Amity
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Scaling companies Deep tech Crossing borders
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Working with clients in New Zealand, the UK and North America.
Scaling companies Deep tech Crossing borders

The science isn't the only hard part.

Real technology, often patents, usually spun out with about a year of funding and instructions to go and be a company now. You have done something genuinely difficult, and most people never will. What comes next is a different discipline, and it is just as unforgiving. Technology readiness is not commercial readiness, and the gap between the two is where most spinouts spend their first year without meaning to.

What decides it is whether anyone will pay for it. Who exactly, for which version, at what price, sold how, and whether the money holds out long enough for you to find out. Technology push has to turn into market pull, and nothing in a research career prepares anybody for that.

The commercial questions nobody trained you for.

Finding the first application somebody will actually pay for, which is almost never the one that's most interesting scientifically. That first application is your beachhead. Everything else waits behind it.
License it, partner on it, or build a company around it. Each route values the intellectual property differently, and sometimes the honest answer is that it should not be a company at all.
Patent strategy read commercially. What the protection is actually worth, where the freedom to operate genuinely sits, and which claims a buyer or an investor will care about.
Turning the technology into something a person outside your field can understand in one go.
Working out what the first year of funding is really for, and what it has to have produced by the end of it.
The move from research project to company. Different decisions, different cadence, and usually a different person in charge of them.
Getting to a paying customer instead of a pilot that goes well and then quietly ends.
Non-dilutive funding. Which grants are worth the effort, and which are a very expensive way to feel busy.
Getting ready for the raise that has to happen before the runway runs out, well before it starts to feel urgent.
Leaving the commercial habits behind in the team, so this doesn't have to happen again.

If you run an incubator, an accelerator or a technology transfer office.

We work with whole cohorts as well as individual companies, through workshops, teaching, and ongoing advice across a portfolio.

Your teams are usually outstanding at the science and starting from nothing on everything else. We've spent twenty years on everything else. We can work with a whole cohort at once, or take individual companies through the commercial questions their founders have never had to answer before.

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Spinouts with a runway measured in months.

Spinouts and research-backed companies with real technology, some protection around it, and a runway measured in months rather than years.

Early is fine here. Deep tech is the one place where the commercial questions are worth answering before there is any revenue at all.

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