Tech for Good and Growth: David Farquhar on Innovation, Impact, and Why Europe’s Moment Is Now
As Tech Tour Growth Deeptech 2025 prepares to convene in Edinburgh, Scotland, from 14–16 May, we sat down with David Farquhar, President of this year’s event, to explore what makes this edition uniquely pivotal for Europe’s innovation landscape. With over three decades of experience scaling high-impact companies, David brings a rare combination of strategic insight, ESG leadership, and deeptech sector expertise.
In this wide-ranging conversation, he shares his vision for how emerging technologies — from AI to photonics — can reshape entire industries, why now is a tipping point for deeptech in Europe, and how purpose-driven innovation can unlock both global impact and economic value. Investors, founders, and ecosystem builders alike will gain timely perspectives as Europe’s top deeptech scale-ups prepare to take the spotlight in Edinburgh.
TT: Tech Tour Growth Deeptech 2025 is bringing together some of the most exciting scale-ups in Europe. What makes this event — and this moment — uniquely important for deeptech innovation in Europe and beyond?
DF: The way I think about deeptech is – in line with the definition that Tech Tour uses – the EIT definition, which has 15 different disciplines. Tech Tour looks at 14 of the 15, it doesn’t include bio or life sciences; it’s all hardware, software, Internet, digital and so on. So you can think about deeptech as being these fourteen different disciplines, from photonics to supercomputing to AI, etc. But you must also think about a second dimension of deeptech – and that is, about its application. Which industries does it serve? Which industries can it improve? And if you look at the way Tech Tour classifies it, it looks at three very broad themes. One is health (which could be human health, plant health, environmental health). The second one is defence – thinking about all that’s going on in the world, whether it has to do with drones coming from China or Russia, or with cyber attacks, or with robots going down into the ocean and cutting cables, etc.. And then the third big area is digitization – that could be the digitization of financial services, it could be to improve Sustainability, or make government and many different industries more efficient. So how do we use technology to make things run more efficiently?
And of course the coming of age of AI is underneath this from a software point of view, because gathering really big data and then making sense of it and turning it into information is great, and we can do that now. It is expensive and it requires a huge amount of computing power – but we can do it. The difference AI makes is that it goes beyond just the data and the information, and it makes actionable recommendations, engaging with the individuals and the organizations in a given sector. AI says: “Here’s how we could do this better.” That’s something we’ve never had before – so that is a tipping point.
On the hardware side, we’ve got the next generation of robotics that can do jobs in agriculture etc.. We’ve also got the next generation of communication power which is moving from electronics to photonics – and everything that will bring. So at the moment, you can almost say we’re living in a new industrial age, where we have these various huge technologies coming together, and we have an opportunity to use them for good, because we know that there are other people who will use them for bad – and that is our responsibility. So for me it’s an incredibly exciting time.
TT: You’ve had an extraordinary journey from scaling startups and global exits to now focusing on environmental and social impact. What inspired this shift, and how does it influence your approach to identifying promising deeptech ventures today?
DF: I was born in the northeast of Scotland in Aberdeenshire, and we have some of the most beautiful countryside anywhere. The Highlands of Scotland are incredible, so it was inevitable that I was going to be drawn to the outdoors. From a child to a college student, I did a lot of mountaineering. When I became a soldier, I spent at least half of my time mountaineering. I spent the year 1987 with the Italian Alpini living in the Val D’Aosta and climbing all the time, so I’ve always been passionate about the environment. But what has really brought that home for me is my daughter. She went to university to study marine biology and oceanography- and she is absolutely passionate about the role of the oceans in tackling climate change, in supporting humanity. The oceans are 70% of the coverage of the Earth, and they only get about 5% of our investment. It is all out-of-balance. And she’s been teaching me so much about this imbalance, about the role that the oceans can play. So my love of the land, my love of the mountains, the Highlands of Scotland, the Alps – is now backed up by completely new understanding of the blue part of our planet. And so that really inspired me to try and do something in that direction.
Also, I ran a business called Intelligent Growth Solutions for seven years. I took it from a eight-person R&D project to becoming the biggest vertical farm company in the world, and that was all about tackling climate change and helping to feed an exponentially growing population. So when I was out pitching the vertical farm business to try and clean up global agriculture and to grow food in the place where it’s consumed, I learned an enormous amount about the impact of industries like energy, transport and agriculture on the planet. So I’ve done a huge amount of learning in the last five to seven years.
