How Deridut Built Strategic Partnerships: A Founder’s Guide to Leveraging Big Tech Relationships for Early-Stage Growth

For early-stage startups building in emerging markets, strategic partnerships can be the difference between slow organic growth and rapid market adoption. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Javier Marti shared how Deridut has successfully leveraged partnerships with industry giants like Dosha Telecom, Databricks, and Thales to accelerate their growth in the climate tech space.

Why Partnerships Matter in Emerging Markets

When you’re building something genuinely new, partnerships serve a dual purpose. As Javier explains, “one hand, you need to be together with industry leaders to build something as complex as what we have built. And secondly, they also have an exposure that naturally is going to give you a side exposure that takes you forward.”

This approach has proven particularly valuable for Deridut, helping them secure partnerships with “Dosha Telecom, which is the number nine brand in the world at the moment, according to Forbes, and other partnerships with very well known, respected companies such as Databricks, SRE and Thales, SAS and others.”

Strategic Positioning for Partnership Success

Deridut’s partnership strategy begins with careful market positioning. Rather than competing directly with established players, they’ve positioned themselves at the intersection of two major market segments: “On one hand, we have competition from sensor companies… And on the other hand, we’re sitting in front of all the people that are actually consuming data for risk models.”

This strategic positioning makes them attractive to partners in both segments, as they complement rather than compete with existing solutions.

Using Partnerships to Drive Market Education

In an emerging market, partnerships play a crucial role in market education. For Deridut, “a company like ours is all about awareness. We need to make sure that everybody understands that when you’re tackling a global problem with a global reach, you need to be known by a lot of people.”

Partnerships with recognized industry leaders lend credibility to this educational effort. As Javier notes, “the more you get to be known by the audience, no matter if they’re buyers or not, the better.”

Building a Partnership-First Growth Strategy

When asked about his top go-to-market advice, Javier emphasizes the centrality of partnerships: “Work on your partnerships, surround yourselves and your company with partners who can help you understand how to get to the ultimate market adoption.”

However, he cautions against viewing partnerships in isolation. They need to be part of a broader strategy that includes “direct sales, talking with customers and listening to their pain points and understanding what they could do and they couldn’t do, understanding what could be the ideal solution and seeing whether your product is actually feeling that ideal solution or not.”

The Long-Term Impact of Strategic Partnerships

While partnerships can provide immediate credibility and market access, their real value emerges over time. As Javier explains, when “introducing a product in the market which is as disruptive as we are introducing it,” partnerships help create the market conditions necessary for broader adoption.

This is particularly crucial in slower-moving markets where traditional growth metrics might not tell the whole story. Strategic partnerships can help maintain momentum and build foundation for future growth, even when immediate traction is modest.

For founders building in emerging markets, Deridut’s partnership strategy offers a valuable blueprint: position your company strategically between existing market segments, use partnerships to build credibility and market awareness, and integrate partnership efforts with direct customer engagement to ensure product-market alignment.

The key lesson? In emerging markets, success often depends less on direct competition and more on strategic collaboration with established players who can help create the conditions necessary for market adoption.