Building the commercial case for a Strathclyde wastewater metal recovery technology
An ongoing Commercial Champion engagement with the University of Strathclyde. The work has moved a wastewater metal recovery technology through a staged public commercialisation pathway — from qualification, into company creation funding, and toward spinout — with a service-revenue business model and an industrial validation pipeline that has positioned the venture for seed.
The starting position
The technology arrived with strong underlying chemistry and the commercial shape most university IP carries at the start. A patented sorbent-based metal recovery process developed at the University of Strathclyde had been validated at laboratory and prototype scale, with metal recovery loadings an order of magnitude greater than competing technologies and a patent through PCT stage. The chemistry was defensible. The business, as yet, was not.
What was less clear was everything downstream of the science. Which industrial market should be pursued first — plating, mining wastewater, or recycling? What business model would turn a chemistry advantage into a fundable company — unit sales, licensing, or recurring-revenue service? Which industry players would provide the validation strong enough to credential the venture for investors? And how would the project move, deliberately and defensibly, from a research-grade demonstrator to a spinout attracting seed investment?
The University had recognised the commercial potential and qualified the project for a structured public commercialisation pathway with sequential funding gates. The commercial case to move it through those gates did not yet exist in fundable form.
What we did
The engagement was structured around the staged commercialisation pathway. Hatch Oxford’s role began as Commercial Champion during the qualification phase — the structured commercial screen used to assess which university technologies warrant further public investment — and has continued through selection for company creation funding and into pre-spinout preparation. From the outset the work was not a periodic advisory input but a continuous commercial partnership embedded in the venture’s decision-making.
Qualification phase
Commercial Champion work in this phase centred on answering the questions the funding pathway needed to see answered before recommending the project for company creation. We screened candidate applications against commercial pull, technical fit, and time-to-deployment. We ran market sizing across the three candidate industrial segments — plating, mining wastewater, and recycling. And we built the early industry validation pipeline through structured outreach, with repeat engagement secured from tier-one operators in each candidate segment.
The outcome was a named beachhead. Industrial plating and circuit-board manufacture was selected against mining and recycling on the strength of shorter deployment timelines, accessible unit economics relative to incumbent treatment routes, and a defined addressable spend across hundreds of UK and European sites. Mining wastewater remediation was positioned as a high-value secondary market with longer validation cycles that would not suit the venture’s first phase but would re-emerge once the beachhead was established.
Company creation preparation
With the beachhead defined and industry validation in hand, the engagement moved into full pre-spinout commercial development. Work across this phase has included the service-revenue business model with multiple named revenue streams and gross margin projections for both services and unit sales; a four-stage phased capital plan from company creation through seed, Series A, and global scale-up; the investor pipeline across clean-tech and industrial-tech funds, with pitches delivered to or arranged with several; and the engineering design of the modular treatment unit, developed alongside Chris Gregory, Hatch Oxford’s Co-Founder.
The venture was selected for public company creation funding with confirmed University in-kind support. A further co-investment raise is now in progress to complete industrial pilots, submit the regulatory dossier, finalise the exclusive IP licence from the University, and form the spinout.
The commercial move
The most consequential single commercial decision in the engagement was the selection of a service-revenue business model — not unit sales — as the venture’s primary commercial structure.
The default for a deep-tech hardware venture is to sell the product. Customers buy a treatment unit; the venture recognises revenue at sale. The service-revenue model inverts that. Customers pay per cubic metre of wastewater treated, or per kilogram of metal recovered. The venture retains ownership of the unit, captures recurring revenue, and keeps economic exposure to the recovered metal itself. Unit sales and licensing remain in the business model, but as adjacent revenue streams rather than the primary one.
Three consequences follow from that choice. The venture’s revenue becomes recurring and predictable, which makes it materially easier to finance. The economic incentives between venture and customer align — both benefit when more metal is recovered. And the venture retains exposure to upside in metal prices, not just in treatment volume.
For a technology whose fundamental advantage is throughput per unit mass of active material, the service-revenue model is the model that matches the engineering reality. Designing the model that way from the outset — rather than defaulting to unit sales and discovering later that it has mispriced the venture — is a material piece of commercial work in its own right. It is the kind of work that pays for itself many times over once the venture reaches investor conversations.
What the engagement produced
A named beachhead — industrial plating and circuit-board manufacture — sized across hundreds of UK and European sites with a defined addressable annual spend, and mining wastewater positioned as the high-value secondary market.
An industrial validation pipeline of more than two dozen organisations engaged across plating, mining, and recycling segments, with tier-one validation secured from operators in each.
A service-revenue business model with multiple revenue streams and gross margin projections for both service and unit-sale lines.
A four-stage capital plan from company creation through seed, Series A, and global scale-up, with investor pipelines mapped to each stage.
A named investor pipeline across clean-tech and industrial-tech funds, with pitches delivered to or arranged with several.
The engineering design and renderings of the modular treatment unit, produced by Chris Gregory.
A successful application for public company creation funding with confirmed University in-kind support.
An active co-investment raise against a clear plan to industrial pilot completion, regulatory submission, exclusive IP licence finalisation, and spinout formation.
Why it matters
The engagement illustrates what structured commercialisation looks like when the commercial work is embedded in the funding pathway rather than bolted onto it. Staged public pathways — qualification, then company creation, then spinout and seed — give a university technology the benefit of defined decision points and sequential funding gates. The pathway only works, however, when the commercial case is being developed continuously alongside the science, not assembled late for each funding deadline.
Too many university projects treat each stage of the pathway as a separate exercise: a new application, written by a new consultant, from scratch. The technologies that move through the stages most efficiently are those where one team holds responsibility for the commercial case the entire way — sharpening it at each stage rather than rebuilding it. That continuity is often the difference between a promising project and a company that actually forms.
It is the same argument we make in our field notes about why most university spinouts are structurally doomed. The failure mode is structural, and the remedy is a continuous point of commercial accountability through the entire pathway — not a sequence of disconnected commercial reviews.
A note on status
The venture has been selected for public company creation funding and is currently raising co-investment. It is on track to form as a spinout in 2027, with industrial pilots and the next technology readiness milestone ahead within the next eighteen months. This case study describes the commercialisation work that has positioned the venture for those milestones; it does not claim outcomes the venture has not yet reached. Specific industrial counterparties, named investors, and detailed deal postures remain commercially confidential.
