Walk around TechBBQ in Copenhagen, Denmark, and it does not take long to notice that the definition of a tech startup has become broad.

There are the software companies one expects at a gathering of over 10,000 startups and investors. But there are also founders working on quantum computing, biotechnology, medical diagnostics, robotics, security systems, new food technologies, and ideas that have spent years inside university laboratories.

For African founders and investors, this was perhaps the most interesting lesson about TechBBQ 2026, held at Copenhagen’s Bella Centre on August 26 and 27. The technology industry is broadening its scope.

The African ecosystem has produced some extraordinary companies, but the ideas that attract serious VC backing can sometimes feel concentrated in certain areas. Payments, lending, digital banking, logistics, e-commerce, and increasingly AI have been the main focus areas.

TechBBQ revealed that some of the money, attention, and entrepreneurial ambition that flowed into apps, marketplaces, and software-as-a-service companies over the past decade is moving towards harder problems like health, energy, defence, biology, and the physical economy.

The event had a dedicated Life Science x Deep Tech stage. It brought together scientists, founders, investors, and researchers working across quantum technologies, life sciences, and artificial intelligence. 

Even the venue for TechBBQ’s Investor Day mentioned the change. VCs, corporate investors, and angels gathered at the University of Copenhagen’s Maersk Tower, in a district that TechBBQ says has 40,000 researchers, students, and staff, and has produced about 500 research-based startups.

This is venture capital moving closer to building sustainable solutions across healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing.  

Lesson one: Look beyond apps

Deep tech challenges many traditional VC assumptions.

A biotechnology company may spend years before earning meaningful revenue. Quantum computing requires specialised researchers and expensive equipment. Medical devices face clinical and regulatory hurdles. Defence startups must navigate governments and procurement systems. Climate technologies may require factories and physical infrastructure.

These are not businesses that can always demonstrate product-market fit within six months and with a few thousand dollars in cloud computing credits.

Yet they are moving towards the centre of the European technology conversation.

TechBBQ described the gap between technologies that might arrive “someday” and those actually reaching the market as narrowing. Its Deep Tech Day focused on technologies including quantum computing, biotechnology, diagnostics, precision medicine, and sustainable food systems.

The important part is not simply that these technologies exist. Universities have produced ambitious science for decades. Investors are increasingly trying to work out how to turn more of that science into companies.

TechBBQ’s deep-tech pitch competition, for example, was open to companies with less than €2 million in funding that had a validated concept, prototype, or early scientific proof of concept. Eight companies were selected to pitch technologies addressing human and planetary health.

That is a rather different starting point from another payments app. It also says something about where venture capital thinks the next valuable companies might emerge.

Lesson two: Difficult industries are becoming investable

VC has traditionally asked whether a company can capture a large market. Increasingly, European investors are also asking whether the technology is strategically important to a country.

That brings governments, universities, and large industrial companies much closer to the startup ecosystem. It also makes the boundary between technology policy, industrial policy, and national security increasingly difficult to see.

There is an African lesson here. Some of the continent’s biggest problems sit in sectors investors have historically found difficult: energy, agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing, water, and transport infrastructure.

They are difficult partly because software alone cannot solve them. But difficult does not necessarily mean uninvestable.

Lesson three: Hard technology needs different money

The change in ideas requires a change in money. Building a consumer app and developing a new biotechnology platform cannot be financed in quite the same way.

The latter can require more capital, longer development periods, and investors willing to tolerate technical risk before there is much evidence of commercial demand. Some businesses will also need grants, government procurement, university partnerships, and corporate capital alongside conventional venture funding.

That was another noticeable feature of TechBBQ. The ecosystem was not organised simply around founders meeting venture capitalists. Researchers, foundations, policymakers, universities, corporations, and public investment institutions were part of the conversation.

This is partly because deep tech makes them necessary.

A scientist trying to commercialise a university discovery needs something quite different from what a founder building another enterprise software product needs. Intellectual property must leave the university. Laboratories and equipment may be required. Regulatory approvals can take years. Specialist talent is scarce.

