I want to tell you something that sounds impossible.
We are living at the beginning of a period that may one day be understood as the most consequential technological transformation in human history. Not the most hyped. Not the most funded. The most consequential. A convergence of forces in robotics, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, advanced energy, synthetic biology, and new materials science is accelerating simultaneously, each field amplifying the others, and the cumulative effect on how we build things, power things, heal people, and organize our societies is going to be profound in ways that most of us, including me, cannot yet fully see.
I know how that sounds. I know the technology industry has promised transformations before and delivered mixed results. I know that a lot of people, especially young people right now, are not feeling optimistic. They are feeling squeezed. They are wondering whether there will be jobs for them, whether the world they are inheriting is better or worse than the one their parents got, whether any of the big talk from people like me means anything at all.
I do not have a clean answer to those questions. What I have is more than two decades working at the intersection of deep tech, universities, commercialization, and early-stage companies, a belief that the work matters, and a motto I learned from one of the most important mentors of my life, a Mississippi fife and drum musician named Otha Turner, who had seen enough hardship to earn the right to say it plainly: Nothing makes a failure but a try.
That is what this document is. A try.
A New Industrial Revolution
The first Industrial Revolution reorganized the physical world around steam, coal, and the factory. What is emerging now is different in kind, not just in scale. It is a Deep Technology Renaissance: a moment where the tools of the physical world, the machines that build, the systems that generate energy, the platforms that sequence biology and compute at the quantum level, are being rebuilt from the ground up, and artificial intelligence is the accelerant running through all of it.
For more than two decades, venture capital poured into software. The economics were compelling: low marginal costs, rapid iteration, global distribution from a laptop. That era is not over, but it is no longer sufficient, and the capital markets have begun to reflect that reality. According to Boston Consulting Group, deep tech now claims a stable 20% share of all venture capital funding, up from roughly 10% a decade ago, a structural shift driven by the recognition that the most important problems left to solve require physical solutions, not just digital ones.
The evidence that we are in an extraordinary moment of technological building is measurable and accelerating. In 2024, innovators worldwide filed 3.7 million patent applications, a 4.9% increase over 2023 and the fastest year-on-year growth since 2018. Scientific publications in AI and deep tech are compounding in parallel. Cathie Wood and ARK Invest, in their "Big Ideas 2026" report, describe what they call "The Great Acceleration," a period where AI and infrastructure technologies are co-accelerating, each S-curve feeding the next: AI drives demand for new hardware, hardware advances unlock new AI applications, robotics scales as AI improves, energy storage enables the electrification of everything. One breakthrough amplifying another, faster than any previous generation of researchers anticipated.
Artificial intelligence is not replacing deep tech. It is making deep tech move faster than any prior generation thought possible.
Silicon Valley's origins were in hardware: the transistor, the integrated circuit, the microprocessor. What feels like a return to hardware is actually a continuation of the oldest thread in the story, the belief that the physical world can be improved by people willing to understand it deeply and build patiently within it.
From Scarcity to Abundance, and What That Could Mean for the World
There is a deeper argument underneath all of this, one we do not hear enough in polite technology conversations: this moment is fundamentally about moving from scarcity to abundance, and that shift has consequences that go far beyond economics.
For most of modern history, human beings have organized their societies, their politics, and their conflicts around scarcity. Scarce energy. Scarce water. Scarce arable land. Scarce manufacturing capacity. Scarce good jobs. These constraints are real, and the competition they generate is real. The wars being fought today, across multiple continents, are in large part wars over resources, over land, over energy, over economic survival. That is not an excuse for them. It is a diagnosis.
Economists are beginning to model what happens when AI and robotics drive the marginal cost of manufacturing, energy generation, drug discovery, and infrastructure maintenance toward zero. The answer, in the models at least, is abundance: an economy in which the pie grows large enough that distribution becomes the central question rather than production. When clean energy is cheap enough, fighting over oil fields loses some of its logic. When food production is efficient enough, hunger becomes a distribution problem rather than a supply problem. Robots, advanced materials, synthetic biology, and clean energy are not just productivity tools. They are, potentially, instruments of peace.
