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Deep Tech Commercialization: The Distance Between Working and Sellable
Hard technology usually fails commercially long after it has stopped failing technically. The demo runs, the paper is cited, the benchmark is won, and the thing still has no buyer who can describe what it replaces. SproutVest closes that distance: naming the buyer, the budget line the spend comes out of, and the first product narrow enough to sell.
30-min call · No commitment · Or start with the free diagnostic →
What you receive
A commercialization plan written for the people who have to execute it, not for a board slide. Four to eight weeks depending on how much customer contact already exists.
- The buyer named to a role and a budget line, not a market segment.
- What the technology replaces, in the language that buyer already uses.
- A first product scoped small enough to ship and specific enough to price.
- Pricing and packaging with the reasoning attached, so it survives the first objection.
- The evidence still missing, and the cheapest way to go and get it.
Who this is for
Research spinouts holding technology nobody has priced yet. AI teams whose capability is real and whose value proposition is a list of adjectives. Protocol and infrastructure teams whose adoption story depends on developers who have not shown up. Funds that have led a round and want the commercialization risk read before the next one.
Why an operator rather than a strategy firm
A deck describing a total addressable market is not a commercialization plan. It is a reason to keep building. The work that moves a deep tech company is unglamorous and specific: finding the one buyer whose problem is expensive enough to fund a purchase order, then cutting the product down until it is the obvious answer to that problem and nothing else.
Where this has been done before
Erick Watson commercialized research assets at Protocol Labs and shipped AI products at Google, contributing $824M and $398M in ARR across two Search Ads surfaces. At Trensant the work was cutting an AI platform that could serve almost anyone down to enterprise supply chain and risk, which is the narrowing that made it legible to an acquirer.
Frequently asked questions
How is this different from product strategy?
Product strategy assumes a market you already serve and asks what to build next. Commercialization assumes a technology that works and asks who on earth is going to pay for it. The second question is the one deep tech teams usually skip.
We already have design partners. Is that enough?
Design partners prove somebody will use it for free. They do not prove anyone will buy it, and the gap between those two facts has killed more deep tech companies than any technical failure. Bring the partner conversations and we will read what they actually establish.
How long does an engagement run?
Four to eight weeks, depending on how much customer contact already exists. Teams that have never spoken to a buyer take longer, because the first weeks are spent creating evidence rather than reading it.
Do you work with pre-revenue companies?
Most of this work is pre-revenue by definition. What matters is whether the technology does something today, not whether anybody has paid for it yet.
Technology that works and does not sell?
Bring the thing you have built and the buyer you think you have. The call is enough to tell whether the gap is positioning, product scope, or a market that is not there yet.
30-min call · No commitment · Or start with the free diagnostic →