7 Go-To-Market Lessons From Building a $55M Sustainable Aviation Fuel Company

7 Go-To-Market Lessons From Building a $55M Sustainable Aviation Fuel Company

Most GTM advice assumes you’re moving fast. Ship quickly, iterate, find product-market fit in months. But what if your technology requires 15 years of development before you can even think about commercial scale?

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Mukund Karanjikar, CEO of CleanJoule, a sustainable aviation fuel producer that’s raised $55 million, shared lessons from a go-to-market journey that started in 2009 with four walls, a roof, and no defined plan. His playbook contradicts nearly everything you’ll read in typical startup literature, and that’s precisely what makes it valuable for founders building in deep tech, climate tech, or any category where the physics can’t be rushed.

Lesson 1: Patience Is Your Primary Competitive Advantage

In traditional B2B SaaS, speed is everything. In deep tech, patience is the filter that eliminates competitors.

“The very first virtue that you need is patience,” Mukund says about navigating government contracts, but the principle applies to the entire deep tech GTM motion. “You may have the next best idea after sliced bread, but it is still the next best idea. Government does not move at the same rate as a starry eyed entrepreneur wants to move.”

The tactical insight: most founders will quit before solving the hard problem. CleanJoule spent three years just framing the problem correctly. They went down “many dark alleys, coming back, restarting” before winning their first government contract in 2012.

The barrier isn’t technical. It’s temporal. Can you sequester 20 years of your life? If not, Mukund says, “I would think twice and three times and four times.” That’s not discouragement. It’s qualification criteria. The founders who survive are the ones who commit to the timeline upfront.

Lesson 2: Government Slowness Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Most founders complain about bureaucracy. Mukund reframed it as a competitive moat.

“That barrier does two things,” he explains. “One is it doesn’t let pass non optimal solutions, but even optimal solutions when they are about to pass, it’s like that large diamond they just found. It’s not shined diamond. Your innovation may be that largest diamond, but until it is going through that process of shining it, you really don’t have a value on it.”

The tactical approach to government contracts: read rejection reviews, even if you want to tear them up. Learn from them. Hit back harder. Understand that when Department of Defense funds your work, “they have their hand on your throat, which means you are supposed to deliver something. It’s a contractual agreement between the government as a customer and you as the performer.”

This creates accountability that venture capital often doesn’t provide. You’re not burning through runway hoping to figure it out. You have deliverables, timelines, and consequences.

Lesson 3: Skip Standard VC Until You Have No Other Choice

Here’s where Mukund’s GTM strategy diverges most radically from conventional wisdom. CleanJoule didn’t raise venture capital for 14 years.

“Some people do need to understand that standard venture capital model may be not for them,” Mukund says. “Those early years, you don’t need as much money as you need time. Skip the standard venture capital investment all along, forget about that, because they are not going to be your friends in the journey to come.”

The logic: standard VC firms operate on seven-year fund cycles. Deep tech often requires longer. The incentive misalignment creates pressure to show traction on timelines that don’t match the physics of your innovation.

Instead, CleanJoule used government contracts to fund development from 2009 to 2023. This worked because their technology addressed national security concerns and supply chain resiliency. The Department of Defense buys 4 billion gallons of aviation fuel annually across the world.

The principle: find customers whose incentives align with your development timeline. For CleanJoule, that was the US government. For other deep tech companies, it might be large enterprises with long-term strategic needs.

Lesson 4: Build Your Cap Table as a GTM Strategy

When CleanJoule finally raised their Series A in 2023, the investor composition told a story about go-to-market strategy, not just capital formation.

Three airlines from three different countries participated: Frontier in the US, Volaris in Mexico, and Wizz in Hungary. These weren’t passive investors. They signed offtake agreements, committing to purchase large volumes at a future date while also investing capital.

“We were very selective in type of investors we choose because that money is for future performance,” Mukund explains. “You need those strategic partnerships because you are in it for that long haul.”

The round was led by Indigo Partners, led by aviation industry veteran Bill Franke. Gen Zero, Temasek’s climate tech investment arm, joined alongside Clean Hill Partners, a private equity firm focused on decarbonization.

The tactical lesson: at commercial scale, your investors should be your first customers, your distribution partners, or domain experts who can open doors that capital alone cannot.

Lesson 5: Choose Your Disruption Battles Carefully

One of CleanJoule’s most important GTM decisions was what not to disrupt. Their sustainable aviation fuel is “drop-in” compatible, requiring zero changes to existing aircraft, pipelines, or infrastructure.

“You’re already solving a very hard problem, which is can I make new type of hydrocarbons and compete with an extremely efficient industry called oil and gas,” Mukund says. “While we are at it, can I also sell it to an extremely conventional but highly efficient industry called aviation that hesitates to change anything. You go to them and you say, I do not want you to change anything. Just buy a different barrel of the fuel.”

This is strategic focus at its finest. The technical challenge of creating sustainable aviation fuel from biomass feedstocks is hard enough. Adding infrastructure transformation would have multiplied complexity exponentially.

The principle: identify where you absolutely must disrupt, then make everything else as compatible as possible with existing systems.

Lesson 6: Reframe the Cost Question

Deep tech founders face a specific criticism that SaaS founders rarely encounter: the present-tense cost competitiveness question.

Mukund has learned to catch this trap. “The standard critic I have heard is this cost competitive with petroleum? It’s a wrong question to ask. The tense used in the question is wrong. Will this be cost competitive? At commercial scale, we are more than cost competitive with petroleum crude.”

When critics ask in present tense, “they are setting you up for treating you as, oh, okay, so you are not in the prime time. And then the other critic, I often hear some people say, oh, but this is hundred billion gallon market. How are you going to disrupt it in any meaningful way? And to which I say, the targets are for 2050. It’s not for next quarter.”

The tactical insight: control the timeframe of the conversation. If you let critics evaluate deep tech on quarterly metrics, you’ve already lost the narrative.

Lesson 7: Build Ecosystem Dependencies Into Your Timeline

Unlike SaaS, where you can often go to market independently, deep tech requires ecosystem coordination. CleanJoule’s commercial success depends on regulators adapting to entrepreneurial speed, pipeline companies connecting new manufacturing facilities, and the biomass processing industry scaling up.

“All of that has to evolve together hand in hand in order to get to a meaningful future,” Mukund explains. The company’s roadmap reflects this: up to 2022 was solving technological problems, 2023 to 2025 is engineering scale-up, work begins on commercial scale in 2026, and full commercial manufacturing happens in 2029.

The lesson: your GTM timeline must account for dependencies outside your control. Map them early, then work backwards to understand when you need to influence those stakeholders.

The Promise and the Price

Mukund’s final insight cuts to why any founder would choose this path. “The promised land is when you come out, you are not coming out with a social network for people with six toes. You are coming up with something that changes our society, uplifts our civilization for the better.”

Even if you look back 20 years later without succeeding, “I tried and I was in it for the long haul and it just wasn’t my time. I think that’s a much better solution than making a quick buck in three quarters and walking away.”

For B2B founders evaluating deep tech, these seven lessons offer a different playbook. One where patience beats speed, government contracts beat venture capital in early stages, strategic investors matter more than smart money, and 20-year commitments unlock problems that quarterly thinking cannot solve.

The price is two decades. The promise is changing civilization.