We do not say this to be naive. The transition will be hard, and it will be disruptive in ways that are already visible. Oxford Economics and others have documented the displacement risk clearly: advanced economies with capital to invest in automation will pull ahead while communities reliant on low-cost labor may struggle to keep up. Managing that transition will require workforce training at a scale we have not attempted, new forms of social support for displaced workers, and a genuine public commitment to ensuring that the gains from this technology are distributed rather than concentrated.
To every young person wondering if any of this matters: it does. This is one of the most consequential moments in history to be starting a career, building a company, or choosing what to study. The problems that need solving are real, the tools to solve them have never been more powerful, and the world genuinely needs people willing to do the hard work of building rather than just talking about it. The abundance that deep tech promises does not arrive automatically. It arrives because people decide to build it.
The destination, handled with intention, is a society capable of producing far more with far less, one that is cleaner, more equitable, and more resilient than what we have today. That is the bet deep tech is making. That is the bet we are making.
The Geopolitical Imperative
There is a geopolitical dimension to this moment that cannot be ignored, and it shapes the argument for building here, in the United States, in ways that transcend politics.
Taiwan dominates semiconductor fabrication. China has built commanding positions in battery manufacturing, solar panels, and rare earth processing, largely on the back of foundational American and European research. The globally distributed, just-in-time supply chains that characterized the smartphone era proved fragile in ways that took a pandemic and a series of geopolitical shocks to fully expose. The consensus across the political spectrum is increasingly clear: the next generation of critical technologies must be built closer to home.
Supply chain fragility and national security are now driving companies across industries to onshore manufacturing, particularly for semiconductors, advanced energy systems, and robotics. Smaller, more distributed, highly automated production facilities are replacing the mega-factory model of the last thirty years. Companies are shortening their supply chains not just for efficiency but for domestic resilience. The globally distributed model that built the smartphone economy is giving way to something more regional and more accountable.
This is not protectionism as an ideology. It is a practical response to demonstrated fragility, and it creates genuine opportunity for the kinds of places, including the East Bay, that have land, talent, research infrastructure, and communities hungry for good manufacturing work. The next industrial buildout does not have to happen in the same places as the last one. In fact, for the sake of the country and the people who have been waiting for their moment, it probably should not.
The East Bay Innovation Corridor
Here is what most people outside of this region have not yet pieced together: the East Bay is assembling, quietly and at remarkable speed, exactly the assets this moment demands.
Think about what is happening within a thirty-mile radius right now.
Chancellor Rich Lyons, Berkeley's first undergraduate alumnus to lead the university since 1930 and a co-founder of the Berkeley Changemaker program, has made innovation and entrepreneurship a defining cultural priority for the campus. Under his watch as chief innovation officer, UC Berkeley became the number one university in the world for creating venture-funded startups, according to PitchBook. His vision extends far beyond consumer software. He sees Berkeley as a platform for solving the world's hardest problems, from climate to health to infrastructure to economic equity.
The investments around that vision are substantial and accelerating. The Berkeley Air and Space Center, a $2 billion, 36-acre project at NASA Ames at Moffett Field, is expected to begin construction in 2026 and will eventually feature 1.4 million square feet of research and development space. It is a direct architectural echo of the NASA Ames and Stanford Research Park ecosystem that seeded Silicon Valley sixty years ago, now intentionally extended into the UC Berkeley orbit. The Roger Herst Quantum Nexus, located at the Masonic Temple in downtown Berkeley, opened in late 2025 as part of Governor Newsom's Quantum California initiative. It provides 6,000 square feet of dedicated collaboration space connecting UC Berkeley's quantum research with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, state policymakers, and industry partners. California is home to two of the nation's federally funded quantum research centers, and Berkeley researchers have authored more quantum computing publications over the past decade than any other institution in the world.
