Welcome to the 106th edition of Deep Tech Catalyst, the educational channel from The Scenarionist where science meets venture!
Deep tech often lives far from the spotlight—down in mines, factories, and remote sites where safety, uptime, and unit economics matter more than headlines.
It’s a world where technology is judged not (only) by demos, but by whether it can survive harsh conditions, move the needle on cost per ton, and scale across a small—but global—set of demanding customers.
Today’s question is: what does it actually take to take a mining tech company from a lab prototype to a successful acquisition?
On this week’s episode of Deep Tech Catalyst, I sat down with Alexandre Cervinka, Exited Founder of Newtrax Technologies (acquired by Sandvik in 2019) and Angel Investor, to unpack how he built and scaled a mining tech company from early experiments to a successful exit.
Key takeaways from the episode:
🎯 Niche Dominance Is a Strategy, Not a Slogan
Picking a tightly defined global niche—like underground hard rock mines—and committing to dominating it gives every team “vector” a clear direction and filters which opportunities deserve attention.
📊 ROI-Driven Sales Win Complex Industrial Deals
In B2B industrial environments, no one buys on vision alone. Building a living ROI model around concrete use cases—lost equipment, ramp congestion, cost-per-ton improvements—turns abstract digitalization into numbers that internal decision makers can defend.
📡 Direct Access to End Users Shapes the Roadmap
Partners and distributors can open doors, especially in new regions, but sustainable advantage comes from direct relationships with operations, maintenance, and safety teams underground. That proximity is what keeps product development anchored in real operational pain.
🚫 Saying No Is Core to Strategy
Attractive adjacent deals—like large open-pit projects—can quietly derail focus. Ruthlessly declining off-niche opportunities is what keeps the organization aligned and gives a company a credible shot at truly dominating its chosen market segment.
BEYOND THE CONVERSATION — STRATEGIC INSIGHTS FROM THE EPISODE
Anchoring a Venture in a Single, Global Niche
For a small, mining tech B2B venture, trying to serve multiple markets is usually less a sign of ambition than of dilution. The alternative is to select one specific segment, understand it in depth, and design the entire business around the goal of dominating that slice of the world.
In this framing, “strategy” stops being an abstract concept and becomes a constraint: every engineering hour, every sales trip, and every hire should reinforce the same direction of travel.
The question is no longer “where else could this technology apply?”, but “how do we become the obvious choice in this one market, globally?”.
Choosing Underground Hard Rock Mines as the Beachhead
In the case discussed, that beachhead was underground hard rock mechanized mines—deep metal mines with complex, safety-critical operations.
The founding team did not start inside this industry; they were pulled toward it by partners who saw a clear fit between a technology stack (hardware + software) and unresolved operational problems underground.
What turned this from an abstract opportunity into a true niche strategy was direct exposure. Visiting mines, and sitting with operations managers revealed 3 attractive characteristics:
The operations were complex
The incentives to improve safety and productivity were strong
The number of relevant sites worldwide was finite and mappable
In other words, it was both painful enough to matter and bounded enough to be “dominated” by a focused startup.
Within that niche, the mission took a clear shape: help underground mines become safer and more efficient, and in doing so, reduce their environmental footprint.
To justify investment at the mine level, the system also had to improve cost per ton: fewer minutes wasted at the start of a shift looking for equipment, less congestion on ramps, smoother traffic flow, and better use of existing assets.
Commercialization Strategy and ROI Model
The entry point into mining came through strategic partners who were already embedded in the industry and could see how a new device might address a range of unresolved problems underground.
In the earliest phase, these partners acted as translators and guides.
They introduced the team to mine operators, framed the issues in language the industry understood, and opened doors that would have been difficult to access directly.
The natural evolution was toward direct global sales.
The company moved from relying on partners for access to building its own relationships with operations managers, maintenance leaders, and safety teams underground.
That proximity to the end user proved critical.
