A strong technical team.
We back founders who are excellent at the technology and honest about the commercial gap.
What we mean by this
The people who built the technology are still the people running it. They can explain why it works, what it cannot do yet, and what they would need six months to fix. There is no distance between the lab and the decisions.
That part is usually fine. The part that decides whether we work together is the second one: what the team thinks about the commercial side. Some technical founders treat sales as a task to outsource and forget. Those companies do not work with us well, because we are not a supplier. We put our own money into the commercial work and we need a founder in the room when a customer asks something only they can answer.
The founders we work with best have already accepted something uncomfortable. Their technology is good and it is still not selling itself. They do not want to hire four commercial people to find out why, and they do not want to spend the next year learning industrial sales themselves. They want someone to run it and to be held to a result.
We are not looking for commercial experience in the team. If you had it, you would not need us. We are looking for the willingness to be corrected by the market, quickly and repeatedly, without treating each correction as an attack on the technology.
The qualities we weigh
Technical ownership
The core of the technology sits inside the company, with people who are still there. If the real knowledge lives at a university group, a former CTO or an external agency, every technical question in a customer conversation turns into a week of delay. Industrial buyers notice that immediately and read it as risk.
Willingness to be wrong about the market
Almost every deeptech company we speak to has a first market guess, and most of those guesses are wrong in some way. That is normal. What matters is what happens when the evidence arrives. Founders who adjust in a week are worth backing. Founders who spend three months explaining why the market misunderstood them are not, however good the technology is.
Speed of decision
Commercial work is a long series of small decisions. Do we chase this account. Do we accept these pilot terms. Do we quote this price. If each one waits for a monthly board call, the pipeline stalls and the whole programme becomes expensive for both of us. We look for a founder who can decide alone on most things and knows which few things really need the board.
Showing up
We run outreach, qualification, follow up and the coordination inside the customer's organisation. We do not pretend to be your technical authority. When a serious buyer wants to interrogate the physics, the founder joins that call. It is usually one or two hours a week. Companies that cannot free up those hours are telling us something true about their priorities.
How we test this
In the first conversation we ask what you have already tried commercially and what happened. Not the plan, the attempts. Who did you approach, what did they say, why did it stop. Founders who have tried and failed honestly tell us far more than founders with a clean slide about a go to market strategy.
Then we ask about the last time the market surprised you and what you changed as a result. The answer shows us how the team handles being wrong. We also ask who decides on pricing and on pilot terms, and how long that takes. If nobody can answer that quickly, decision speed will be the thing that breaks the programme, not the technology.
What a yes looks like
- Founders with genuine technical depthThey can answer a hostile technical question without calling someone else first.
- One founder ready to show up for customer conversationsA couple of hours a week, reliably, for the calls where the technology is on trial.
- Decisions made in weeks, not quartersPrice, pilot scope and priorities can move without a formal process.
- Willing to hear that the first market guess was wrongEvidence changes the plan instead of starting a debate about the evidence.
What a no looks like
- Technology owned somewhere elseAn agency or a university group holds the real knowledge and you no longer steer it.
- Nobody available for customer callsEvery technical question has to be scheduled two weeks out, so deals cool down.
- A board that needs three months to approve anythingCommercial momentum dies in approval cycles, and we carry half that cost.
- Looking for someone to sell while you stay out of itThat is an outsourced sales team, and it does not work in deeptech. We are not that.
Why this matters for the deal
For companies we believe in we can invest part of our own fee instead of invoicing it. That means we can end up exposed to the same outcome you are, and the team is the variable we can do the least about once we start.
We can fix a weak market hypothesis. We can work around technology that is early. We cannot make a founder available who does not want to be, and we cannot speed up a company that decides slowly. That is why the team question is the one we are strictest on.