Speed Is a Lie in Deep Tech

"Move fast and break things" doesn’t scale to systems that can break.

In traditional tech, speed is gospel. You ship an MVP in a weekend. Break stuff, iterate, pivot. The cycle is short, the stakes are digital, and failure is recoverable.

In deep tech?
- Failure is expensive.
- Failure is physical.
- Failure sets you back months, not sprints.

If you’re building robotics, climate hardware, quantum systems, or synthetic biology - the rules are different.
This isn’t lean startup territory.
This is the arena where physics pushes back.

Tech ≠ Deep Tech

Let’s be real: most "tech" companies today are CRUD apps wrapped in a sleek UI.

And that's fine.

They’re fast because the unknowns are small and mostly digital.

In deep tech, especially robotics the unknowns are layered and interdependent:

• Your perception system affects your control logic.

• Your mechanical tolerances impact your software fault tolerance.

• Your gripper material might require a change in control parameters and real-time image processing thresholds.

You don’t ship broken and patch later. You patch preemptively or the system never leaves the lab.

Speed Kills When You’re Not Building for Reality

Every deep tech founder hears it from investors, from mentors, even from themselves.

But speed only works when you’re playing the right game.

In consumer tech, you move fast to test demand.
In fintech, you A/B test UX flows.
In AI tooling, you ship prompts and iterate live.

But in robotics?

You’re working with real-world forces: latency, backlash, signal noise, materials, wear.
And physics doesn’t care about your burn rate.

You often have to validate reality before you can validate the market.
A misaligned gripper doesn’t just ruin the UX - it might snap a part, rip fabric, or jam a motor.
A perception model that works in the lab might fail the moment factory lighting changes.

We’ve seen startups raise on hype videos that break during the first real install.
We’ve seen systems fail because no one stress-tested sensor placement, airflow, or downtime recovery.

Speed isn’t your advantage until you’ve earned it.

Move fast on the wrong foundation, and you're not agile - you're fragile.

What We’re Doing at Silana

At Silana, we’re building robots that handle and sew textiles - one of the most chaotic, non-rigid, non-repeatable materials on Earth.

To do that, we’ve had to:

• Build custom soft-material grippers that dynamically adapt to fabric geometry

• Develop vision systems that can detect a seam on white fabric moving in real-time

• Modify industrial sewing machines to be programmatically controlled, with embedded sensors

• Create feedback loops between vision, actuation, and stitch quality - all in a closed-loop system

And more importantly: we’re building for deployment. Not for Tradeshows. Not for a TED Talk. But for a factory floor where uptime, diagnostics, and safety matter.

This takes time. This takes patience. This takes discipline.

Slowness = Strategy

Here’s the twist: deep tech founders that play the long game win bigger.

Covariant spent years in stealth.
Zipline did over 10,000 test flights before launch.
Tesla nearly went bankrupt in its race to scale manufacturing - not build better batteries.
Boston Dynamics built for 20 years before they shipped a product anyone could buy.

The payoff? Category leadership. Real defensibility. Moats that aren’t easy to clone with prompt engineering and a VC deck.

If you rush it, you build hype.

If you do it right, you build infrastructure.

Where We’re Going

We’re not building the fastest robot.
We’re building the one that works — and keeps working — in an actual factory, on actual fabric, at actual speed.

The vision is bigger than automating a task.
It’s about redefining what’s possible with robotics in soft material handling, and laying the groundwork for a new era of local, automated, ethical manufacturing.

We’re early. It’s hard. And most days, the progress is invisible to the outside.

But that’s the nature of deep tech:
You don’t win by shipping fast.
You win by shipping real.