This field guide to DTM26 exists to fix that. DTM26 runs on 20 and 21 May 2026 at Wilhelm Studios Berlin, with more than 3,000 attendees. Two days is not long, and the difference between a productive event and an expensive one is decided before you land.

The premise is simple. The Dealroom 2026 European Deep Tech Report found that 87% of dedicated European deep tech funds are too small to lead a Series B, and that 70% of late-stage capital for European deep tech now comes from non-European investors. That is the structural backdrop to every conversation you will have in Berlin. The founders in the room know it, and the question is whether you walk in positioned as part of the solution or as one more browser.

Your Field Guide to DTM26: Who Is Actually in the Room

DTM26 is structured as a corporate-startup marketplace, not a stage with a networking drink attached. The investor-relevant population splits into three groups, and your preparation should reflect which one you are hunting.

First, the founders raising now. The DTM100 cohort concentrates the continent's most competitive deep tech companies into one selection, and the finalists pitch on stage with judges who write cheques. These are not idea-stage teams. They are companies with working technology, named customers, and a specific capital requirement, which makes the DTM100 list the most efficient pre-screened filter at the event.

Second, the co-investors and fund peers. Hermann Hauser, Co-Founder of Amadeus Capital Partners and one of the co-founders of Arm, brings the long institutional view on what it takes to build generational European companies. Hendrik Brandis, Co-Founder of Earlybird, has been writing early-stage cheques into European deep tech for two decades. Thomas Oehl, General Partner at Vsquared Ventures, runs one of the most active deep tech books in the German-speaking market, and Tae Hea Nahm, Co-Founding Managing Director at Storm Ventures, represents exactly the non-European capital that 70% of growth-stage European companies now depend on.

Third, the corporate buyers. This is the group most investors underweight, and it is a mistake, because a startup with a signed corporate pilot is a different risk profile to one without. DTM26's Guardian Connect programme assembles senior corporate decision-makers with real procurement authority, including figures connected to Infineon, where Herbert Diess chairs the supervisory board, and Deutsche Telekom, where Frank Appel chairs the supervisory board. Watching which startups these buyers gravitate towards is free diligence.

Which Sessions Matter, and Which You Can Skip

The full DTM26 programme spans eight tracks across two days. You cannot attend all of them, and you should not try. Triage by thesis.

For hardware and physical AI, the Titans Stage on Day 2 is non-negotiable. David Reger, Founder and CEO of Neura Robotics, speaks there. Neura raised €1 billion from Tether in March 2026 at a €4 billion valuation, the largest single round in European robotics history. Daniel Schall, Co-Founder and CEO of Black Semiconductor, also appears on the Titans Stage to address HPC and AI gigafactories, the live version of the EU Council's €37 billion plan for 10 AI gigafactories approved in January 2026.

Energy and deep decarbonisation theses point elsewhere. Prioritise the sessions featuring Francesco Sciortino, Co-Founder and CEO of Proxima Fusion, whose company signed a memorandum of understanding with Bavaria, RWE, and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in March 2026 to pursue Germany's first stellarator power plant. Moritz von der Linden of Marvel Fusion, which raised €62.8 million plus a further €50 million from EQT and Siemens Energy, offers the laser-fusion counterpoint. Hearing both founders on the same day, in the same building, is a comparison you cannot reconstruct from pitch decks.

The sessions you can skip without guilt are the broad "future of technology" panels. They are valuable for first-time attendees building context. For an investor with a defined mandate, they are time better spent in the Investor Connect track.

The Investor Connect Track Is the Point

Serendipity is an unreliable sourcing strategy. The Investor Connect track exists precisely to remove the chance element. It pairs investors with founders in pre-scheduled, curated sessions rather than relying on a collision in a hallway.

Preparation is rewarded by the mechanics. Before you arrive, review the published speaker and startup lists, identify the ten companies that fit your thesis, and request specific introductions rather than waiting to be matched generically. A founder raising a €40 million Series B, the European deep tech average, has a finite number of meeting slots over two days, and the investors who book early are the ones in the calendar.

Defence is where this becomes concrete. In 2025, 43% of all European deep tech funding went to defence, security, and resilience, and European defence venture capital climbed from $159 million in 2014 to $5.2 billion in 2024. Ricardo Mendes of TEKEVER, Thomas Gottschild of MBDA Germany, and David Chinn of McKinsey, co-leader of the firm's European defence work, are all present. If dual-use is in your mandate, the density of relevant operators here is higher than at any generalist event.

How to Prepare in the Days Before Berlin

Preparation is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a productive event and an expensive one.

Build a target list of fifteen companies before you travel, drawn from the DTM100 selection and the confirmed speaker lineup. For each, write one sentence on why they fit your thesis and one question you genuinely want answered. Founders can tell within ninety seconds whether an investor has read about them, and that signal compounds across a two-day event into reputation.

Mapping the corporate buyers in attendance against your existing portfolio is the second move. A portfolio company looking for a first industrial customer and a Guardian Connect buyer evaluating exactly that category should not be in the same building without an introduction you engineered. Your value to founders is not only capital; it is the corporate relationships you can broker on the floor.

Decide your follow-up protocol before you land. The investors who convert event conversations into term sheets are the ones who send a specific, referenced message within forty-eight hours, not a templated note the following week. Two days in Berlin generates more qualified conversations than a quarter of cold outreach, so the constraint is never the volume of meetings. It is the discipline of the follow-up.

The Calculation

An Investor Pass to DTM26 costs €1,990. Set that against the cost of a single mispriced round, a missed lead in a category you cover, or a quarter of unstructured sourcing, and the figure stops being a line item. It becomes the cheapest diligence access in the European calendar, in the one room where founders, corporate buyers, and the capital that backs them are present at the same time.

The $690 billion number tells you European deep tech has arrived as an asset class. It does not tell you which companies will define the next decade. That is decided in conversations, and the conversations happen in Berlin on 20 and 21 May. Arrive with a list, a thesis, and a follow-up plan.

Secure your DTM26 Investor Pass.