Investor Pitch Q & A Briefing / Part III

Go-to-Market & Vision

A clear, defensible plan for market entry, revenue growth, and a successful long-term outcome.

This briefing addresses the core business and strategic questions behind the Edge-Forge commercial roadmap and investor opportunity.

Go-to-Market & Sales Strategy

Your target markets—maritime shipping and the DoD—are notoriously difficult to break into. Who is your first customer, and how do you plan to land them?

Our go-to-market strategy is built on a "land and expand" model, starting with high-impact, paid pilots. Our first target customer segment is mid-sized commercial maritime logistics firms that are highly sensitive to SATCOM costs but nimble enough to adopt new technology quickly. We are already in early-stage discussions with companies in this space. We land them by leading with an undeniable ROI—our $25,000, 90-day paid pilot is designed to prove a 90% reduction in their data-transmission costs on a small subset of their fleet. The data from that pilot becomes the internal business case for a fleet-wide, multi-year SaaS contract.

What is your sales cycle? How long does it take to get from a first meeting to a signed pilot, and then to a full enterprise contract?

We have a two-phase sales cycle.

Phase 1 (Pilot): The cycle for a paid pilot is rapid, approximately 45 to 60 days. Because the technical integration is minimal—our sidecar model requires no changes to their core systems—and the financial commitment is low, the decision-maker is typically a Director of Operations or IT, not the C-suite.

Phase 2 (Enterprise Conversion): Following a successful 90-day pilot, the conversion to a full enterprise SaaS contract is projected to take an additional 4 to 6 months. At this stage, we are working with their legal, procurement, and executive teams, using the pilot's performance data to justify the larger, multi-year agreement.

Beyond your personal network, how will you build a sales pipeline? Are you hiring a sales team?

Initially, our pipeline is driven by targeted, founder-led outreach focused on two channels: direct engagement with commercial CIOs and CTOs, and leveraging my existing network within the defense contracting ecosystem (NAVWAR, NIWC). The capital from this seed round will be used to make our first key hire: a VP of Business Development with deep experience in both enterprise SaaS sales and federal contracting. This individual will build out a small, specialized team focused on converting our pilot successes into scalable, repeatable revenue.

Business Model & Financials

Your SaaS pricing seems reasonable, but how did you land on those numbers? Are they based on market comparables, or are they value-based?

Our pricing is value-based, directly tied to the ROI we deliver. Our fee is a fraction of the direct, hard-dollar savings our customers will see. For example, a heavy edge node license at $255/month is insignificant compared to the thousands of dollars a shipping company saves on SATCOM bills per vessel, per month by achieving 90% data reduction. We are not selling software; we are selling a quantifiable increase in their operational efficiency and profit margin. This value-based approach gives us strong pricing power and the flexibility to introduce our 30–50% "IP Premium" once the patents are granted.

Your financial model projects $1.35M in ARR by Year 2. How many customers is that? Walk me through the math.

That projection is deliberately conservative and is based on securing just three initial enterprise customers. The math is:

Customer 1 (Maritime):One central hub license ($50k) plus 200 heavy edge nodes at $255/month per vessel. That's $662,000 in ARR from a single shipping client.

Customer 2 (Industrial SCADA):One hub license ($50k) plus 1,000 remote sensor nodes at $50/month. That's $650,000 in ARR.

Customer 3 (Defense Pilot): A single Phase II SBIR or DIU prototype contract easily accounts for an additional $400k to $1M in non-dilutive revenue.

Just two mid-sized commercial clients and one defense contract gets us well past our $1.35M target, fully justifying our path to a premium Series A valuation.

Long-Term Vision & Exit Strategy

Where do you see this technology in five years? Are you a feature or a company?

We are a platform, not a feature. In five years, the Edge-Forge protocol will be the industry-standard synaptic layer for the disconnected edge. Our core engine will be embedded in thousands of devices across maritime, energy, and defense, with a robust developer ecosystem building on top of our API. While our initial product is a sidecar, the long-term vision is to be the foundational technology that enables a new generation of truly autonomous, resilient applications to exist where they can't today.

What is the ultimate exit strategy for this company? How do we, as investors, get our return?

While our primary focus is on building an enduring, profitable company, the nature of our technology creates two highly probable and lucrative exit pathways within a 5–7 year timeframe:

Strategic Acquisition by a Cloud Giant (e.g., AWS, Microsoft): We solve a fundamental weakness in their current edge offerings. As the market for the "true disconnected edge" grows, owning our protocol would be a massive strategic accelerator for them.

Acquisition by a Major Defense Prime (e.g., Lockheed, Northrop Grumman): Our protocol is a key enabler for JADC2 and next-generation tactical networks. As these programs mature, owning our IP would give a prime contractor a powerful, proprietary advantage in bidding for the next wave of multi-billion dollar defense contracts.

In either scenario, our deep-tech classification and defensible IP position us for a premium acquisition multiple, delivering a significant return for our early investors.