At ViennaUP 2026, Konsultori co-organised and moderated the “Lab to Leader: Building Science Ventures That Last” event on May 20th at the TU the Sky Vienna. The part of the event was a deep, experience-driven panel discussion on cofounder alignment, scaling deeptech spin-offs, and the path from local traction to global market entry. The room was full of founders, and the conversation matched the occasion: no polished startup PR, just real stories from the trenches.
Petra Wolkenstein, CEO of Konsultori, moderated the session and was joined by three founders who are living these challenges right now.
- Richard Malovič is CEO and co-founder of Whalebone, a Czech cybersecurity company protecting millions of users globally and navigating high-stakes international enterprise sales.
- Julia Reisinger is CPO and co-founder of Factorymaker, a Vienna-based spin-off from TU Wien tackling industrial automation with a novel algorithm for automated industrial building design – and fresh winners of the Startup World Cup Austria 2026.
- Moritz Novak is CEO and co-founder of GATE Space, building advanced satellite propulsion systems and scaling a capital-intensive deeptech venture with a seven-person founding team, spun out of the TU Wien Space Team.
What Scaling Deeptech Actually Looks Like
1. The cofounder team is your first structural decision
Before any product, any investor, any sales strategy, there is the founding team. How it is set up, governed, and held together will determine how resilient the company is when things get hard – and in deeptech, things always get hard.
Moritz Novak described GATE Space’s seven-person founding team, which grew directly from the TU Wien Space Team’s core group.
Having a large group of founders makes you as an organisation extremely resilient. It very much aligns the interest of the company with the interest of your core team.
He was equally candid about the challenge: when seven people all identify as founders rather than employees, decision-making and governance require deliberate structures from day one. GATE Space addressed this early by separating voting and non-voting shares and implementing vesting schemes – not as a formality, but as the legal and cultural foundation for alignment.
Julia Reisinger’s path was different. Factorymaker started with three cofounders and moved to two. The process of finding the right team composition took longer than building the initial product – from research ending in late 2022 to founding the company in August 2024. The lesson is not that more or fewer cofounders is better, but that getting this right is worth the time it takes.
2. Cofounder alignment requires documents, not trust alone
Richard Malovič put the stakes plainly:
It’s like a marriage. A corporate split-up can easily destroy 70% of the company’s value. If you aren’t ready for a long-term commitment with clear vesting and exit rules, you aren’t ready to build together.
Whalebone went through cofounder departures. What prevented lasting damage was that the rules had been written down before the conflict arrived. Vesting schedules, share forfeiture conditions, and exit mechanisms were agreed upon early, and when the moment came, the process was transparent and fair. This is not a legal nicety. According to Harvard Business School research cited by Petra in her post-event reflection, 65% of high-potential startup failures are caused by cofounder conflict. Yet some spin-offs continue to launch without these documents in place.
3. Entering the market early and pricing from day one
One of the most consistent signals from all three founders was the importance of confronting the market before you feel ready. Julia Reisinger described how Factorymaker began charging for early pilot projects immediately, even at modest amounts. The reasoning was straightforward: if a potential customer will not invest even a small sum for an early trial, that is important information. Charging also signals that the product has value, and it filters for customers who are genuinely committed to the engagement.
For Whalebone at 165 people, the lesson about sales has held across every stage: founders do not escape sales. Richard Malovič described having tried to step back from direct selling multiple times, and returning each time. His practical rule, drawn from investor and SaaS advisor Jason Lemkin: never hire a sales director before you have a small group of salespeople who are consistently hitting quota. Hire salespeople first, prove the model, then build the management layer above it.
4. Scaling the team without losing the culture
As GATE Space has grown beyond its founding group, Moritz Novak described the advantage of having seven cofounders distributed across the company’s departments. Each one shapes the culture of their area directly. New hires – increasingly international, from Portugal, the Netherlands, Turkey – have joined not because of geography but because they share the same intrinsic motivation.
We want to build something that lasts. Making money is an essential part of this because otherwise we are not going to be able to shape the world. But it is not the goal.
5. The Austrian ecosystem supports entry. Global scaling is still a solo effort.
When Petra asked the founders what they would change about the Austrian ecosystem, the answers were consistent in direction if different in specifics. Julia Reisinger pointed to two things: better cross-university connection at a personal level so that technical and business founders can find each other more easily, and a stronger push to step outside Austria earlier.
We are very comfortable in Austria. The network is nice, the support is good. But stepping out, going to Europe, going to the US — I don’t know if the Austrian ecosystem could somehow better push people to leave the borders.”
Winning the Startup World Cup and heading to Silicon Valley changed Factorymaker’s strategy almost overnight.
Richard Malovič’s wish was for infrastructure over programs: fewer fragmented initiatives, more practical support for companies scaling across borders. Moritz Novak highlighted the specific challenge of physical facility access for hardware-intensive deeptech – the chicken-and-egg problem of needing a prototype to raise money and needing money to build the prototype. GATE Space found its way through unconventional approaches and strong support from the European Space Agency, but the structural challenge remains.
Closing
The Lab to Leader panel was exactly the kind of conversation the ViennaUP ecosystem needs more of. Three founders at different stages of scaling deeptech spin-offs, willing to share what happened rather than what looked good in a pitch deck. Cofounder conflict, the first hire that changed everything, the customer that made them take the market seriously – this is the material that helps the next generation of founders make better decisions.
We are grateful to ViennaUP 2026 and the Vienna Business Agency for the platform, and to our co-organisers across the Vienna Spin-Off Alliance – AIT, BOKU, MedUni Wien, TU Wien, Uni Wien, WU Wien, XISTA, and AWS – for making this event possible. And above all, thank you to Richard Malovič, Julia Reisinger, and Moritz Novak for the generosity and honesty they brought to the stage.
For Founders
If you are scaling a deeptech spin-off and want a structured, honest assessment of where you stand across product, team, funding, and governance, our Deeptech advisory work is designed for exactly this stage.