Vincent Prêtet focuses on the specific financing gap deeptech startups face between proving demand and building a factory, arguing that early funding should validate demand rather than pay for heavy equipment, and he often points to companies with real orders that still struggled to finance inventory and manufacturing fast enough. With a background split between founding a company and working at a regional VC before joining Aster, he centers his approach on industrial execution—backing hardware startups roughly between €1M and €10M in sales, favoring high-margin technology that can realistically be manufactured in Europe, and pushing for investing to stay rooted in regional industrial clusters and connected to larger industrial groups.