WHO WE ARE
We’re Sapphire & Steel, run by Anna-Lisa and Pete. We work with the executive teams and boards of deep tech scaleups in clean energy and medtech, to help science and engineering founders get a first-of-a-kind technology to commercial scale.
THE PROBLEM WE SOLVE
Most of the founders we meet aren’t short on ambition or technical ability. The harder part is getting the technology, commercial, operational and investment roadmaps pointing the same way, and holding customers, suppliers, investors and the team together while it happens. That’s where we spend our time.
WHAT WE ACTUALLY DO
We go inside the business. We work with executive teams on targets, strategy, critical path plans and accountability. We help technical leaders build the commercial confidence to lead their markets, and we work with them to deliver that. We chair, advise and performance-manage boards.
WHERE AND WHEN WE ADD VALUE
We work inside deep tech scaleups at three moments where the right support makes the biggest difference: before a raise, straight after it, and when a company has to redesign its business to turn a technology into a product at scale.
BEFORE THE RAISE: PROFESSIONALISING THE EXEC TEAM
Whether the next hurdle is an investment committee at a VC or a credit committee for large-scale debt finance, the people on the other side of the table are testing the team as much as the technology. Brilliant science and engineering leaders often haven’t yet had to defend their strategy, risks and numbers to people whose job is to find the weak point.
We get the exec team ready for that scrutiny. We pressure-test the strategy and the story, align the pitch, presentation, data room and metrics so they tell one consistent logic line, and prepare the team to negotiate terms from a position of confidence. For debt and project finance, we sharpen how they articulate and mitigate risk, because that is where credit committees concentrate. The aim is a team that walks in as a professional, credible management team rather than a group of founders hoping the technology speaks for itself.
AFTER THE RAISE: BRINGING INVESTORS AND THE EXEC TEAM TOGETHER
One investor described the investment process as falling in love with a business, then going through a painful pre-nup, before finally having to work out how to live with each other once the deal is signed. That last stage is where we come in, and it’s the one most often left to chance.
Right after a raise, the board and executive team have to agree what the money is for, how decisions get made, how performance is judged and how bad news travels. We work with both sides to settle those things early: board design and effectiveness, priorities for deploying the capital, and a working relationship between investor directors and executives that holds up under pressure.
THROUGH SCALE-UP: CHANGE AND TRANSFORMATION
Moving from R&D to delivering a full-scale product for accelerating customer demand changes almost everything about how a company works. It usually means rethinking the business itself: where it should compete, how it makes money, and how it differentiates from incumbents. We help leadership teams design the business and the operating model that can deliver it, from scaling commercial relationships beyond pilots to making the operation scalable through site development and first-of-a-kind manufacturing.
We then stay close to the executive team through the transformation itself. We set performance targets, build critical path plans and put whole-business accountability in place, so that commercial, technical, operational and investment roadmaps move together and the whole company pulls in the same direction as it scales.
WHAT SITS UNDERNEATH
The same toolkit supports all three: customer and market discovery; commercial strategy and route to market; technology adoption and scaling enterprise sales; governance as connective tissue and working rhythm; and leadership, culture and performance management.
We also take part in the wider ecosystem, mentoring with ConceptionX, EarthScale at Imperial, and the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, as well as through leadership roles in industry accelerator programmes including the Shott Scaleup Accelerator at the Royal Academy of Engineering.
WHAT WE DON’T DO
We aren’t finance specialists, and we’re not legal or technical advisors. Where they’re involved, we work alongside them. Our contribution is to strengthen the company around their work. We align commercial, operational and financing roadmaps, govern risk and dependencies, and get the executive team ready to lead the conversation with investors, lenders, customers and partners. The specialists bring the depth in their disciplines, and we make sure the business and its leadership can put it to work.
TESTIMONIAL
CEO, UK ENGINEERING SCALEUP
“Working with Anna-Lisa and Pete over the last three years has been a genuinely special partnership. They came into the business at a time when we were scaling quickly and needed to build a leadership team that could operate at a much higher level together.
The strategy offsites they ran with us were completely brilliant - genuinely the best I’ve ever been part of by a mile. They create a space that is safe enough for people to be honest and open, but demanding enough that everyone leaves having stepped up.
What they bring is a rare combination of clear thinking, emotional intelligence and practical leadership experience. They’ve pushed me to think differently about how I show up as CEO and emboldened my confidence in my leadership style to build the culture we want by design and effort and not by chance.
Their work has strengthened our leadership team, sharpened our thinking, and left the company in a stronger place to execute the next phase.
Working with them has been a joy, and the business is stronger for all of our employees because they were part of the journey.”
DOING REALLY HARD THINGS
OUR PHILOSOPHY
Scaling a deeptech business is extraordinarily hard. Over the last eight years we’ve built a way of working from our own partnership, and it’s what founders respond to.
In that time we’ve developed our own assets, done commercial work with deep tech scaleups, and built relationships with smart leaders across the ecosystem. At the centre of all of it is our partnership.
It didn’t come easily. We’ve seen some eye-opening things and we learn from our own mistakes every day. Every one of those experiences goes into the soft machine (🧠🧠), where we make sense of it, decode it and share it back with the businesses we work with.
That partnership has earned us the trust to engage with boards and customers on behalf of founders, to drive commercial delivery and governance with management teams, and to get the keys to the real engine of growth: the all hands.
It is also a living culture, a Petri dish for examining the impact of behaviour, starting with our own. Our clients use us to understand themselves, their team, their board and their market.
We say the hard things to each other, and we expect the same of you - how we work as a partnership is how we help you work.
That’s a tricky USP to capture in a couple of words, though in hindsight it was there all along. It’s Sapphire & Steel.