Big ideas, basic questions

One of the things I like about the current climate in venture is that there seems to be more room for “crazy” ideas. With software businesses under pressure, investors are willing to look further afield. Whether all that pressure on SaaS is justified is a topic for another post. But I’m glad to see founders getting backing to attempt things that are technically difficult, expensive and a little hard to explain at a dinner party.

We don’t have to look far for examples. Israeli startup Q-Factor emerged from stealth in April 2026 with $24 million in seed funding to develop quantum computers based on neutral atoms, with an architecture intended to scale towards a million qubits. Quantum Machines, which builds the systems that control quantum processors, raised $170 million in February 2025. These are ambitious bets on changing how computing works, with substantial scientific and engineering challenges still to solve.

There are also meaningful outcomes. Intel announced an agreement to acquire Israeli quantum software company Classiq in October, in a deal reported at $2.3 billion and expected to close in the first half of 2027. Motorola Solutions completed its $1.5 billion acquisition of D-Fend Solutions in August, bringing its technology for taking control of rogue drones into a global public-safety business. And Mobileye’s $15.3 billion acquisition by Intel in 2017 remains an important earlier example of Israeli deep tech reaching commercial scale.

These companies operate in different markets and at very different stages. Their stories show both the appetite to fund difficult technology and the strategic value it can create. They also remind us that deep tech includes software: Classiq’s quantum software is a very different proposition from a conventional SaaS application.

My sample size is n=1, but at Remagine Ventures, we’re finding ourselves diligencing deals that might not previously have made it this far in our process. That’s healthy. We should be willing to question our assumptions about what a venture-backed company can look like.

Still, a big, ambitious idea doesn’t make the basic questions go away. If anything, the longer and more expensive the journey, the more useful it is to ask them early. Here are five I keep coming back to.

1. Why are you the right team to solve this?

Identifying a big problem doesn’t automatically make you the right team to solve it. That sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly easy to get through an entire pitch about the size of an opportunity without understanding why these particular founders have an advantage.

I don’t think founders need to have spent 20 years in an industry before they’re allowed to challenge it. Outsiders can spot opportunities that insiders have learned to accept as “just how things work”. But there’s a difference between questioning an industry’s assumptions and not knowing why those assumptions exist.

If you’re building for factories, who on the team understands how a factory buys and deploys new technology? If your product depends on a scientific breakthrough, where does that expertise sit? If it needs to be manufactured, who has experience getting something out of the lab and into reliable production?

The gaps themselves aren’t necessarily a reason to pass. At pre-seed, there will be plenty. What matters is whether the founders recognise them and have a credible plan to fill them, through co-founders, early hires or partners who are meaningfully involved. An impressive advisory board slide only helps if those people actually contribute.

2. Talk to customers before you have something to sell

Even if you’re building something as technically complex as a quantum computer, you can start learning about your customers long before the product is ready. Who might use it? What problem would they need it to solve? What performance would justify the cost? Who would approve the purchase?

You don’t need a finished product to have those conversations. In fact, waiting until it’s finished can make the answers rather expensive.

Traction is one of the strongest ways to give investors confidence, but it needs to be appropriate to the stage and the technology. I wouldn’t expect a quantum hardware company and a SaaS startup to show progress in the same way. Technical validation, access to a customer’s testing environment or a funded development agreement can all be meaningful. None should be casually relabelled as recurring revenue, but they can show that the company is making progress.

What I want to understand is whether potential customers are helping shape the product. Have those conversations changed the specifications, the first use case or the route to market? Can the founders explain what a buyer needs to see before committing?

Quantum Machines is a useful example here. When it announced its $170 million round in February 2025, the company said its customer base included more than half of the companies developing quantum computers. It was selling control infrastructure to organisations already building those machines. For founders, that raises a useful question: who has a problem you can solve along the way to the bigger vision?

Customer enthusiasm won’t prove that the science works. Equally, a scientific breakthrough won’t tell you how purchasing decisions get made. Both deserve attention, even when one is much further along than the other.

3. Show how the economics work outside the demo

Hardware, increasingly discussed under the banner of “physical AI”, is attracting attention. But putting intelligence into the physical world also means dealing with the physical world: supply chains, installation, maintenance, repairs and all the things that don’t appear in a polished demo.

