🤖 #34: Vivian's Deeptech Insider: The Moment My Founders Went Silent

Hello and welcome to #34 edition of the fortnightly Vivian's Deeptech Insider.

A few weeks into the current Capital Catalyst cohort, I asked each founder to show me their roadmaps and their next 90 days focus—design partners, pilot customers, active conversations.

Recognisable names.

Then I pulled out the exit canvas we'd built weeks earlier and asked: "How many of these potential partnerships align with your ideal acquirer?"

Dead silence.

For context: 100% of this cohort has outlined trade sale M&A as their ideal exit. So we're not talking about IPO paths or PE buyouts—we're talking about building companies someone specific will want to acquire in today’s newsletter.

The Partnership Paradox

Here's what's happening, and it's not obvious until you see it mapped out:

Founders chase partnerships that say "yes" quickly. You need momentum, validation, something to show investors. Academic labs move fast if you have existing networks. Small clinics are eager to pilot. Startups love collaborating with other startups.

These partnerships feel productive. They generate case studies, create buzz, prove the product works.

But they're often completely irrelevant to the buyer that matters.

It’s often easy to think that building relationships across university research departments with great logos and published papers is a strong validation that the technology worked.

This is not the case.

Their target acquirer? A pharma major that explicitly stated in their M&A strategy: "We acquire to gain access to commercial distribution channels, not research capabilities."

What This Actually Looks Like

Three fake examples (details changed for confidentiality):

Founder A: Medical device for chronic condition management. Target acquirer: top-5 medical device company.

Partnership list: 5 academic labs running pilots.

The problem: Their acquirer's head of corporate development said in a podcast six months ago that they only look at companies with "proven reimbursement pathways and existing relationships with private payers."

Academic pilots prove clinical efficacy. They don't prove commercial viability through the payer systems their acquirer depends on.

Founder B: Industrial automation platform. Target acquirer: major manufacturer with 200+ factories globally.

Customer base: 30+ small-to-mid manufacturers, mostly under 50 employees.

The problem: Their acquirer's integration team only rolls out tech validated at scale in facilities with 500+ employees and union workforces. None of Founder B's customers came close to that profile.

Founder C: Diagnostic tool for rare diseases. Target acquirer: specialty pharma company.

Design partner: Large academic hospital system.

The problem: Their acquirer does 90% of clinical trial recruitment through specialised private clinics—competitors to the academic system Founder C partnered with.

In each case, the partnerships weren't bad. They just didn't add value to the right asset. Sometimes they actively created friction.

The Three Types of Partnership Misalignment

As we audited the cohort, three patterns emerged:

1. Wrong Scale
You've proven your product works in research labs. Your acquirer needs proof it works at enterprise scale. Academic pilots don't translate to commercial deployment.

2. Wrong Channel
You've built relationships in one go-to-market motion. Your acquirer operates through completely different channels. They can't use your customer relationships because they don't sell that way.

3. Wrong Geography/Segment
You've validated in markets your acquirer doesn't care about—or worse, has explicitly exited. You've de-risked the wrong territory entirely.

The brutal part? Founders often chose these partnerships because they were easier to close. Smaller customers say yes faster. Adjacent markets have fewer barriers. Academic institutions love running pilots.

But easy partnerships rarely align with hard exits.

The Partnership Audit Framework

We're now running every cohort partnership through three filters:

Filter 1: Does this relationship validate the specific business pain point our acquirer needs solved?

Not "does this prove our product works?"

Filter 2: Would our acquirer view this partnership as an asset they can leverage, or as a relationship they'd need to navigate around?

Some partnerships create integration complexity. Others create instant distribution. Know which is which.

Filter 3: If we could only show three partnerships in an acquisition deck, would this be one of them?

Brutal simplicity. Most partnerships don't survive this question.

Why This Matters From Day One

"We're too early for this."

I hear this constantly. It's wrong.

You're not too early to think about what success looks like. You're too early to not think about it.

Business is building relationships. The sooner you establish and build the right relationships, the more they compound. A partnership formed in year one that aligns with your acquirer's priorities is worth infinitely more than ten partnerships formed in year three that don't.

The Uncomfortable Realisation

Most founders in this cohort didn't have a partnerships problem. They had a prioritisation problem.

They were treating all pilots and partnerships as equally valuable proof points. Academic and commercial. Small-scale and enterprise. Adjacent markets and core markets.

But acquirers don't see it that way. They have a specific checklist of risks they need addressed. If your partnerships don't tick those boxes, they're just noise.

The founders who realise this early build half as many relationships but create 10x the exit value.

The ones who realise it late spend years building momentum with the wrong audience—and wonder why acquisition conversations never get serious.

What This Means for You

If you're building in deeptech or healthtech, pull up your partnership or wishlist list right now.

Then pull up your most likely acquirer's last earnings call, investor deck, or M&A strategy statement.

Ask yourself honestly: Are your partnerships validating what they need validated?

The gap between "we have traction" and "we have acquirer-relevant traction" is the difference between a company that gets acquired and a company that gets passed over.

Getting this alignment right—mapping partnerships to acquirer priorities before you build them, not after—is one of the core topics of Capital Catalyst. We work through this systematically because most founders only realise the misalignment when it's too late to course-correct efficiently.

All of them are now asking a question they should have asked 18 months ago:

Who are we really building these partnerships for? What asset am I building that is valuable?

Until next time,
Vivian

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