E3: What does a deep tech company need to succeed?

Vibhore Sharma is an investor backing deep tech startups across robotics, climate, semiconductors, AI infrastructure, biotech, and the categories where the technology is hard and the path to adoption is genuinely unclear.

He argues that design is not the layer you add at the end, but the bridge between the lab and the market - the thing that makes complex technology legible, usable and credible enough to e bought. He's increasingly recognised for shaping "deep tech by design" not as a styling exercise but as a serious commercial discipline.

In this episode we sit down with Vibhore to unpack one of the most overlooked questions in deep tech: why do so many genuinely brilliant technologies struggle to reach the people they're built for? Vibhore's answer is design: not as aesthetics, but as the discipline of making the complex usable, trustworthy and adoptable.

The conversation moves from why deep tech has historically under-invested in design, to what changes when design sits at the core of how a hard-tech company builds and goes to market. Along the way he sketches out what "design for deep tech" actually looks like in practice, and why he believes it's becoming a category of its own.