Investors and industrial partners routinely bring in accountants and lawyers before committing capital to a project. The technology itself — the actual thing the money is betting on — often gets a lighter touch: a pitch deck, a site visit, a conversation with the founding team. That's not the same as an independent technical audit, and the gap between the two is where a lot of industrial capital gets misallocated.
What an honest technical audit should check
- Real TRL versus claimed TRL. A process demonstrated once, under ideal conditions, is not the same as a process with a track record of reproducible performance. The gap between the two determines how much technical risk the round is actually carrying.
- Reproducibility, not best-case results. Every process has a best run. What matters is the typical run — and whether the team can explain, with data, why the best case isn't the norm yet.
- The actual scale-up bottleneck. Every process has one step that gets harder, not easier, at scale — often an impurity, a heat transfer limit, or an equipment constraint. A credible technical case names that bottleneck explicitly and shows a real plan for it, rather than assuming scale-up is a formality.
- Dependency on specific inputs. A process validated on one feedstock sample can behave very differently on the variable, real-world feedstock a commercial operation will actually see.
- Cost curve at scale versus cost curve in the lab. Lab-scale unit economics are almost never the economics of a full plant — the question is whether anyone has modeled the difference credibly, or is simply assuming lab numbers will hold.
None of this requires doubting the team or the technology. It requires someone with hands-on process background asking the specific, technical version of "why should we believe this holds up," rather than the general version that a pitch deck is built to answer well.