Deep Tech Risk Assessment in a Specialist Market

“Our portfolio companies operate at the frontier of biotech, cleantech, and deep tech. We needed a diligence partner who could actually evaluate what they're building — not just tick boxes.”

About ECBF

The European Circular Bioeconomy Fund (ECBF) is a specialist venture capital fund focused on deep tech and climate-bioeconomy companies. ECBF invests in European companies developing breakthrough technologies in areas including industrial biotechnology, sustainable agriculture, circular materials, and bio-based chemicals. The fund backs companies operating at the frontier of science and engineering, where the gap between laboratory promise and commercial scalability is one of the most significant investment risks.

The diligence challenge in deep tech

Deep tech and climate-bioeconomy investments present diligence challenges that go well beyond standard software due diligence. ECBF's portfolio companies typically involve complex technology stacks that span proprietary biological processes, custom data platforms, process engineering software, and often bespoke hardware or sensor systems. Evaluating the maturity, scalability, and defensibility of these stacks requires specialist knowledge that most generalist VC teams — and most standard due diligence providers — don't have.

For ECBF, the risk of getting the technical assessment wrong is high. An overly optimistic read of technology readiness can lead to under-pricing the investment required to reach commercial scale. A failure to identify key technical dependencies or IP risks can surface as material problems post-investment. The fund needed a diligence partner capable of engaging with the genuine complexity of what their portfolio companies were building.

Specialist due diligence for complex technology

Scaleflow's Due Diligence process for ECBF deals involves a deeper-than-standard technical assessment that engages directly with the specific technology architecture of each company — including the interfaces between proprietary biological or process technology and the software and data infrastructure built around it. Reports are structured to give ECBF's IC the technical context needed to evaluate technology readiness level, identify the key de-risking milestones ahead, and understand how the technology stack evolves as the company scales toward commercial deployment.

The assessments are written to be useful to investment professionals, not just technical audiences — translating complex findings into investment-relevant conclusions about risk, capital requirements, and the specific technical factors that will determine whether the company's thesis holds at scale.