Agentic AI that helps you find real market pain, talk to the right people, and build evidence that turns research into revenue.
Evidence that holds up to your TTO, your board, and your own gut. Built for faculty, postdocs, grad students, and tech transfer teams.
How it works
Move forward when the evidence says so.
A structured discovery loop that replaces hunches with conviction. Real conversations with real stakeholders, weighted against sixteen readiness dimensions, so the go, pivot, or stop call is backed by what you actually heard.
Drop in your research - Paste an abstract, a patent, or a paragraph about your prototype. Custard reads it like a translational scientist and stands up your project in a minute.
Meet your AI research team - Mira Researchers map personas, stress-test hypotheses, run outreach, and synthesize every conversation. Four agents working in parallel, in your voice, while you focus on the lab.
Talk to the right people - Custard finds real stakeholders, drafts non-leading interview requests, books the calls, and rehearses each conversation with an AI focus group before you ever pick up the phone.
Get a defensible verdict - Sixteen evidence-weighted readiness scores, a buying-group graph, transcripts synthesized into insights, and a recommendation: license, spin out, partner, pivot, or stop.
What we believe
Three convictions that shape every part of the product.
Customer discovery is research. It deserves the same rigor as a benchtop experiment. A hypothesis. An instrument. A protocol. Evidence you can show your peers and your PI without flinching.
Knowledge that does not build on itself disappears. Most discovery scatters across docs, decks, and inboxes. The semester ends, the postdoc moves on, the insights fade. A shared workspace that ingests every conversation is the only way the work carries forward.
Decisions need evidence, not vibes. Whether you license, spin out, or pivot, the call should rest on cited interview passages, scored dimensions, and the contradictions you could not make disappear. Anything less is a story.
Frequently asked questions
What makes Custard different from running discovery myself or through I-Corps?
Confidence in the answer. Every recommendation is traceable back to specific conversations, weighted against sixteen readiness dimensions, and stress-tested against alternatives. You finish with a verdict you can defend, not a hunch you have to sell.
Do I have to be technical to use it?
No. If you can describe your research in a paragraph, Custard takes it from there. The product is built for faculty, postdocs, grad students, and tech transfer staff, not engineers.
What does Custard actually produce?
A Commercialization Evidence Report with a buying-group graph, persona research, interview transcripts and synthesis, sixteen readiness scores, and a recommended path: license, spin out, partner, pivot, or stop. All exportable.
Will the AI talk to my customers for me?
No. The conversations stay yours. Custard does everything around them: finding the right people, drafting outreach in your voice, scheduling, recording, transcribing, and synthesizing. You stay in the human seat.
Is my unpublished research safe?
Your project data is private to your account by default and we never train models on your project content. Check with your tech transfer office before entering sensitive pre-disclosure material.
What if I decide not to commercialize?
Good. A grounded no is more valuable than a hopeful yes. Custard surfaces kill criteria early so you can stop, pivot, or reframe before you spend a year on the wrong market.