they do share one thing in common: All are areas where it generally takes enormous expertise just to launch a startup, let alone successfully scale one.
This may seem like par for the course in startup-land, but it’s actually not true of every cycle. During the dot-com boom, the dawn of social networking, and the rise of the app economy, for instance, it wasn’t uncommon for leading companies to begin as dorm-room startups.
By contrast, it seems unlikely any inexperienced founder could successfully develop life-extending therapies, launch a cryopreservation service, build spacecraft propulsion systems or build next-gen munitions. Hopefully, these are also not the kinds of business plans anyone would envision hatching out of a dorm room.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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