🔑 The key to disrupting heavy industry
Founders Factory Startup Bulletin #52
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Achieving that scientific breakthrough might feel like definitive success. But really, that’s only the beginning.
Proving that your technology can work is one thing; being able to sell it into large companies and disrupt major industries is a whole challenge of its own. This is particularly true in heavy, highly regulated industries—like mining—where safety and reliability often comes first.
Liz Dennett, founder of Endolith, has faced this challenge head on. Scaling deep tech out of the lab and selling to corporates, she says, is one of the hardest things she’s ever done—and that’s coming from someone who climbs mountains in her spare time.
In today’s Startup Bulletin, Liz shares her insights into disrupting heavy industry, and the four things that have found her some success in this regard.
Also in today’s newsletter:
📚 This month’s reading list
🚀 Highlights from our global portfolio
📍 Opportunities in tech (events, jobs, etc)
Endolith’s Liz Dennett: On disrupting heavy industry
Liz Dennett, founder of the biointelligence startup looking to transform copper recovery, shares what she’s learned about disrupting a heavy industry like mining
Start with an immediate problem
When I joined Cemvita (the forerunner to Endolith), I was coming in with a strong view to the potential of microbes as an application to numerous areas in the mining industry and its value chain.
The problem is—industry doesn’t reward future potential. It rewards immediate results and impact. So the most important decision I made was to get our team to sit down and figure out where we could have the most immediate impact on the climate transition—not in ten years time, but right now.
This brought me back to a conversation I’d had during my PhD, about the most important resource for the future of humanity. Copper—a critical element for the transition to clean energy—always cropped up. So I brought these two things together—microbes, an organism that can radically improve metal recovery, and copper.
That mantra keeps popping up for me—cash is king, focus is queen.
Show you understand—and care
You’re often told in technology to not shy away from being an outsider, a disruptor. But things work a little differently in heavy, highly regulated industries. These companies are risk averse and safety always comes first: anything that changes too radically without the right checks and balances might result in injury or worse.
I’ve tried before blundering in as an outsider: but you’re much more effective in showing that you understand the industry, that you’ve taken time to listen and hear their problems, empathise with what they value, and demonstrate how you think they can move forward.
Tap into insider knowledge where possible
One of the best advantages you can build, and a great way to demonstrate understanding and nuance, is through tapping into insider knowledge. This may be industry experts, or even people who work at the types of companies you are trying to sell to.
This was a huge advantage of the Founders Factory Mining Accelerator, which gave us senior level access to Rio Tinto, giving us strong insight into the dynamics of selling to the mining industry, and potential problems to be solved at these multinationals.
Footnote: For many founders, speaking to ‘insiders’ will take place through the discovery phase, where you should speak to as many industry professionals to start to build an image of your ideal customer profile and the problems you are solving for.
Incremental gains aren’t enough
Scaling and selling deep tech is incredibly hard. You can’t pin success on a 10%-20% improvement. Your product should not just be the better option, it has to be the easiest possible choice, a solution that can easily adapt to existing systems and demonstrate radical improvements.
I keep reminding myself that to succeed, ”Market adoption has to be inevitable”.
This has been excerpted from our recent founder spotlight on Liz Dennett, which you can read in full here:
📚 This month’s reading list
AI Eats the World (Benedict Evans)
Forget SEO, the hot new thing is ‘AEO’ (Business Insider)
The Art of Evals: How Figma Put People at the Center of Its AI Product (First Round Review)
🚀 Highlights from our global portfolio
We announced the launch of the Future Industries Partnership, a philanthropic initiative funded by HSBC to fund new technologies focused on decarbonising and upgrading heavy industries like steel and cement. We’ll be providing hands on operational support to those companies involved
We hosted twelve startups from our mining and nature tech accelerators in Perth for a week of in-person programming, networking, and partner engagement, culminating in an opportunity to pitch to a room of industry leaders and investors
Endolith, the mining biointelligence platform, published the results from its testing with Think & Act Differently (BHP’s innovation arm), demonstrating significant advances in copper recovery from low grade ores—essential for meeting the growing demand for copper
Valarian announced a further $7M in funding, bringing their seed funding to $20M. They’re building infrastructure for secure data management, focused largely at highly regulated industries like defense
Our team visited Vancouver to host the culmination of our first Blue Action Canada program, featuring eight startups innovating in the blue economy space. This included programming as part of Web Summit, being held this year in the British Columbia capital
Opportunities in tech
📆 Events
SLINGSHOT by SWITCH (October 29th - 31st)—SLINGSHOT is a global deep tech startup pitching competition, part of the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH), taking place 29th to 31st October 2025. Find out more and register here
📍 Jobs
Founder & CEO at Capita—we’re looking for an entrepreneur-in-residence to lead the strategy & build of our latest fintech concept, an AI-powered financial companion for ‘emerging affluents’
See you next month 👋
Interested in reading more of the same? Check out the Founders Factory blog and previous newsletters.