5 Unconventional Go-to-Market Lessons from Validika’s Battery Analytics Journey

When Validika Diagnostics launched in 2019, conventional wisdom suggested they should grow as fast as possible and own the customer relationship. Instead, they took the opposite approach – growing slowly, positioning as a backend provider, and waiting for the market to mature. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, founder Claudius Jehle shared how these counterintuitive choices helped build a company that now monitors over a gigawatt hour of batteries globally.

Here are the key go-to-market lessons from their journey:

1. Sometimes Being “Second Line” is Better Than Being Front and Center

Rather than building a direct-to-customer platform, Validika made the strategic choice to integrate their technology into existing systems. “We early on decided the software that we’re developing must be integratable into existing fleet management systems, into existing processes in the utility company,” Claudius explains. This meant focusing heavily on API development and partner integration.

While this approach meant giving up some control – “Very bluntly speaking, you’re at the mercy of your reseller” – it enabled faster market penetration through established channels. The key was making their technology easily embeddable: “Early on we decided tech wise to focus on APIs, well documented API and guidelines for partners to integrate our insights that we deliver into their product.”

2. In Deep Tech, Trust Trumps Traditional Marketing

For complex technical products, conventional marketing playbooks often fall short. As Claudius notes, “We are dealing with a very complex technological component. So the market and early adopters and everyone needs to trust you. So you need to come up with a trustable story and not just marketing alone.”

Their approach focused heavily on building credibility through industry presence. “For me, early adopters and finding interested people, my recipe would be to speak at as many events and exhibitions as possible,” Claudius shares. This focus on establishing technical expertise before scaling marketing efforts proved crucial for building market trust.

3. Controlled Growth Can Be a Strategic Advantage

Despite raising venture funding, Validika maintained a deliberately measured growth pace. “We didn’t grow too quick, too large to maintain efficiency in the team and being still able to react on the client needs,” Claudius explains. With about 30 people today, they’ve maintained the agility to adapt while building enough substance to serve enterprise clients.

This controlled growth was particularly important given market dynamics: “The market is not yet able to tell us exactly, like with a specification document or something like that, what they exactly need.” By staying lean, they maintained the flexibility to evolve with market demands.

4. Patient Capital Deployment in Emerging Markets

When building in an emerging market, runway management becomes crucial. “You need patience. You need a Runway that is long enough,” Claudius emphasizes. This patience extended to their go-to-market strategy, as the company spent its first years educating the market and working with early adopters before seeing significant inbound interest.

The payoff came gradually: “Last year was pivotal. It was the first year where really inbound requests were flowing in,” Claudius notes. This validated their approach of maintaining controlled growth while waiting for market maturity.

5. Product Strategy Should Follow Market Evolution

Rather than trying to build a comprehensive solution immediately, Validika focused on becoming a crucial building block that could evolve with the market. “We want to be global. We don’t necessarily want to be in the front line, but we want that most battery information, battery health information, particularly for heavily used batteries, will be provided by us in the background,” Claudius explains.

This approach positions them to scale as the market matures: “This can easily grow our company and the product… to dozens, if not plus $100 million business SaaS business easily.” By focusing on being an essential backend component rather than a full-stack solution, they’ve created multiple paths to scale as the market evolves.

For technical founders building in emerging markets, Validika’s journey offers a compelling alternative to the standard startup playbook. Their success suggests that in deep tech, particularly in markets tied to major infrastructure shifts like electric vehicles, patience and strategic positioning can be more valuable than rapid scaling. Sometimes, the key to building a category-leading company is having the discipline to grow in sync with market readiness rather than ahead of it.