The Bakar BioIngenuity Hub is active and its new Climate Hub is under construction. The Institute for Genomic Innovation is adding a building to house companies graduating from smaller spaces. SRM Associates, one of the leading commercial real estate owners in downtown Berkeley, is working to activate commercial space across Berkeley's core, where prime square footage can still be found at significantly more affordable rates than facross the Bay in San Francisco. The Berkeley Commons, a 500,000-plus square foot facility on the west side of town, sits ready for activation.
Just north of Berkeley, OpenAI signed a lease in March 2026 for a 202,000-square-foot industrial facility on the Port of Richmond, its first East Bay expansion, with a focus on robotics manufacturing. The site offers more than 14,000 amps of power capacity, purpose-built for the energy demands of advanced manufacturing at scale. That is not a coincidence. That is a signal.
The UC Berkeley Richmond Field Station offers 175 acres of developable research land. The old Golden Gate Fields horse track in Albany, CA sits empty. The Oakland Coliseum site awaits a vision. Between Richmond and Oakland, there is more available land, more affordable real estate, and more potential for meaningful manufacturing employment than anywhere else in the Bay Area. These are not just real estate opportunities. They are opportunities to create dignified, skilled work for people across the full economic spectrum, not just the narrow top of it.
At the civic level, Mayor Adena Ishii, Berkeley's first Asian American mayor and the first woman of color to hold that office, brings a Haas School of Business education and a pragmatic, pro-building orientation to City Hall at exactly the right moment. She represents a generation of civic leadership that understands infrastructure, entrepreneurship, and equity as a unified agenda rather than competing ones.
This is the East Bay Innovation Corridor. Not a branding exercise. A genuine geographic and institutional argument. The assets are here. The talent is here. The moment is here.
Why Berkeley Gateway Accelerator?
We did not build BGA to be a conventional accelerator. We built it to be a spark plug.
What this corridor needs, and what this broader renaissance needs, is not another institution layered on top of existing ones. It needs a place where the university and the private sector can meet without the friction of bureaucracy. A place where a robotics founder and a quantum computing researcher and a climate tech entrepreneur can work side by side, share a whiteboard, have an argument over lunch, and build something none of them could have built alone. A place agile enough to fail and learn fast, and grounded enough to stay oriented toward the work that matters.
BGA is university-adjacent by design. That proximity gives us access to UC Berkeley's extraordinary talent, research relationships, and intellectual infrastructure. Our independence gives us the ability to move at the speed the moment demands. We sit at the boundary between those two worlds, and we believe that boundary is exactly where the most important work of the next decade will happen.
Our community is explicitly intergenerational and interdisciplinary, because the challenges of this moment do not yield to any single expertise or any single generation. We are building something that includes seasoned operators and first-generation students, engineers and ethicists, researchers and practitioners, people who have built companies before and people who are just beginning to imagine what is possible. That is not a diversity statement. It is a design principle. The problems we are trying to solve are too complex, and the stakes are too high, for a monoculture to address them well.
We do not have all the answers. We are not going to get everything right. What we have is a commitment to trying, a community willing to do hard things together, and the conviction that the attempt itself is worth making. As my old mentor Otha Turner used to say: Nothing makes a failure but a try.
None of this happens alone. BGA exists because of the people who showed up and decided to build it with us. Nirav Bisarya, my partner in this work, has been essential to shaping everything we have created here. Bo Heiden was part of the original inspiration that set us on this path. Kavisha Shroff has been with us since the earliest days, and Murry Corpus has brought an unending amount of work and genuine passion to everything she touches. Alex Ashton, Charles Alexander, and the IDW team have been instrumental in helping us tell this story to the world. And to the countless mentors, advisors, and resident founders who have given BGA its character and energy: thank you.
A Replicable Model for the World
Berkeley is where we start. It is not where we stop.
One of the most persistent failures of the innovation economy over the past thirty years is geographic concentration. The benefits of the technology revolution pooled in a handful of zip codes, a few coastal cities, a small number of elite universities. The rest of the country, and most of the world, was told to wait, or to move. That is neither sustainable nor just.
