🤖 #38: Vivian's Deeptech Insider: You won the grant. Now you're optimising for the wrong metrics.

Hello and welcome to the #38 edition of the fortnightly Vivian's Deeptech Insider.

If you've been awarded an Innovate UK grant, a DFG grant in Germany, NIH funding, or any of the excellent research grants globally — genuinely, congratulations. That's a real achievement.

You've got strong IP. You've proven market viability. You've got research backing your thesis. You've done something most people never manage: you convinced a panel of experts that your science is worth backing.

But here's where it gets tricky: research validation is not the same as commercial and investor readiness.

And the assumptions you made to win that grant? They're not the same assumptions the market and investors will interrogate when you go out for revenue or your fundraise.

I see this constantly with technical founders coming out of academia or spinning out of universities. The grant got you started. It bought you time to de-risk the science. But now you need traction — and what traction matters most depends entirely on where you're going.

The hidden fork in the road

Here's something nobody tells you when you're celebrating that grant award: there's a fork in the road coming, and most founders don't even see it until they've walked miles down the wrong path.

It's not always the generic "fundraising, marketing, revenue" playbook everyone talks about. You need to be clear on what "winning" looks like first — because the metrics that matter are completely different depending on which road you're on.

Path 1: The technical trade sale

If you're building towards a technical acquisition — think a therapeutic or biotech being acquired by pharma, or a deep hardware play being absorbed by a larger tech company — your entire focus should be on rock-solid technical validation. Preclinical datasets. Clinical trial milestones. Patent portfolios. Regulatory pathway clarity.

Revenue might actually distract you from what matters. I've seen founders burn months chasing pilot customers when their acquirer couldn't care less about £50k in ARR. What they wanted was the science, the team, and the IP. The commercial traction was noise.

Path 2: The classic trade sale or IPO

In most classic trade sales and certainly any IPO path, the commercials absolutely matter. Pilot clients. Revenue. Proof that someone will actually pay for this. Unit economics that suggest this thing can scale.

If you're on this path and you've spent three years perfecting your IP while assuming "pharma will just fund us" or "the tech speaks for itself" — you've got a painful catch-up ahead.

The problem? Most grant-funded founders don't know which path they're on. So they either:

→ Waste years chasing revenue when their exit is purely technical

→ Delay commercial operations too long, assuming the IP will carry them

Both are expensive. Both burn runway and energy. Both lead to hiring the wrong people for the wrong stage. And both could have been avoided with clarity from the start.

Why grants create this blind spot

Here's something I've been thinking about a lot lately: the grant application process actually trains you to think in exactly the wrong way for what comes next.

To win a grant, you need to prove scientific novelty. Technical feasibility. Research impact. You're optimising for a panel of academics and technical assessors who want to see rigorous methodology and defensible science.

But investors and acquirers? They're asking completely different questions:

• What's your route to market?

• Who's already paying for this, or who will?

• What's the competitive landscape and why do you win?

• What does the cap table look like and who else is in?

• What's your exit multiple based on comparable transactions?

The grant trained you to lead with the science. The market wants you to lead with the business model and prove the science supports it.

This isn't a criticism of grants — they're essential for de-risking early-stage deeptech. But they create a muscle memory that can actively hurt you in the next phase if you don't consciously retrain.

The most expensive mistake

The most expensive mistake I see? Assuming all businesses need the same metrics.

I worked with a founder last year who had spent 18 months building out a sales operation, hiring a commercial lead, and chasing pilot revenue. Impressive hustle. But when we actually mapped their exit landscape, every likely acquirer was a pharma company who would strip out the commercial operation entirely post-acquisition. They didn't want customers — they wanted the molecule and the data.

Those 18 months and that commercial hire? Wasted runway. Not because revenue is bad, but because for that specific exit path, it wasn't the unlock.

Contrast that with another founder I know who kept delaying any commercial conversations, convinced their IP was so strong that acquirers would come knocking. Two years later, the strategic acquirers they'd hoped for all asked the same question: "Where's your commercial validation?" They weren't buying science — they were buying a business.

Same sector. Completely different exit paths. Completely different metrics that mattered.

Knowing your exit path from day one

When I talk about "exit literacy," founders sometimes push back. "I'm not thinking about selling yet — I'm just trying to build." Or:

But knowing your exit path from day one isn't about "planning your acquisition." It's about knowing which metrics to align and prioritise so you're not optimising for the wrong thing.

It's the difference between building a company that's accidentally valuable to someone and building one that's strategically positioned for the outcomes you actually want.

Because here's the truth: the grant was the easy part. It validated your research. It gave you credibility and runway. But building a fundable, exitable company? That requires a completely different lens — one most technical founders were never taught.

A moment that clarified this for me

In my second company, at pre-seed and seed stage, I was pitching three different versions of the future, which meant I ended up building fragmented assets, and developed stress-induced lupus that I now live with daily.

It wasn't until I had board advisors who helped ask the right questions that things started to clarify — but by then it was too late. My cap table had already dictated too many decisions, and we ended up restructuring first. Years wasted. Wrong hires. A lot of money burned.

This is why I built Capital Catalyst

Just in the second half of this year, I've been running a board-level residency programme specifically for grant/investor-funded technical founders — the ones sitting on strong science but unclear on how to translate that into investor and market readiness.

We work through:

• Exit literacy + what "winning" looks like — 7+ different exit options out there and which aligns best with you and your mission

• Path mapping — work backwards to carve out what the most strategic roadmap looks like with realistic outcomes for your specific company and sector, not generic startup advice

• Metric alignment — identifying which proof points actually matter for your path and which are distractions

• Board-level thinking — at founder's pace, learning to see your company the way investors and acquirers see it

• Commercial traction strategy — if and when you need it, building the right commercial motion for your exit

I've taken everything I've learned from 18+ years as a scientist, 3x founder, VC investor, and board advisor and distilled it into an operating system built specifically for deeptech and healthtech founders - it’s a new way of thinking.

The March 2025 cohort priority waitlist is now open.

The clarity will save you years. I mean that literally.

Until next time,
Vivian

P.S. If you know a grant-funded founder who's stuck in the "great science, unclear path" trap, feel free to forward this to them. Sometimes the right framing at the right time changes everything.

P.S.S. Was this forwarded to you? Read past issues and subscribe here.

P.S.S.S. Are we connected on LinkedIn? I’m here.

If you have gotten value out of Vivian’s Deeptech Insider, please help us grow by sharing it with your friends!