Case Study: From Technoeconomic Analysis to an Investor-Ready Operating

Plan Client: Dugu Systems — emissions-free turbine with sophisticated chemical applications

Engagement: Fractional CFO / Strategic Finance

Timeline: ~7-month engagement

The situation
Dugu began the engagement with a technoeconomic analysis but no forward-looking business plan. Specifically, there was no operating model, revenue projections or numbers that could illustrate the growth potential to investors. The company also didn’t have a view on which potential customers to target or how to price their turbine outputs across different customer types. They were already in early investor conversations and at least three investors disengaged pushing the new startup to have a better handle on your business targets. Dugu needed a financial operator to bridge the science base with the investor/economic targets.

The work
I translated the founders’ understanding of the technology and ecosystem into fundraising fundamentals by taking the technoeconomic narrative and putting it in the form of a model that made sense to investors. The model developed over three stages, with the TEA at the heart of the build.

A development burn model.
Working with the team, I built expected development costs over a three-year horizon. Part of that came directly from Dugu’s EPC. Then, I layered in capital raises tied to de-risking milestones, plus corporate costs like headcount and office.

A pricing framework.
The turbine carried different economics depending on the chemistry it was paired with, so I built a framework that worked backward from a target ROI to the price the business needed to hit. The numbers themselves were academic but they drove real decisions. Most consequentially, the analysis settled an open architectural question: whether the unit should be a reciprocating turbine. After identifying the customer potential for non-reciprocating and reciprocating turbines we settled on the reciprocating build. This exercise would prove critical in narrowing down the field and selecting the first customer.

The operating plan and ancillary analyses.
Turbine unit deployment and management economics drove the core model with corporate overhead layered in. On top of that, I layered ROI cases by chemical use then a cash burn / sources-and-uses view tying the technical roadmap to runway.
The big unlock was restraint. The turbine's economic appeal is genuinely broad: it can deliver multiple forms of energy at or below market rate and can capture carbon that can be sold. The team expects to operate turbines across several use cases but we simplified the economic complexity for the investor view. It cost us some of the flexibility story but the simplicity more than made up for it. When investors see granular detail, they assume they're meant to have an opinion on it. By narrowing what we surfaced, we directed their attention to what actually moved the decision.

The outcome
Dugu has raised over $4M and signed a customer purchasing 10 units ($40m in contracted revenue). I worked with them over a roughly seven-month period, and the full raise and customer came together over about a year. The team cycled through several narratives along the way. The framing of the turbine shifted, but the direction of its economic advantage held constant: Dugu produces multiple energy outputs at or below market rate, plus saleable captured carbon. That advantage became the throughline, and it gave the team a clear filter for identifying the right partners on both the customer and investor side. When I was confident the company could run and update the model on its own, I handed it over in full.