Science Meets Capital: Growing the Philippine Deep Tech Community through Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration

PASIG CITY, Philippines — Leave a Nest Philippines, Inc., through its Frontier Development Division, successfully conducted its first Knowledge Sharing Session titled “Science Meets Capital: Growing the Philippine Deep Tech Community.” This session revolved around deep tech investment and involved almost 40 participants from across the Philippines, including Filipino startup founders, researchers, students, and ecosystem enablers, all united by a shared interest in advancing science-driven innovation, understanding how deep tech startups can better position themselves for receiving external funding, and the importance of building the Philippine Deep Tech community is for increasing opportunities.

The program has included a foundational refresher lecture on investment basics, sharing the nature of deep tech and differences in technology and funding mindset versus non-deep tech startups, used real-world Leave a Nest investee case examples and also allowed participating startup founders and guests to ask queries about deep tech investment.

Participants were able to understand key concepts in startup investments, which included defining equity investments (“priced rounds”) and non-equity funding vehicles, differences between equity investment,  government grants and debt financing, valuation and dilution, and key players in investment processes for deep tech through the first segment shared by Mr. Bryan Foronda (Director of Leave a Nest Philippines). With this, they gained a clearer understanding of ownership distribution and investor participation.

Importantly, he presented the current Philippine startup funding ecosystem in the past year using publicly released reports with the current trend of declining startup investments in the Philippines. Congruently, he emphasized that startup funding focused on deep-tech verticals (e.g. biotech, marine tech, food tech, etc) are largely unseen both in volume and number. With this, he encouraged that budding deep tech startups need to be equipped with proper mindset and tools that are appropriate for an issue-driven and research-based startups and ventures.

 

Bridging that general need, the bigger portion of the discussions were led by Dr. Yuko Ueno, General Manager of the Group Creation Division of Leave a Nest Co., Ltd (Japan). She provided a deeper exploration of deep tech investment. She emphasized that deep tech startups differ significantly from conventional startups, particularly in their reliance on research, experimentation, and iterative prototyping. 

With software-based ventures' nature of scaling rapidly in an easier manner, deep tech ventures often require years of development before commercialization. Dr. Ueno stressed the importance to deep tech ventures and its founders the understanding that they must see the long-term vision and that large investments at early stages may not necessarily accelerate growth due to the constraints of iterative, scientific development. 

“Deep tech cannot simply accelerate with large funding at the beginning. It requires step-by-step validation through science and engineering.”, Dr. Ueno mentioned.

To guide Filipino participants and startup founders better, she introduced Leave a Nest’s investment philosophy and the key factors for consideration: Passion, Technology, and Vision, which shifts the focus away from short-term financial returns toward building ventures capable of creating lasting societal impact. 

Participants were able to understand better on this philosophy and investment through the several examples of Leave a Nest investees from Japan and the Philippines: Challenergy (Japanese startup that develop next generation of wind turbines including Magnus Vertical Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT), Anihan Technologies (Philippine startup focused on using sensors to generate data for farmers to reduce post-harvest food loss), and Wela School Systems (Philippine EdTech platform that automates school administration and improves communication between schools and parents in the Philippines). These startups demonstrated that multiple years of testing and iteration were needed to demonstrate the solution’s viability and gradual business scaling, continuous project building to engage with partners and funding sources, and finding right partners to grow market capture abroad, expand exponentially and realize the vision globally, respectively.

Additionally, participants were provided a glimpse on the general process of how previous Filipino and foreign deep tech startups were able to acquire funding through investments from Leave a Nest. This emphasized the key role of the TECH PLANTER program in the Philippines as the crucial entry point for deep tech researchers and startups to utilize to meet partners & receive feedback and validation through discussions, and the larger organization’s ecosystem.

Through the “Science Meets Capital” session, Leave a Nest Philippines has shared the importance of building stronger connections between academia, industry, and investors, as well as fostering a culture that supports long-term innovation. Looking at the bigger picture, it demonstrated the potential of collaborative efforts in advancing the country’s innovation landscape. Moving forward as more Filipino innovators engage with programs like TECH PLANTER, Leave a Nest Philippines is also actively inviting up-and-coming deep tech innovators and solution builders to discuss with Leave a Nest Group for available funding opportunities and collaborations with the Group and its partners. Session attendees were provided the platform and invitation to closely communicate with Leave a Nest Philippines members for possibility of deep tech investments and co-building the deep tech ecosystem within the country

For more information about Leave a Nest Philippines and its programs, you may visit: https://global.lne.st/offices/ph or contact us through [email protected]. Kindly address it to Managing Director Ronezza Delos Santos.