It not only shortened feedback loops but also provided a much clearer line of sight into which problems mattered most and how the technology needed to evolve to address them.
In the context of B2B industrial technology, the lesson is straightforward: partners can open the first doors, but enduring value creation depends on direct, long-term engagement with the people who actually use and depend on the system.
Building an ROI Model Around Real Bottlenecks
In this environment, selling on vision alone was never going to be enough. Underground mines are capital-intensive businesses, and each new system competes with many other potential investments.
To win those internal prioritization battles, the technology had to be tied directly to measurable financial outcomes.
The company built a detailed ROI model in the form of a spreadsheet that captured the different ways the system could reduce cost per ton while improving safety. That model was not static; it evolved with each customer conversation.
Sitting down with the economic buyer—typically an operations manager or equivalent—the team would walk through the assumptions, line by line, and connect specific applications to that particular mine’s context.
Some applications were simple and easy to grasp.
One of the earliest use cases was around lost equipment.
At the start of a shift, crews would go underground without knowing exactly where key machines were located. By using the system to track equipment, mines could start each shift with full visibility on asset location, cutting wasted time and improving overall efficiency.
In another case, the main bottleneck was traffic congestion on the ramp—a critical artery in an underground operation.
Better traffic control, enabled by real-time data on truck movements, allowed one mine to increase the number of trucks reaching the surface each shift. That single additional load per shift had a direct, quantifiable impact on cost per ton.
As the company expanded its footprint, the model accumulated more of these applications.
Over time, it captured around 30 different ways in which customers were using the system to improve safety and productivity.
When visiting a new mine, the team could present this catalogue of real-world use cases and collaboratively filter out the ones that did not apply. In most cases, a subset remained that clearly resonated with the mine’s operational challenges.
Crucially, this exercise was not only a sales tool. It was also a structured way to learn.
The discussion around ROI surfaced how each operation actually worked, what constraints mattered most, and where incremental improvements would be most valuable.
Those conversations, repeated across many sites, helped shape the roadmap far more effectively than abstract product planning could have done.
ROI-Driven Sales in a Complex Decision Environment
With contract sizes measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars over the lifetime of a customer, these were not impulse purchases.
Each sale involved a complex decision-making unit—a kind of internal jury that had to be convinced the system deserved capital ahead of competing projects.
In that context, ROI-driven sales were not a nice-to-have; they were the only viable route. Internally, mines would run their own financial analyses to compare this project against others vying for the same budget.
If the vendor could not clearly articulate the return on investment and provide a structured way to quantify it, the project would struggle to advance.
Mastering this dimension became a core competence.
Over time, the sales process evolved into a collaborative exploration of where value could be created, grounded in operational data and economic logic rather than generic claims.
For founders building B2B industrial technology, the pattern is important: the value proposition becomes tangible when it is systematically translated into cost, throughput, and safety metrics that matter to a complex, ROI-driven buying process.
Founder-Led B2B Sales and Early Adopters
A recurring theme in this story is that sales was not an abstract function delegated to others; it was a survival skill learned under pressure.
After an early angel round was partially burned on ventures that did not work, the founders were given a very clear constraint: there were roughly six months left to generate sales or accept that the company would be shut down.
That ultimatum pushed sales out of the realm of theory.
Cold calling, which is easy to romanticize or dismiss in the abstract, became a daily reality. Rejection was constant, the hit rate was low, and very little about it felt glamorous. But it was the forcing function that turned the founder into a salesperson, not by preference but by necessity.
Sales effort only makes sense if it is pointed at the right targets.
Once the niche had been defined—underground hard rock mechanized mines—the next step was to translate that definition into a concrete set of accounts.
Rather than thinking in terms of “the market” in the abstract, the team built what was referred to as a hit list: a named, finite set of operations that fit the beachhead criteria.
In the context of B2B industrial technology, a beachhead market is often not thousands of customers; it can easily be a few hundred globally.
That scale is large enough to build a company, but small enough that every account can be identified, researched, and tracked.