One of the things I did in response was that I volunteered to join the board of an NGO called the John Muir Trust. John Muir was born in Scotland, but his family emigrated to America. He was the one to invent the concept of the National Park, and he sold the concept to President Teddy Roosevelt before World War I, and was absolutely pivotal to saving some of the most amazing parts of our planet. So I’m really proud that he’s a Scot. The John Muir Trust exists back here and it’s the only NGO in the UK that is dedicated to the protection and restoration of wild places – and that’s something I’m absolutely passionate about. We own some incredible tracts of land, and we are rewilding them back to the way that they would have been up to 2000 years ago, through natural regeneration – I’m excited by that. I’ve also joined an advisory group on the board of VistaMilk in Ireland, which is trying to create, in the Irish dairy industry, an industry that is as clean as it possibly could be. It’s a grass-fed industry and what we’re trying to do is to improve the quality and reduce the impact of milk by reducing the output of methane from the herd, for example. It is a very hands-on, practical endeavor and I’m excited by that. So, it is that passion and all the learning I’ve had motivating me to go back into the E [in ESG].
The other side of E is working with companies, particularly AI companies, that are also having a positive impact on the environment. For example, one such company I’m working with is called Robocean – they have created a robot to harvest and replant seagrass. We’ve lost 70% of our seagrass meadows around the world – and seagrass will sequester carbon 50 times more efficiently than a forest, so it’s an incredibly important thing that not many people know much about. But, to me, it is absolutely essential.
So that’s my E [in ESG] – and my inspiration for S comes from my wife. She is the loveliest and most social person I’ve ever met. She is a volunteer at CHAS – and that stands for Children’s Hospices Across Scotland. We have hospices here in Scotland that are for families with children with a very short life expectancy, it is an incredibly emotional thing. A lot of people worry that it must be very depressing, but it’s actually incredibly uplifting. My wife has been a volunteer there for 10 years as a cook in the kitchens, as a receptionist and as someone who looks after a family in their home. She cooks for them; she cleans for them; she helps them do their shopping and all kinds of other tasks – and she’s an inspiration to me. So a year ago when I handed over the reins at IGS, the vertical farm company, one of the things I wanted to do was a voluntary role. I began volunteering as a gardener, and we have beautiful gardens at the children’s Hospice, next to Loch Lomond on the edge of the Highlands. Every Monday I do a shift there, working in the gardens, and it’s an incredibly rewarding thing. I absolutely love it and it gives me a chance to give something back. I’ve been very fortunate in my life.. I’ve been successful, but it is time that I was giving back.
So that is one of my S [in ESG] activities. Another one is being involved with Tech Tour – I want to leave a legacy for my country. Scotland is an absolute gold mine of innovation, but that is what it is. It is a mine, and we need to start mining it more efficiently. So I’m absolutely determined that by bringing Scotland into the Tech Tour ecosystem properly, we will be able to reveal some incredible research, some incredible institutions, fantastic companies from here to work with our partners in Europe and bring European investment here. And so I want to leave a legacy in working more broadly with Tech Tour in Scotland that will benefit my country – and hopefully benefit Europe on a wider basis.
TT: With over 30 transactions and decades of experience across continents, what key traits do you look for in founders and teams when selecting companies for Tech Tour Growth Deeptech?
DF: I like to get involved with companies – whether as a board member, operationally, or as an investor – where there is at least one founder who understands the sector that they are addressing. I’ll give you 2 examples, the first one with the vertical farm company IGS. The founder was a man called Sir Henry Aykroyd. He was a farmer with tunnels and greenhouses up in Aberdeenshire, where I come from, and he had been growing micro greens and herbs for Michelin-star restaurants for about 20 or 30 years – so he understood that industry really well. The second example is a company that I’m chairman of now, called Bloom IQ, based in Calgary, Canada. The founder is David Karwacki, and he built a business called Star Produce from zero to $500 million over the course of about 30 years, which is in the fresh produce industry across the Americas. And what Bloom IQ is doing is creating something a bit like a Bloomberg Terminal, but totally focused on fresh produce supply chains, to make them more efficient, to reduce waste, to improve trading and profitability – both economic and environmental value added. So having one of the founders that understands the target industry in-depth and has great networks in that industry – for me that’s really important.
I also like to see a team that is diverse. If you just have six white male software engineers, that is not going to work. We need diversity in all its different forms, because you need to have a healthy debate. For startups, both early-stage and scaling companies, it’s really tough. And if you have only one view at the table, you’re probably going to make a lot of bad decisions. So we need a diversity of skills, a diversity of instincts, a diversity of experiences, a diversity of opinions, and therefore having that is something I always check for, because people have a terrible habit of hiring someone like themselves. You know, they look in the mirror and they think – ‘oh, you’re a brilliant guy, we need more of you’. Wrong. When I hire a team, I always look for people who will argue with me (in a respectful way). They will have a different opinion, they can articulate that opinion, and if I don’t take their opinion into account, then I’m really stupid. So that’s what I look for.
