Scaling Hardtech Companies Through Smart Milestone Planning

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The most successful hardtech companies scale quickly by systematically retiring risk and hitting clear milestones. This methodical approach not only builds a strong business but also increases investor confidence.

Great hardtech companies understand that smart milestone planning is essential for successful scaling. By methodically tackling their biggest technical and business challenges, they create clear paths to growth while minimizing risk.

“Go after the things you understand the least. The ones with the highest technical risk. Knock them off one by one,” says Mike Schroepfer, founder of Gigascale Capital and former CTO of Meta.

In this article, we explore how two founders of Gigascale portfolio companies turned promising technologies into scalable businesses:

• What the team at Arbor learned about proving complex technology cheaply and quickly, and how it led to a deal with Microsoft.
• How Dioxycle approached commercialization through proven scale-out strategies, setting the stage for efficient manufacturing and deployment.

These stories offer practical strategies for identifying critical risks, retiring them systematically, and demonstrating progress. With the right team and offering, these strategies can help create confidence with investors and commercial partners. With the right team and approach, these strategies can accelerate your path to market while building credibility with investors and commercial partners.

How Milestones Reduce Risk

When evaluating companies, investors want to know: Can this team turn a good idea into a scalable business?

“The best companies do a really good job of sequencing out the milestones,” says Mike. This systematic approach creates a framework that prioritizes resources, keeps the team focused, and builds investor confidence.

Consider a founder developing a first-of-its-kind technology. Instead of pitching investors on broad strokes or assumptions about how they’ll build the technology, they should map out specific milestones, for example:

• Prove core performance in laboratory tests over next 6 months
• Validate material strength and durability against industry standards
• Complete long-term reliability testing by Q1
• Demonstrate production at pilot scale in 2027
• Demonstrate scalable manufacturing approach by next fundraise

Delivering these milestones on deadline demonstrates two key things: the team’s ability to plan effectively and execute reliably, plus clear signals that the technology is commercially viable.

A promising technology in the lab means little if it can’t compete with conventional solutions already broadly adopted in the real world. Investors look for founders who can map a credible path from lab-scale success to commercial deployment.

“No amount of designing on paper is going to save you. It just delays the point when you realize that a critical part doesn’t work,” says Mike. This insight drives how the best teams approach milestone planning: proving the technology works in practice, not just in theory.

Arbor: Engineering for Scale Through Rapid Validation

Arbor’s team of former SpaceX engineers had an ambitious vision: using rocket engine technology to turn waste biomass into electricity while sequestering carbon.

Rather than building expensive full-scale prototypes, they designed their validation strategy around two key concerns:

• Technical risk: Could they prove their core technology worked reliably?
• Economic risk: Could they scale without costs growing exponentially?

“The goal is that you are scaling up. You don’t want risk to be scaling as well,” says Brad Hartwig, CEO and co-founder of Arbor.

Their solution was to validate small and scale through replication. Instead of constructing large custom facilities, they first proved their core technology worked by building a $2,000 test system using parts from Home Depot. This allowed them to validate fundamental physics and control systems before investing in larger installations.

Once the core technology was proven, scaling became primarily an engineering challenge. They focused on:

• Creating modular designs that can be replicated without reinventing core technology
• Standardizing components to reduce manufacturing costs
• Integrating with conventional industrial equipment like pipes and blowers

The riskiest elements, including fundamental physics and novel technology, were proven early and cheaply. Then, scale-up became a matter of replicating proven modules and integrating them with standard industrial components.

“We needed to create a working system at the smallest, cheapest scale possible. This gave us something people could see, touch, and know that end-to-end it works,” says Brad.

This practical approach validated their technology at an affordable cost and led to a significant partnership: Microsoft signed on as an early carbon removal customer.

Dioxycle: Using Proven Scale-Out Approaches

For Sarah Lamaison and her team at Dioxycle, planning for commercial operations meant looking to proven models of horizontal scaling. Unlike scaling up, where a single unit gets bigger and eventually hits physical limits, scaling out offers more flexibility. It allows companies to simply add more standardized units. Following this approach, Sarah’s team designed their electrolyzers as replicable, stackable modules that could be mass manufactured and dropped into existing industrial operations.

“It’s a proven model already, and that’s a track we can follow to scale up this technology,” says Sarah. The team designed membrane-based systems that can be mass produced with existing supply chains, which reduces both technical and commercial risk. By focusing on standardization and ease of deployment, Dioxycle has created a clear path from pilot to commercial scale that’s familiar to both manufacturers and customers.

Their approach builds investor confidence through:

• Standardized modules that can be manufactured using existing supply chains
• Proven drop-in deployment that reduces integration risks
• A clear path from to commercial scale to compete with conventional ethylene producers

Building a Track Record for Delivery

Having great technology isn’t enough. Cleantech founders must prove they can win in the real world.

The most successful founders tackle their biggest risks first, show clear evidence of progress, and demonstrate scalable approaches whether through rapid validation like Arbor or proven scale-out strategies like Dioxycle.

Visit the Gigascale blog for more insights on how founders are tackling the toughest climate challenges.