Within each account, the focus turned to specific roles: operations managers, maintenance leads, safety managers, and others who formed part of the internal decision-making unit.
These were the people who both felt the operational pain and had a voice when capital projects were prioritized. Reaching them required a mix of channels—phone, email, and any credible way to get an introduction.
“Playing in Traffic”
Direct outreach was necessary, but not sufficient. The team also needed to show up where potential champions naturally gathered.
That meant identifying the “watering holes” of the industry—technical conferences, trade events, and professional forums where operations and engineering leaders spent time.
With a limited budget, classic marketing was not an option. Instead, the company invested in presenting technical papers at conferences. This approach served multiple purposes at once.
It positioned the team as serious technical contributors rather than generic vendors, created a reason for people to engage, and kept costs relatively low compared to conventional advertising.
The mindset behind this was described as “playing in traffic.”
Rather than waiting for interest to appear, the founder spent long stretches on the road, especially in the first few years. Within North America, that included long drives—up to twelve hours—to reach remote mining camps, along with cheap flights, multi-stop itineraries, and nights in low-cost hotels or even airports.
As international expansion began, the approach evolved. In these regions, especially where language and cultural barriers were more pronounced, the company initially relied on distributors to provide warm introductions.
Here again, there was a filter: the right distributor was one already selling complementary products into the same mines, with established relationships and a sales rhythm that could accommodate one more offering.
Joint road trips with these partners, visiting multiple customers in a week, brought concentrated exposure to new markets without the overhead of building a local presence from scratch.
Selling Capability (While the Product is Still Unfinished)
One of the hardest phases—especially in B2B industrial technology—is when the technology works, but the product is not yet fully finished.
That was exactly the context of the early sales efforts.
The company had a technology stack and a clear sense of the problems it wanted to address in mining, but the system was still evolving.
Under those conditions, the sale depended on two elements.
First, the ability to demonstrate the underlying technology in a way that made its potential obvious—showing what it could do rather than only describing it in the abstract.
Second, the ability to credibly convey that the team could close the gap between what existed today and what the mine actually needed.
Early adopters, in this context, were not self-declared.
They emerged from conversations with individuals and organizations that were frustrated by a concrete problem and willing to make a bet on an unfinished solution.
The fact that the team already had a track record of building solutions in other markets mattered. It signaled they could move quickly from a technology demonstration to a deployable product, even if the domain was new.
This is an important nuance for founders: in the earliest deals, customers are not just buying what the product is today; they are buying the team’s ability to deliver what the product needs to become.
Scaling Commercialization with Capital-Efficient Operations
A striking aspect of this story is how little early capital was spent on building internal structure and how much was directed toward simply reaching customers.
When the first angel check arrived, the priority was not to hire a sales team or invest in marketing infrastructure.
The priority was to fund founder-led sales: plane tickets, long drives, basic accommodation, and the minimum out-of-pocket costs needed to get in front of decision makers.
This approach reflects a broader allocation principle that is highly relevant for Deep Tech founders: in the earliest stages, the most valuable use of capital on the commercial side is not branding or polished collateral, but direct access to customers.
Every dollar that goes into being physically present at the mine—seeing operations, sitting with managers, understanding problems—creates learning that no second-hand research can substitute.
Leveraging Distributors and Trade Commissioners to Enter New Regions
Geographic expansion added another layer to the commercialization strategy. In the early years, most customer contact was direct and concentrated in North America, where language and distance were manageable from a Montreal base.
As the company looked beyond that region, the cost and complexity of going it alone increased.
Here, the company leaned on two types of leverage.
The first was institutional support. In the Canadian context, trade commissioners attached to embassies abroad played a practical role. These officials had visibility into local industrial ecosystems and could introduce the company to potential distributors that already served mining clients in their markets.
The second was the distributors themselves. The goal was not to sign any intermediary willing to carry the product, but to find those whose existing portfolio and customer base were already aligned with underground hard rock operations.
