The KV Fund seeks to invest in companies in the latter stages of commercialisation. This stage involves progressing a technology to a commercial basis, ensuring it has relevance across several factors: Commercial Relevance, Technology Relevance, and Investment Relevance. This ensures that technologies are solutions to known and defined commercial opportunities, rather than interesting technologies looking for a problem to solve.

Commercial relevance:

Without a high degree of relevance in the market (current and future), even the most interesting technology will struggle to be successful. Commercial Relevance addresses the business viability of a technology looking at various factors such as market size, market need, the competitive landscape, macroeconomic trends and customer needs. As with all technologies, an understanding of the needs of the end user and the ability of the technology to meet these needs in a form acceptable to the end user are keys to the commercialisation process.

Technological Relevance:

A company has to provide evidence that demonstrates that its business model or idea is feasible. While success at the proof of concept stage provides a view into the long term potential, several other factors need to be proven to ascertain whether a technology can make it commercially. These factors include the scalability of the technology, its development roadmap and timing, the funding required to advance the technology, and the pipeline of competing technologies.

Investment relevance:

Upon completion of an understanding of the commercial and technology relevance, KV makes a determination as to whether the opportunity would be appropriate for the KV Fund. While the market for the technology may be favourable, the ability to profit long term needs to be evaluated.

Opportunities will be considered which have the below characteristics: