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Hard-tech innovation. Commercial outcomes when it matters most.

Steven Martens is a hard-tech innovation and commercialization executive with over 30 years of experience moving technologies from lab to market in some of the world’s most demanding environments. He has led teams and initiatives across medical imaging, biological warfare detection, hyperspectral imaging, ag-tech, industrial sensors, and explosion-proof instrumentation—always with a clear mandate: turn advanced technology into revenue.

Hard-tech organizations face long development cycles, technical uncertainty, and demanding customers. Grid 749, led by founder and principal Steven Martens, helps executive teams de-risk commercialization, accelerate adoption, and win high-value deals by combining decades of engineering, product, and business leadership across med tech, ag tech, mining, military, and industrial sectors.

Preferred Partners

Hard-tech and deep-tech CEOs with a working prototype or pilot, but stalled or uneven traction in the market.

Established industrials with R&D or innovation teams that struggle to convert promising research into launched, adopted products.

Investor-backed ventures that need to demonstrate credible commercialization progress to boards, investors, and strategic partners

Challenges & Opportunities

You have built something technically impressive; the constraint is turning that promise into predictable commercial performance.

Your science and engineering talent is strong, but the team lacks the capacity or experience to drive market conversations, pilots, and early sales. You are facing long sales cycles, complex buying groups, and technical due diligence that your existing team is not equipped to navigate alone. Critical decisions—architecture, pricing, positioning, regulatory pathways—are being made without enough commercial perspective at the table.

Customer and investor requirements often exceed your current capabilities, yet visible commercial traction is required for the company to progress. Talented technical founders may hesitate to fully commit to commercialization until they see a clear, de-risked path from prototype to product to scale.

You engage Grid 749 at exactly this point—when the technology is real, the opportunity is large, and the cost of getting the commercialization wrong is no longer acceptable.