What we do

Fundraising

All of our clients require funding to transition between key value inflection points. We offer our clients support in all aspects of investor readiness, from developing an ideal investor configuration, through building a comprehensive data room, to identifying appropriate investors.

RIG undertakes investor readiness for two types of rounds: Seed Extension funding from individual private investors; and Series A funding from private and institutional investors. We only undertake investor readiness activities as part of a broader commercialisation engagement and never as a standalone activity. This approach stems from the distinct advantage that we can derive from leveraging a high degree of market intimacy developed out of an extended period of market engagement.

Growth Strategy

The value in crafting the optimal commercialisation strategy lies in enabling easier execution. Equally, poorly conceived strategy will result in the misallocation of resource and make deal execution an unnecessarily challenging, if not fruitless, exercise. RIG leverages its position at the intersection of the market and the technology to design the right path to commercial success.

Product Market Fit

To deliver a venture scale outcome, our clients must find and engage ‘market pull’. To facilitate this, RIG’s method privileges the search for Product-Market Fit (PMF), where technology and market need come together.

RIG’s method begins with a hypothesis which describes the interplay between three critical success factors: the new product, its first market or application, and proposed business model. Of these three factors, locating the ‘right’ first market is the most important and most immediate. The optimum business model follows directly after this.

The majority of early stage technology companies fail to find product-market fit. Even for those companies that find this ‘fit’, the process often takes significantly longer than anticipated. Entrepreneurial vision is necessary but insufficient. What matters in executing this critical activity is method.

RIG’s method is governed by the belief that the search for product-market fit should not be a loosely managed activity overly dependent on luck, but rather it should be a structured search process. To increase the probability of success, the search should be characterised by rapid learning and iteration. This is underpinned by the application of a rigorous and tightly managed discovery and validation process through direct engagement with the market and supported by stage-specific tools.

Attaining product market fit can be determined by three outcomes:

1)   The new and transparently differentiated product configured to address a significant challenge such that the customer is motivated to adopt now or in the near term

2)  A high-momentum, high-value, large enough first market with attractive adjacent markets

3) A business model that motivates the market to adopt and enables the company to scale and capture a fair portion of the value it creates

Deal Execution

Supporting and executing first deals is a core RIG activity and a distinctive capability.

First deals constitute a crucial early milestone in building a venture company. They demonstrate market acceptance, mitigate market risk, deliver first revenues, and serve to inflect a company’s value ahead of a funding round.

Wisely chosen and well executed, they provide the points of reference that underpin an accelerating growth path. For this reason, first deals are an order of value higher than those that follow: their strategic value outweighs their economic value.

First deals are also inherently different from later deals. To generalise: they are harder to win and take longer. The execution challenges associated with first deals are manifestly different from those of ‘known products’. Engineering first adoption requires a fundamentally different approach and skillset. There is an imperative to leverage curiosity for the new, and to transform it into a concrete commercial opportunity. First deals are also formative in the sense that they initiate the process of working up from scratch not only the company’s deal execution template but how it chooses to do business. This is a valuable by-product of our work.

Establishing PMF and deal execution are interlinked: crafting the right market strategy and focusing on the right opportunities logically make for easier deal execution. We do the first activity to enable the second, at which point value is realised.

Business Model

Defensible IP and strong product-market-fit mean little unless a venture can find a viable model that generates revenues and inflates its value. In the sustainability sector, this can rarely be achieved without (I) a clear understanding of the industry value chain, or (II) insight into the strategic priorities of major corporate actors.

A strong venture business model enables the company to capture the fair and equitable share of the value brought by its innovation. It draws its strength from forensically aligning the venture’s interests with those of its surrounding value chain, driving early and then widespread adoption, while balancing other considerations such as IP generation.

Intellectual Property

Intellectual property rights and secret know-how protect the effort and cost of innovating, allowing a company to benefit, for a limited time period, from its breakthrough. For the technology venture, IP is often the primary basis on which they can compete and so defending and building on existing IP is a crucial pillar of commercialisation.

A successful venture will build an IP strategy into its business plan, consistently bringing it in line with commercial goals, business growth and fundraising targets.