Titrant Applied Research is a deep-tech pre-incubator.
"I kept watching good technology die in the same place: between an impressive concept and an applied product.
I've led biological engineering program management at a spaceflight biotechnology company, building hardware that had to work the first time, unattended, in an environment that punishes optimism. I've worked with national labs to commercialize spun-out foundational technology. In both, the pattern was the same. The concepts that died didn't die on the science. They died because nobody found the market in time, or because the funding ran out before the question that mattered got answered.
I've had more ideas than I could ever pursue, and what I always wanted was a fast, cheap way to know which ones deserved the effort.
So I built the firm I kept wishing existed."
— Daven Northroup Kuder, Founder
About Titrant
-
We're a pre-incubator contractor. We take foundational technology from raw concept to the point where it's ready to be commercialized, then hand it off. Our goal is to help create technology companies that can bridge the gap between technical and market.
The method has two halves.
Validation. We work with you to understand the technology, the problem, and the story you want to tell, and produce a fully citable technical and market analysis with ranked R&D efforts — highest value, lowest cost, first.
Execution. We produce the specific artifacts that answer the critical assumptions, on a timeline where the answer still matters.
Neither half is advice. The industry standard is a well-reasoned report nobody can execute on. Our fix was to follow through on our own recommendations. The outcome of the idea should dictate its success, not how many billable hours we counted.
-
A titrant is the reagent of known concentration you add to an unknown solution, in controlled increments, to understand what's actually in it (a process called titration)
That's the work. Small controlled additions to an uncertain thing until it reveals what it is.
-
We are not trying to own your company.
Build and Accelerate engagements are work-for-hire. The technology, the data, and the results are yours. Two exceptions, stated here because you'll find them in the contract anyway:
The method is ours. The process we use to rank assumptions, define evidence standards, and run stage gates is Titrant's background IP. You get the output of it, not the machinery.
Fund engagements sometimes involve a position. A negotiated share of a federal program, or equity where we're developing alongside you. This is agreed in writing before any work starts, never assumed, and never both equity and IP on the same project.
-
We say no. Not every concept should proceed, and telling you early is worth more than the capital wasted finding out slowly.
We don't bill for rediscovery. Work done at one stage carries into the next.
We build. If a question can't be answered through research or interviews, we build the experiment that answers it. An optical sensor system, production rates of an engineered bacterium, rocket fuel compositions — whatever the fastest test is.
The Team
Daven Northroup Kuder
FounderA biological engineer working across bioengineering, synthetic biology, robotics, and environmental agriculture — a range that turns out to matter more than depth in any one of them, because the concepts that reach us rarely sit inside a single field.
He has designed, prototyped, and built five scientific instruments for the International Space Station, totaling more than fifty on-orbit deployments, and has supported seven ISS missions. All of it on development and validation cycles under six months.
M.Eng. in Bioengineering, University of California, Berkeley. B.S. in Microbiology and Oceanography, University of British Columbia. Based in Reno, Nevada.