Titrant Applied Research is a deep-tech pre-incubator.
We work with early-stage technology: prototype and proof-of-concept builds, R&D portfolio review, and federal proposal support.
The approach inverts the standard R&D question. Instead of "can we make this work," we ask "what's the cheapest way to disprove this." Only the ideas that can't be disproven advance.
We build what survives.
The Problem
I've watched a lot of projects die, and it usually wasn't because the science or engineering were unsound. It was because there was never a clean path to commercialization — no way to communicate technical and commercial trade-offs in terms the other side could act on.
That gap burns real money. Projects run for months that a single customer call or a rough prototype could have invalidated in a week. Teams test the questions they already know how to test, and the prototype gets built before anyone talks to a customer, because building is what the team is good at.
The cost never shows up anywhere. A concept that died because the science didn't work and a concept that died because nobody tested the right thing first look identical from the outside — same dead project, same postmortem, same lesson written down. One of them was never going to work. The other one you killed by accident.
With one concept, that's a year. With forty, it's a decade, and nothing in your records tells the two apart.
Evaluating a concept properly costs more than the concept looks like it's worth, so nobody does it. The backlog stops being a queue and becomes furniture.
What we do
We find the assumptions a concept actually rests on, rank them by what it would cost to be wrong, and test the load-bearing one first — with the cheapest test that can produce a real answer.
Before the test runs, we write down what result would end the project. Then we run it.
What you get back is a concept that survived something, or a documented reason to stop.
How we work
Build
You have a concept and an argument about it. More analysis only produces more analysis. We build the narrowest version that can settle the question, run it, and tell you what it settled.
Accelerate
You have more concepts than anyone can evaluate or track, and no defensible answer to why you're working on what you're working on. We rank the portfolio against a single standard and keep it ranked as it changes.
Fund
The money exists and you qualify for it, but the proposal is a specialized document in a genre nobody on your team writes in. We write it.
Our Approach
Test before you build. Every engagement starts by naming what has to be true and ranking those assumptions by the cost of being wrong. We target the cheapest tests with the highest bearing on whether the project continues.
A prototype is an instrument. Its job is to answer a question you can't answer any other way, and to be honest when the answer is no. We measure ourselves on engagement outcomes, not billable hours.
You never pay twice for the same thing. Work done at one stage carries into the next. We don't rediscover what we already established and bill you for it again.
We say no. Not every concept should proceed. A documented dead end is a real deliverable, and hearing it early is worth more than the capital you'd spend finding out slowly.
Titrant is new. The judgment behind it isn't.
Founder Daven Northroup Kuder has designed, prototyped, and built five scientific instruments for the International Space Station — more than fifty on-orbit deployments across seven missions, every one on a development and validation cycle under six months. M.Eng. in Bioengineering, UC Berkeley. B.S. in Microbiology and Oceanography, University of British Columbia.
What began as a passion project has evolved into something more. We’re proud of where we’ve been and even more excited for what’s ahead. What sets us apart isn’t just our process—it’s the intention behind it. We take time to understand, explore, and create with purpose at every turn.