About
What is State of the Future?
For the last two years, we’ve been building a research tool to understand the deep tech landscape. Now we’re making it freely available. The site is centred around the Tracker, a collection of the technologies we’ve explored so far with scores and predictions. We’re improving the accuracy of the scores by incorporating the latest news and research as well as conducting expert interviews.
Who made it?
State of the Future was created by Lawrence Lundy-Bryan. Contributors include Fatih Ucar, Dr. Benjamin Wolba, Ines Lachheb, Dr. Peter Crane, Cindy Wei, Alberto Cresto, Luis Shemtov, Dr. Elad Verbin, and Mick Halsband.
Who is Lunar Ventures?
State of the Future is a Lunar Ventures project. Lunar is a European-based deep tech venture fund investing in pre-seed and seed. We invest €300K to €1 million into technical teams with strong R&D backgrounds to turn science fiction into reality.
Why did you do this?
State of the Future began as an internal project. Two years ago, we began thinking about how to proactively comprehensively map the deep tech landscape rather than assess new technologies ad hoc. As we collected information on a range of diverse technologies under the broad banner of “deep tech,” we struggled to find comprehensive, non-paywalled, and credible sources of information from a startup and investor perspective.
What will I find on the site?
You will find a set of technologies from fully homomorphic encryption to bitcoin to SleepTech. Each of these technologies is summarised in about 1000 words and scored across six dimensions:
Viability: how mature is the technology? (1-5)
Drivers: how powerful are forces for adoption? (1-5)
Novelty: how much better relative to alternatives? (1-5)
Diffusion: how easily will it be adopted? (1-5)
Impact: how much value is created? (1-5+)
Timing: when will the market be large enough or growing fast enough for risk capital? (2020-2025; 2025-2030; 2030+)
Each technology is augmented with expert interviews, news stories, research, and relevant startups.
Why did you not include quantitative data?
We intend to add some quantitative data in 2023, but State of the Future is predominately a qualitative tool. We remain unconvinced that technological progress’s high complexity and uncertainty can be captured in metrics. The intention behind a straightforward 1-5 scoring system is that it gives some sense of scale but ultimately acts as a starting point for a discussion.
What did you learn doing the project?
Technologies do not progress in isolation; they combine and reinforce in novel ways. The most exciting opportunities are at the intersections. We have found State of the Future to be the most exciting following whole brain emulation to optogenetics. Or spatial audio to acoustic-wave chips. We have generated novel insights to support investment theses by using State of the Future for scenario planning exercises.
What will you get for this?
Fame and legacy, I hope. More prosaically, we can only go so far with internal knowledge and interviews. We want to open this up and improve our knowledge base faster. There is no better way to learn than to say the wrong things online. So here we are.
Why give away years of work for free?
As an early-stage investor, we are part of a broader investment landscape. You can be contrarian but only a few years at most before others. We intend to release this into the open to make it easier for more investors to invest in deep tech. And for founders, policymakers, journalists, and researchers to have a single resource for them to do their jobs better.
Who is it for?
We know it is helpful for us, an early-stage deep tech investor. We have had positive feedback from many other people, including investors, startup founders, journalists, policymakers, and R&D teams. We are launching to understand better who this might be most useful for.
Is State of the Future finished?
No, the project is split into three phases: assess, optimise, and open. The release of the website is the end of the first phase: assessment. Phase 1 was the infrastructure phase. We set up a scoring system. We scored 100+ technologies. And we created a process to update the information and scores with news, research, and interviews.
Why is my favourite technology not included?
Because we had to launch at some point, it is to my great shame that we haven’t launched with space-based solar power, solar sails, or gene editing. We have 95 technologies complete, with about 50 or so currently in process.
What will you do once State of the Future is live?
Once the site is live, we will begin Phase 2: optimise. The site will be updated daily with relevant news and research and, every few days, with new interviews. New technologies will be added throughout 2023. we will interview 2 or 3 people per technology over 2023, culminating in 200-300 interviews. On the quantitative side, we will incorporate R&D data like performance improvement rates and patent analysis.
How can people contribute?
At launch, the site will be maintained by the Lunar team. Contributions will mainly be through interviews and the Substack community forum. As we move into Phase 3: Open, we want to let the community submit new content and enable all the content to be accessed through an API. Eventually, we want the community to maintain State of the Future.
