Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Poppy Crum · Giant Step Capital · August 2026
This map counts the United States. In venture, first contact with a company usually happens through an introduction, which means the deals anyone sees are selected by whose network they happened to cross. This map is what sits outside that. The places deep tech and hard tech companies are actually formed, who signs inside each one, and roughly how many of them there are.
University technology transfer offices
The origin point for a large share of quantum, biotech and advanced materials companies, and the one place where the science is visible years before a company exists around it. These offices are staffed, named and reachable, and most of them are trying to find investors rather than avoid them.
Who signs: director of technology transfer, licensing manager, associate vice president for research, the head of the institution’s own venture fund.
200 to 260
US institutions that report licensing activity each year, between them forming roughly 1,000 to 1,200 startups annually
Federal laboratories and national labs
Where energy storage, autonomous systems and space adjacent work gets proven at a scale a seed stage company cannot fund on its own. Each lab publishes technologies it wants commercialized, and each has a person whose job is to place them. A named role with a public mandate is unusual in this category.
Who signs: commercialization or partnerships director, technology deployment lead, entrepreneur in residence program manager, chief research officer.
Roughly 300
federal laboratories and research centers across the agencies, of which 17 are Department of Energy national labs
Federal research award winners
The only segment on this page published on a schedule. Small research businesses win non dilutive federal awards continuously across the agencies, the announcements carry the company and the technology, and an award means someone has already put the science through review. The trigger is a date rather than a rumor.
Who signs: founder or chief executive, chief scientist, principal investigator, the first commercial hire once there is one.
3,000 to 5,000
US small businesses taking a federal research award in a year; the figure moves with appropriations, so it is a band by necessity
Hard tech studios, accelerators and university funds
The layer that sees a company before the priced round and has every reason to share it with an investor who understands the physics. Worth being straight about a limit: there is no register of these, and the list changes every year, so this group is identified one at a time rather than bought.
Who signs: managing director, program director, the partner who runs the deep tech track, the university fund manager.
No public register
named and tracked individually; the difficulty of assembling this list is the reason the segment stays open
Corporate venture and strategic co investors
In frontier categories the strategic is often the first customer as well as the co investor, which makes this group a source of validation and revenue at once. It is also the least consistent group to reach, because the mandate sits somewhere different in every company.
Who signs: head of corporate venture, director of strategic investments, chief technology officer, head of innovation or emerging technology.
Several hundred active in the US
no official register of corporate venture units exists; activity is self reported and moves year to year, so this is described rather than counted

Where the openings are

1
The counted tiles come to roughly 3,500 to 5,560 named US organizations. An introduction reaches whichever part of that already overlaps someone’s network. The rest are not weaker companies, they are simply unaware, and in deep tech unaware usually means pre round rather than passed over.
2
Two of these segments have a public mandate to talk to investors. Transfer offices and federal lab commercialization teams are measured on placing technology, not on protecting it. An approach to a person whose job is exactly that conversation is not really a cold approach, it is an introduction nobody has made yet.
3
Federal awards are the one dated trigger in a category that has almost none. Deep tech founders do not run on a fundraising calendar, they run on milestones, and the award announcement is the only milestone published for you. Watching 3,000 to 5,000 award winners a year for the ones that matter is mechanical work, and mechanical work is what a channel is for.
4
The buyer here is a role, not an organization. Director of technology transfer, lab partnerships lead, program director. Those seats are named, they turn over, and a new one arrives looking for investors to build a relationship with. Reaching several thousand of them on a schedule is a coverage problem rather than a reputation one.
Built from public market data covering the United States, counts banded deliberately. Institution counts come from the annual reporting those bodies publish themselves, so they cover the organizations that report rather than every one that exists. Award counts move year to year with federal appropriations. Studios, accelerators and corporate venture units are not enumerated in any public register and are described rather than counted. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
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