Deep-tech: research to market
Working alongside founding teams to build — and then run — the commercial models that turn mature deep-tech research out of a leading Indian science institute into something a business can actually buy.
The mandate. A deep-tech venture studio at IISc Bengaluru — robotics and drones at its core, with ventures reaching into AI and medtech — held research past TRL 4. Each one needed a commercial answer: who buys it, why, and at what price.
Our role. Build the commercial case alongside each founding team, then stay in to run it — pricing, positioning and route to market, down to which events earned a place in the marketing budget.
What the work involved
Every venture in the studio had the same gap. The labs were past proof of concept — an artificial pancreas, warehouse automation, telepresence robotics, language datasets, a data exchange. The science worked. What none of it had was a buyer.
The hard part isn’t the science — it’s finding who pays for it, and why.
So that is where we came in. For each one we built the commercial model from the buyer backwards — who they are, what they would pay, how the product reaches them — and turned it into pricing, positioning and a route to market.
Then we stayed to run it, because a model on a slide changes nothing. The work was in the execution: choosing which events earned their place in the marketing budget, setting the operating cadence, deciding what each team did next. The data-exchange business we designed went on to raise $400K in pre-seed funding.
