The situation
A founder I spoke with started his company around a sensing technology he had licensed from a university lab.
He initially explored using it for battery diagnostics. Through conversations with potential customers, another application began coming up: monitoring transformers and other power infrastructure.
He decided to investigate further. Over the next couple of months, he conducted dozens of interviews, went to conferences, did cold outreach, and reconnected with a large manufacturer that had previously explored similar technology.
By early 2025, he had enough conviction to shift the company from batteries toward power-asset monitoring. The underlying technology remained the same, but the market had changed.
The plan
The company began developing the technology for the new application while continuing to validate the market.
They secured LOIs and other early commitments from prospective customers. The founder raised a pre-seed round, hired his first two employees, and continued developing the sensing platform.
Over the following months, they were talking with customers across utilities, renewable energy, and data centers. They had interest from the market. The next step was turning some of those conversations into paid projects.
Where uncertainty remained
By early this year, moving from early interest and soft commitments into paid projects was proving difficult.
The founder pointed to two reasons. Their technology was still building proof of concepts, while prospective customers were looking for a more refined product. Their value proposition also wasn't specific enough to the different customers they were approaching.
So the team continued customer discovery.
At one large industry conference, they spoke with a large number of people over two or three days. They began testing different ways of describing the product and watching how people in different roles responded.
They found that the problem didn't carry the same urgency for everyone. Independent power producers, for example, could feel the consequences of a transformer failure directly because their business depended on generating power. Within utilities, different teams could care about the technology for different reasons.
The company was getting closer to understanding who felt the problem strongly enough to act. They still needed a way to turn that understanding into a first paid deployment.
What needed to be proven first
Those conversations also helped the founder understand how companies in the industry evaluated new technologies.
Large energy companies often had innovation teams responsible for finding new technologies. Some participated in specialized accelerator programs designed to connect startups with teams inside utilities and explore potential pilot projects.
The founder also spoke with other startups selling into utilities and power infrastructure. Several founders pointed him toward programs where they had secured their first pilots.
He began pursuing those programs and secured his first paid pilot through a utility-focused accelerator. Going through that process helped the company understand what mattered to the customer, refine how they presented the value of the technology, and structure a pilot the customer was willing to run.
He continued participating in similar programs. As utilities began piloting the technology, he found that other prospective customers became more interested as well.
Between June and August, the company went from a five figure pilot to six figure pilots and pilot opportunities. The founder came to view these programs as part of his go-to-market channel. In his experience, they gave him access to companies already interested in working with startups and helped his team navigate organizations that otherwise could take much longer to enter.
The pattern
Selling a new technology into a large B2B organization can require more than finding a customer with the right problem.
The company also has to find someone willing to evaluate something new, understand who inside the organization can move a project forward, and establish enough credibility for that customer to take the first step.
In some industries, there are already organizations built to make those connections. For this founder, industry-focused accelerators became a way to reach customers that were prepared to work with an early-stage company.
If you're in a similar spot
If you're trying to get the first few customers for a new B2B hardware technology, it can be useful to look at how companies in your industry already find and evaluate new technologies.
There may already be a path into those organizations through an accelerator, OEM, industry group, or other partner they trust.