Europe still struggles with this.

One TechBBQ session asked about “Europe’s biotech spinout challenge”. Another examined how the Nordics could translate research into companies. The underlying problem is that Europe produces excellent science but has struggled to build enormous technology companies from it.

The response appears to be an attempt to build a bridge between science and capital. It is worth watching because Africa also faces the problem.

Lesson four: Diversity of capital produces diversity of ideas

African venture capital has become remarkably good at funding a relatively narrow range of ideas. Fintech is the obvious example.

Payments, digital banking, lending, and financial infrastructure have attracted some of the continent’s largest venture rounds and produced many of its most valuable technology companies. There are good reasons for this. Financial infrastructure remains inadequate in many markets, mobile money has created unusual opportunities, and the potential customer base is enormous.

But success can create its own gravity. Once investors understand a business model, more founders build versions of it, and more investors become comfortable funding them. The result can be an ecosystem with plenty of entrepreneurial activity but relatively little variation in what receives serious capital.

TechBBQ provided an interesting contrast. A founder developing biotechnology could be followed on stage by someone working on quantum computing, food systems, defence, healthcare or climate technology. The ideas often seemed to start with a scientific or industrial problem rather than with the question of which consumer service to digitise.

Africa has companies working on similarly difficult problems. The problem is that the capital available to them remains thin.

TechBBQ’s own Nordic-Africa initiative acknowledged this after its first summit. Its 2025 impact report identified the concentration of African capital in popular sectors such as fintech as one of the ecosystem’s weaknesses. It also pointed to a shortage of patient capital and flexible or blended financing.

That matters more as technology moves towards sectors where software alone is insufficient.

An African company developing new battery technology, a diagnostic device, or an agricultural biotechnology product cannot necessarily follow the same funding path as a payments startup.

It may need five or ten years of patient capital. It may need laboratory facilities and university researchers. It may need governments willing to become early customers. And it may require investors who can assess scientific risk rather than simply look at monthly active users.

The next African technology ecosystem, therefore, needs more kinds of capital.

Lesson five: Build bridges, not just pitch competitions

That made the Nordic-Africa Startup Summit, held on the second day of TechBBQ, one of the more interesting parts of the gathering.

This was its second edition. But the organisers are trying to make it something more permanent than the familiar arrangement in which African founders fly to Europe, pitch for a day and return home.

TechBBQ describes the ambition as creating a “Nordic-Africa innovation corridor” that connects founders, investors, universities, policymakers, and companies across the two regions.

The choice of sectors is notable: health and diagnostics, agriculture and food, climate and sustainability, AI and deep tech. The broader programme also covered life sciences, clean technology, education and inclusive financial services.

That is considerably broader than the picture of African technology that international venture-funding figures can sometimes present.

There is also an interesting complementarity between the two ecosystems.

African startups have access to large, young markets and are accustomed to building around infrastructure constraints. Nordic countries have strong research universities, specialised technical knowledge, public financing institutions and pools of capital accustomed to investing in climate and impact.

The summit’s organisers are trying to combine the two.

Charles Kinga, who has been involved in building the initiative, described its ambition ahead as positioning Africa not merely as a market but as a “co-creation partner”.

Lesson six: Being difficult to build can be an advantage

None of this means software is finished.

Far from it. Software remains cheaper to build and easier to scale than most physical technologies. AI will probably make that even more pronounced by reducing the cost of writing code and starting companies.

But that may, in turn, push investors towards technologies that are harder to replicate.

If a competent team can build a software product increasingly quickly, then software alone becomes less of a moat. Proprietary science, hardware, intellectual property, specialised data and years of research become more interesting precisely because they are difficult.

This may help explain the diversity of ideas at TechBBQ.

For African founders, that is worth thinking about. The question does not always have to be “what can we build fastest?” There is also value in asking what can be built here that would be unusually difficult for somebody elsewhere to reproduce.

That might come from local scientific knowledge, agricultural data, climate conditions, mineral resources, manufacturing expertise or simply years spent understanding a particularly difficult market.