Once a suitable distributor was identified, the model was hands-on rather than arm’s-length. The founder would fly into the region and join the distributor for intensive road trips, visiting several customers in a single week.
This allowed the company to benefit from warm introductions and local knowledge while still maintaining direct exposure to the end users and their feedback.
Ruthless Focus as the Path to Market Domination
One of the most vivid images from the conversation is the idea of every employee as a vector.
As a company grows beyond 20 people, each individual brings energy, skills, and opinions—each vector pointing in a direction.
Strategy, in this view, is about alignment: getting all those vectors to point the same way so that their force adds up rather than cancels out.
Focus is what makes that possible. If the company is clear that its mission is to dominate one specific niche—here, underground hard rock metal mines—then every team, from engineering to sales, knows what “forward” means.
Product decisions, sales targets, hiring priorities: they all reinforce the same trajectory.
Without that clarity, vectors begin to drift—toward adjacent markets, custom projects, or one-off opportunities that look attractive but dilute momentum.
Saying No to “Attractive but Off-Niche” Opportunities
The real test of focus is not in what a company chooses to pursue, but in what it is willing to decline. In this case, the pressure showed up in the form of adjacent opportunities—such as large open-pit mines—that sat just outside the defined niche.
Salespeople would sometimes arrive with what sounded like a dream lead: in the case discussed, a huge open-pit project, possibly worth tens of millions of dollars, with strong initial interest.
On paper, it looked compelling. The customer profile was related to existing clients, the ticket size was large, and the potential short-term revenue was hard to ignore.
Yet these opportunities cut across the core strategy.
Open-pit mines, while part of the same broader industry, are operationally and structurally different from underground hard rock operations. Serving them properly would have required new product adaptations, different workflows, and a shift in commercial focus.
The response was deliberately ruthless: “No, this is outside our target market; we are not going to respond.”
Saying yes to a large but misaligned deal would have pulled engineering, sales, and management attention away from the chosen niche. Over time, enough of those compromises would erode the company’s ability to be the best in the world at the specific thing it had set out to do.
For founders, this highlights an uncomfortable but important reality: serious focus means turning down opportunities that look attractive in isolation but are strategically off-axis.
When Years of Focus Make the Hand Fit the Glove
Focus also compounds in a quieter way. By committing to a single niche over many years, the fit between the product and the market gradually becomes more natural—“the hand fits the glove.”
In the early stages, even with a clear niche, the alignment is imperfect. Each new customer surfaces gaps and requires some degree of adaptation.
Over time, however, the repeated cycle of deployment, feedback, and refinement within the same type of operation builds a kind of structural expertise.
This accumulated fit is not something that can be replicated quickly by a new entrant or a generalized solution. It is the product of repeatedly solving variations of the same problem in the same context, and folding those learnings back into the core offering.
The moment when the company began closing deals in places like India and Russia was a concrete signal that this had happened.
These were not “friendly” markets. They had local suppliers and different operating conditions. Winning there suggested that the solution was not merely adequate, but truly competitive on a global stage within its chosen niche.
What It Means to Truly Dominate a B2B Industrial Niche
The endgame of this strategy is not vague market presence; it is dominance. In this context, “dominating a niche” is not just rhetorical. It has a quantitative benchmark: serving more than 50% of the relevant customers in that clearly defined segment.
For underground hard rock mechanized mines, that meant aiming to become the default provider of digitalization systems for operators that fit the target profile.
The company did not set out to be one option among many, or to own a small share of a broad, ill-defined category. It designed its strategy around the idea that it could, over time, secure the majority of serious buyers in its specific, global niche.
This framing has two implications.
First, it raises the bar on what counts as success: a handful of impressive logos is not enough.
Second, it reinforces the logic of focus.
A company cannot realistically dominate multiple industrial niches at once, especially not in its early and growth stages. It can, however, build an exceptionally strong position in one, provided it is willing to align every vector—people, capital, product, and time—around that singular objective.