We believe the university-adjacent gateway accelerator is a replicable infrastructure, one that can be built wherever three ingredients exist: a research university with an engineering school, a business school, and a law school; a surrounding community with available real estate and a workforce that needs opportunity; and the civic and institutional will to make it happen.
That description fits dozens of university towns across the American interior, places where talent is abundant, land is affordable, and communities are hungry for good work. The next generation of advanced manufacturing does not need to be in San Francisco. It needs to be near research, near people, and near the kinds of places that have been waiting too long for their moment.
The model travels internationally too. There could be gateway accelerators in West Africa, in Southeast Asia, in Brazil, wherever universities are producing engineers and scientists who deserve access to the same innovation infrastructure that Berkeley students take for granted.
The common thread is not geography. It is a philosophy: university adjacent, privately independent, interdisciplinary by design, and oriented toward building in the physical world rather than merely describing it. Not a franchise. Not a brand. A set of shared values applied with deep local roots, shaped in each place by the people, the culture, and the challenges that are actually there.
What would connect these places is a commitment to using deep technology to build abundance rather than extract it, to create opportunity rather than concentrate it, and to make the Deep Tech Renaissance a genuinely global project rather than the property of a few privileged places.
We are starting in Berkeley because Berkeley is where we are, and because Berkeley's history as a place that challenges the status quo, builds new things, and opens its doors to people from everywhere in the world gives this work a particular credibility. A city that has always believed that what seems impossible is worth attempting anyway.
An Invitation
Silicon Valley did not happen by accident. It happened because a set of institutions, people, and ideas converged in one place at one moment, and because enough people recognized what was happening and decided to lean in rather than watch from a distance.
That convergence is happening again. This time it is not confined to one peninsula, and it is not organized around consumer software. It is organized around the hardest, most important problems in the physical world, powered by the most capable scientific tools in human history, and it is unfolding simultaneously in dozens of places that are only beginning to realize what they have.
This is going to be hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Building physical technology is slow, expensive, and humbling. Coordinating across institutions, disciplines, generations, and geographies is even harder. We will make mistakes. We will have to revise our assumptions. We will need patience from our investors, generosity from our partners, and honesty from our community.
But we believe the work is worth doing. We believe the abundance that deep tech promises is real, and that it can reach people who have been waiting a long time for their moment. We believe that young people today are not facing the end of opportunity. They are facing one of the most significant openings in history, if we build the infrastructure to make it accessible.
We are not building BGA because we are certain it will work. We are building it because not trying guarantees failure, and because the work is too important to leave undone.
Nothing makes a failure but a try.
And to those of you who have already built something, who have the resources, the hard-won wisdom, the networks, and the time that comes after a long career: we need you too. Not just your capital, though that matters. Your judgment. Your mentorship. Your willingness to sit across from a twenty-six-year-old founder who is trying to solve a problem you have seen three versions of, and share what you know. The Deep Tech Renaissance will not be built by any one generation. It will be built by people who have been around long enough to know what is hard, working alongside people young enough to believe it is possible anyway.
If you are a founder building at the frontier of deep technology, come find us. If you are a researcher whose work deserves to reach the world, come find us. If you are a city, a university, a foundation, or a partner who believes in this vision, come find us. If you are a young person who wants to build something real, and you have been told that the moment has passed, or that you are in the wrong place, or that the problems are too hard: come find us anyway.
The Deep Tech Renaissance is not coming. It is already here. And there is more room in it than most people think.
The Berkeley Gateway Accelerator is a deep tech residency and pre-seed fund in downtown Berkeley, California. We invest in early-stage companies building at the frontier of robotics, quantum technologies, advanced energy, climate tech, and life sciences. We are university adjacent, privately independent, intergenerational and interdisciplinary by design, and committed to building innovation infrastructure that creates opportunity for everyone.
Berkeley is where we start. The world is where we are going.