The other really big thing for me is Product-market fit. I taught product management as a discipline for about 17 years to technical students who understood engineering, but didn’t understand markets very well and didn’t know how to engage with customers. The discipline of product management is really all about researching and listening to customers. What are their problems? Is it an opportunity problem – in other words, I need to grab this over here. Or is it a challenge problem – in other words, I need that horrible thing to go away. How do they articulate their problem and what is it they’re trying to solve? And can you then deliver to them a product that answers that challenge? That is the biggest thing for me. I’m less interested in how clever a company is – I’m interested in how effective it is, and how focused it is on Product-market fit.
TT: Having helped companies such as Intelligent Growth Solutions rise from R&D startup to global leader, what lessons from that journey would you pass on to this year’s selected entrepreneurs?
DF: It comes back a little bit to some of the things we just discussed. Be very careful when you’re hiring. You know, you need to pull back the curtains on the people you’re hiring and really get to know them, get to know their motivations. Yes, there is the skill and experience that they bring, the knowledge and maybe even networks that they bring to the table. But it’s all about the individual. For investors, at the end of the day, once they’ve seen the technology’s good, there’s some IP, there’s a Product-market fit – above all, they’re investing in a team, they’re investing in human beings. Because the investors don’t want to run the company, they want the management team to run the company. So make sure that you hire the right people, taking in mind the diversity that we just discussed.
The second really big thing for me is culture. The business I had before IGS was called Workplace. When I was asked to take it over by its private equity investor LDC in London, it was a fundamentally broken thing. You know… Marketing hated Sales. Nobody trusted Engineering. The management didn’t trust the workforce, and vice versa. It was losing £1 million on the bottom line, on a turnover of £10 million, and it had been stuck there for about five or six years. So when I went in, we got rid of 1/3 of the workforce, because they were poisonous and difficult. We took it from 135 people down to 90, and in doing so – in 100 working days – we made it profitable. We literally improved the EBITDA of that business by £10,000 per day. We made it profitable and pivoted, turning it into a SaaS company, and focusing it away from having 17 different products for 17 different industries. We focused it on one thing – big retail, and doing employee scheduling for big retailers. It sounds like a simple problem to solve, but it’s actually incredibly complicated math. We were able to satisfy the ambitions of the corporation, the ambitions of the local manager and the desires of individual employees – this was a unique thing to be able to do, and it gave us our competitive advantage in the marketplace. Having turned it round and made it profitable, we then made it the fastest-growing employee scheduling company on the planet. But if we had not changed the culture, we wouldn’t have been able to do all of that. On my website Northface Ventures, there’s a Resources page with a series of guides and pamphlets to support entrepreneurs and even investors – the first one of them is on Culture as a Platform. It is the story of how we built a winning culture at Workplace, and everything else stems from that. If you have a winning culture, you can ask a huge amount out of the people that you work with, and you will get a fantastic response. In my experience, it took me two decades to really understand the importance of culture. But at the end of the day, everything gets done by humans. So giving those humans a fantastic place of work is one of the best things that you can do as a CEO.
TT: Can you share any trends or key themes emerging in light of the companies that stood out at the upcoming Tech Tour Growth Deeptech?
DF: It’s interesting to note that the Top 10 companies on the final list come from 8 different European countries, which I find very encouraging. What also stands out is that the Hardware/Software ratio is 80/20. A lot of these are focused on very hot topics which are in the news all the time, given current geopolitical pressures: AI; technologies for the enablement of very big data, quantum computing components and novel network types; cyber security; energy. There’s also a subset of them developing NextGen replacements for some fundamental tech products. Overall the cohort reflects the three overarching themes of TechTour: Health, Sustainability, and Digitisation.
TT: Finally, as President of the event, what excites you most about this year’s cohort?
DF: Given that this is Growth Deeptech, most of the companies already have market traction, so their application to crucial industries is obvious from their websites. These industries are in need of greater efficiencies (revenues and profitability), less waste, lower climate impact, and at a time where cheap labour is becoming harder to source. Almost every one of the 14 variants of Deeptech that Tech Tour includes per the EIT definition is represented here, which is very healthy and a strong indicator of the breadth and depth of innovation across geographic Europe, even though the list is heavily biased towards north-western countries.
From environmental stewardship to shaping next-gen tech ecosystems, David Farquhar exemplifies the values that define Tech Tour Growth Deeptech 2025: bold innovation, global ambition, and purposeful growth. With over 30 scale-ups, 60+ top-tier investors, and a powerhouse agenda running alongside EIE25, this year’s event in Edinburgh promises to spotlight the companies and collaborations driving Europe’s deeptech future. Join us from 14–16 May in Edinburgh to meet the pioneers, spark new partnerships, and be part of the continent’s most impactful deeptech scale-up showcase. Stay connected on this and other upcoming events by signing up for our newsletter below.