How Deep Tech Founders Turn Partnerships into Real Growth

The FORGE Series highlights the founders and experts driving Deep Tech innovation. Hosted by Stifel Bank’s Venture Banking team, these conversations explore industry trends, investment insights, and the challenges of building transformative companies. This piece builds on Laurent Hautefeuille’s session from the 2025 FORGE Conference.

Partnerships can be a startup’s most powerful accelerator—or a potential drain on resources. For Deep Tech founders navigating complex industries, the difference often comes down to intent, timing, and knowing what a good partnership actually looks like in practice. 

Laurent Hautefeuille, Chief Operating Officer at Bedrock Robotics and previously EVP, Chief Business Development Officer at Uber Freight, has seen the challenges Deep Tech partnerships can face. 

In a conversation following the FORGE Conference, he shared the hard-won lessons that separate partnerships that consume resources from those that help build enduring businesses. 

What Are Deep Tech Partnerships Actually For?

A Deep Tech partnership is a mutual commitment of real resources—engineering time, field access, or budget—in pursuit of a specific business outcome neither party can achieve alone.

At Uber Freight, partnerships were built around a single question: what constraint is limiting growth right now? The answer was different on each side of the marketplace.

On the carrier side, the constraint was supply. Partnerships around fuel, insurance, and equipment improved driver economics and pulled carriers into the platform—eventually reaching two million truck drivers. 

On the shipper side, the constraint was meeting customers where they are. Enterprise customers had complex existing technology stacks (ERP, TMS, WMS), so partnerships centered on APIs and integrations that made Uber Freight fit seamlessly into how they already operated and ran their supply chains.

Same company. Different bottlenecks. Different partnership strategies. Every partnership was intentionally designed to solve a specific problem in the service of a larger flywheel. 

In contrast, a common mistake is treating partnerships as a growth signal or investor optic—chasing logos for the deck rather than removing a real constraint. In Deep Tech, where sales cycles can be long, technology is complex, and customers are often asked to change how they operate, the wrong partnership doesn’t just waste time. It drains the engineering focus and leadership bandwidth that early-stage teams cannot afford to lose.

When you’re assessing partnerships, the test is simple: what bottleneck does this remove? If that answer isn’t clear, the partnership probably isn’t either.

The Path from Design Partners to Distribution Partners

Deep Tech companies typically need two very different kinds of partnerships at different stages—and confusing them, or pursuing them out of order, can be a costly mistake. 

Design partners come first. These are the customers you build with—not at. Bedrock works with a small cohort of general contractors and subcontractors as co-design partners, embedding engineers alongside estimators, fleet ops, and superintendents in actual field operations. 

A design partner is a customer who co-develops your product in real operating conditions, trading early access and influence over the roadmap for the feedback and field data you can’t get any other way.

That proximity is irreplaceable. You cannot build autonomous construction technology from your office . The workflows, the edge cases, the change management challenges—you only discover those by being on construction sites with your customers.

When Bedrock announced its $270M Series B, the company put one of its design partners Champion Site Prep at the center of the story, letting their CEO explain what autonomy means for his operations and his business. That was a deliberate signal: the technology only matters because of what it does for the customer.

Distribution and reseller partnerships come later, after you’ve nailed your product and have a clear, repeatable value proposition. You also negotiate from zero leverage: no proven product, no track record, no alternative. Wait until the channel accelerates something you’ve already validated, not something you’re still figuring out.

How to Find the Right Internal Champion

Ignore the job title and focus on influence. The right champion inside a large organization isn’t necessarily the most senior person in the room—it’s the person who can cut through internal red tape, move engineering resources, and advocate across business units.

The three criteria are:

• Pain point intensity. The bigger their problem, the stronger their motivation to push a partnership forward.
• Profit and loss ownership. If your champion can’t move budget, you’ll stall at the finish line.
• Engineering access. Getting bandwidth from the engineering team is one of the strongest signals of real intent—engineering resources are scarce and protected.

And always cross-reference. Use your network to understand who you’re working with before you commit time and trust.

How a Pilot Becomes a Partnership

Treat every pilot like the beginning of a long relationship—because the best ones are. Done well, a pilot creates the conditions for a real commercial relationship to form. Done poorly, it drains resources.

The most important thing you can do before a pilot starts is define what success looks like — jointly, with your partner, in writing. What KPIs matter to them? Who are the decision-makers? What happens if you hit those targets? 

Don’t impose your startup’s KPIs on a partner. The most powerful outcome metric is the one they already track, whether that’s cubic yards moved per hour, ROIC, or on-time delivery rates. Speak their language, and the path to buy-in becomes significantly shorter.

On pricing: never do free. A nominal fee filters out partners with no real intent and ensures skin in the game on both sides. But be deliberate about how you frame it. Pilot pricing is not commercial pricing, and your partner should know that from day one. Anchoring too low creates expectations you’ll struggle to reset later.

Trust Is the Asset That Compounds

When Bedrock deployed a machine onto a job site that turned out to be far more complex than anticipated—too muddy, too deep, not viable for autonomous operation—the team showed up anyway. Fully manual, no return on investment, but on-site as committed. The response from their partner was transformative: a level of trust that no contract could have created.

Companies don’t partner with each other—people do. Investing in relationships, not just deal terms, is what separates transactional partnerships from the ones that define a business.