The number your investor is quietly scoring you on

The partner across the table leans forward and asks the question casually, between the coffee and the small talk about the weather. So where would you put your commercial readiness? The founder nods. She has answered harder questions this morning. She can recite her technology readiness level in her sleep, TRL 6, validated in a relevant environment, the slide is in the deck. But commercial readiness has a number too, it turns out, and she does not know hers. She says something confident about traction and changes the subject. The partner writes something down. It is probably not "traction".

I have some version of this conversation every month. Technical founders can place their technology on a nine-point scale to the decimal, because every grant application and every investor update has asked them to for years. Almost none of them know there is a parallel scale for the commercial side, and that a growing number of investors and grant programmes score them on it, formally or in their heads, before they decide anything.

TRL measures your technology. CRL measures whether anyone will pay for it.

The scale is called the Commercial Readiness Index, and it was built by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, ARENA, as a companion to the technology readiness levels everyone already knows. Their original 2014 framework document describes nine levels, starting at "an idea that might have commercial value" and ending at "a mature, widely deployed product in a competitive market". It was designed for renewable energy projects, but the questions it asks are universal. Is there a market? Who is in it? What do they pay? Can you reach them? Can you do it twice?

The reason investors like it is the reason founders find it uncomfortable. A TRL score tells them your science works. A CRL score tells them whether the science is a business. Most deeptech companies walk into a seed round at TRL 5 or 6 and CRL 2, and then wonder why the term sheet prices them like the risk is enormous. It is. The technology risk has been engineered down. The commercial risk has barely been touched.

CRL 1 to 3: you have a hypothesis, not a market

At the bottom of the scale you have identified a problem, and you believe your technology solves it. That belief might be right. It is not evidence. At CRL 1 the customer segments are guesses. At CRL 2 you have started testing the guesses, usually through friendly conversations and conference chats, the kind where everyone is polite and nobody has a budget. At CRL 3 you have done real market research and you can describe your first customer in specific terms: a named industry, a named role, a named pain, a rough willingness to pay.

The trap at these levels is mistaking politeness for signal. A professor of mine in Delft used to say that everyone loves a clever prototype and nobody has to pay for loving it. Interest is free. The only currency that moves you up the scale is commitment: someone's time, someone's data, someone's signature, eventually someone's money.

CRL 4 to 6: the uncomfortable middle where most deeptech dies

From CRL 4 upwards, the scale stops caring about your research and starts caring about transactions. CRL 4 is a first pilot with a real customer under real conditions. CRL 5 is multiple pilots, or a pilot plus letters of intent, some proof that the first one was not a fluke or a favour. CRL 6 is the first properly commercial deal: a paid deployment, a supply agreement, a contract that would hurt to lose.

This is the stretch where I see the most promising European deeptech companies stall, and it is rarely the technology that stalls them. The pilot runs, the results are good, and then nothing happens, because nobody agreed in advance what would happen next. (I wrote a whole article about that failure mode, and the five things to settle before anyone plugs anything in.) Or the pilot goes fine and the founder discovers the person who championed it cannot actually buy anything, because the budget lives three floors up with someone who has never heard of them. The climb from CRL 4 to CRL 6 is not an engineering problem. It is a sales problem, and for most technical founders it is the first sales problem they have ever had.

CRL 7 to 9: repeatability is the whole game

Higher up, the scale measures something founders often forget to want: a commercial engine that works without heroics. CRL 7 means you have sold the same thing to more than one customer, in a way you could describe and repeat. CRL 8 means multiple market segments, reference customers who take calls from your prospects, pricing that has survived negotiation. CRL 9 is the boring, beautiful end state: steady commercial deployment in a competitive market.

Notice what is missing from that description. Nowhere does it say the founder closed every deal personally. A company where the CEO is still the only person who can sell is, whatever its revenue, not commercially mature. That is not an insult. It is a diagnosis, and it is treatable, but only if someone names it.

Investors score you on evidence, not enthusiasm

Here is the part that matters for your next round. When an investor asks about commercial readiness, they are not asking for a number. They are asking what proof exists that a stranger will pay for this. The answer scales with the evidence you can put on the table, and the evidence has a natural order. I think of it as a ladder.

Each rung is worth more than the one below it. Named problem interviews beat a market report. A written pilot agreement beats verbal interest. A letter of intent beats a pilot that produced only compliments. A paid pilot beats a free one. A second paid deal beats the first. You can tell an investor you are CRL 5, but what they hear is the rung you are standing on, not the number you said. Founders who understand this stop arguing about their score and start collecting the next piece of proof.

The counter-argument: some investors call this box-ticking

Fair warning: not everyone takes the scale seriously, and their objection is worth hearing. The criticism, which I have heard from more than one deeptech investor, is that readiness frameworks reward companies that are good at paperwork. A charismatic founder with a sharp deck can claim CRL 4 with zero customers, and a brilliant company can look bad on the scale because it sells something genuinely new that no buyer category exists for yet. The Carbon Trust's work on commercial maturity makes a version of this point: the index is a policy tool, useful for comparing projects, not a verdict on any single company.

Both things are true. A score without evidence behind it is theatre. But the founders who dismiss the framework entirely miss what it is actually for. The number is worthless. The conversation it forces is not. Sitting down and honestly asking "what proof do we have, and what would the next level even look like?" is one of the cheapest strategy exercises a technical team can do, and it surfaces the uncomfortable gaps while they are still cheap to fix.

How to move one level in ninety days

Three moves, in order, for a founder sitting at CRL 2 or 3, which is most of the teams I work with.

First, write down your first paying customer as a person, not a sector. Not "semiconductor manufacturers" but a role, a company size, a geography, and the sentence they would use to describe their own problem. If that exercise is hard, the ICP tool walks through it, and the article on choosing a first industrial customer covers the trade-offs.

Second, go and have five real problem conversations with people who match that description. Not pitches. Conversations about their problem, in their words, recorded in their vocabulary. Five sounds small. It is enough to find out whether your hypothesis survives contact, and it costs you two weeks.

Third, if you have a pilot running or coming, get the pass mark and the next step in writing before it starts. This is the single highest-leverage move on the whole scale, because it converts a technical event into a commercial instrument, and it is the difference between a pilot that produces a result and a pilot that produces a decision.

None of this requires a commercial hire. It requires honesty about which rung you are on, and ninety days of deliberate work on the next one.

Common questions

What is a commercial readiness level?

A commercial readiness level (CRL) is a score from one to nine that describes how commercially mature a technology or company is, from an untested market idea (CRL 1) to a widely deployed product in a competitive market (CRL 9). It is the commercial counterpart to the technology readiness level (TRL) scale.

Who invented the commercial readiness index?

The Commercial Readiness Index was developed by the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), originally to assess renewable energy projects alongside their technical maturity. It has since been adopted more broadly, including by European grant programmes and deeptech investors.

What CRL do investors expect at seed stage?

There is no universal bar, but most deeptech seed investors look for CRL 3 to 5: a validated problem, a clearly defined first customer, and ideally a paid pilot or letters of intent. What matters more than the number is the evidence behind it.

What is the difference between TRL and CRL?

TRL measures how proven the technology is, from concept to validated system. CRL measures how proven the market is, from hypothesis to repeatable revenue. A company can be TRL 8 and CRL 2 at the same time: excellent science, no customers. Many are.

If you recognise yourself somewhere in the lower half of this scale, that is normal, and it is fixable. It is also the exact gap we work on at SLSCRW, so if you want a second pair of eyes on where you actually stand, tell us what you have built. Worst case, you leave with an honest number.