Who installs the product? How long does it take? Does deployment require the customer to stop operations? Who answers the phone when something fails, and how much does that visit cost?

For an industrial customer, even a promising technology can be difficult to adopt if installing it introduces operational risk. The savings might look attractive on a slide, but the person responsible for keeping a production line running has other considerations. Understanding those constraints is part of building the business.

Hardware doesn’t automatically mean poor margins, just as software doesn’t automatically mean attractive ones. The question is what the economics look like once you include everything required to deliver the promised result. Components are only part of the cost. Integration, support, working capital and the time between paying suppliers and getting paid by customers all matter.

At pre-seed, I’m not expecting a perfectly accurate five-year model. I do want to understand what becomes easier, cheaper and more repeatable with each deployment. If the tenth customer needs as much bespoke engineering and founder involvement as the first, that deserves an honest discussion.

4. POCs are not ARR

Getting someone to try your product is an achievement, especially at pre-seed. I don’t want to diminish how hard that can be. But a proof of concept and a recurring customer are different things, and a growing list of pilots can sometimes obscure the distance between them.

Some organisations are enthusiastic experimenters. They have innovation budgets, enjoy working with startups and are happy to test new technology. The person sponsoring the experiment may have no authority to buy it at scale.

That’s why I want to know what happens after the pilot. Who owns the budget? What counts as success? Is there a decision date? What procurement, security or integration work would still be needed before a commercial rollout?

A paid pilot is useful evidence that a customer will commit money. It still doesn’t automatically belong in ARR. A successful technical trial might also produce no sale if the economics don’t work or the problem isn’t urgent enough.

The most useful pilots are designed to answer a commercial question as well as a technical one. They should leave the founders knowing more about whether, why and how that customer will buy. Otherwise, it’s possible to become very good at running POCs while making little progress towards a repeatable business.

5. Know what this round needs to prove

“Hire engineers, build the product and grow sales” is a reasonable description of how a startup might spend its funding. It tells me less about what will be different when that money has been spent.

Will the round demonstrate that the core technology works? That it can be manufactured at an acceptable cost? That a customer will pay for a production deployment? Which important uncertainty will have been resolved?

This matters particularly when the eventual ambition requires a lot of capital. You might need several rounds before reaching meaningful revenue, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But there should be a credible sequence of milestones, with each one making the next investment easier to underwrite.

Mobileye offers an earlier example of building towards a much larger ambition. Its computer-vision technology found a commercial application in advanced driver-assistance systems before the company expanded its efforts into fully autonomous driving. There was value to deliver to carmakers along the way. The useful question for founders is whether their own roadmap contains milestones that customers will value, even before the full vision becomes possible.

Founders can’t control what the funding market will look like when they next raise. They can think carefully about the evidence they aim to have by then, how much it will cost to produce and what happens if it takes longer than expected.

I’d much rather have that conversation early than discover, close to the end of the runway, that the company needs another round simply to finish what this one was meant to prove.

Leave room for the unreasonable

Of course, no one expects founders to have everything figured out at pre-seed. We certainly don’t. If every technical, commercial and operational question already had an answer, there would be much less reason for an early-stage investor to be involved.

And investors need some humility here too. A checklist can help structure our thinking, but it can also become a comfortable way to reject anything unfamiliar. Some of the most interesting companies will look awkward against the patterns we’re used to.

I like meeting founders whose ambition makes me pause. That’s part of what makes this job interesting. I want us to remain open to ideas that initially sound improbable, while doing the work to understand what it would take to make them real.

You don’t need to arrive with every answer. But knowing which questions matter, being honest about what you haven’t solved and showing how you intend to learn goes a long way. At pre-seed, that’s often where conviction starts.

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Eze Vidra

Co Founder and Managing Partner at Remagine Ventures

Eze Vidra is the founder of VC Cafe and the co-founder and managing partner of Remagine Ventures, a pre-seed fund investing in ambitious founders at the intersection of AI, technology, entertainment, gaming, and commerce with a spotlight on Israel.

He is a former General Partner at Google Ventures (GV) in Europe, former head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe, and founding head of Campus London, Google's first startup hub. Eze writes on Israeli tech, venture capital, artificial intelligence, and founder strategy.

He is also the founder of Techbikers, a nonprofit that brings together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read.

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Latest posts by Eze Vidra (see all)

• Big ideas, basic questions - November 3, 2026
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