Everything you’d ask us

An exclusive licence for twelve months — the right to take your technology to market, and nothing else. No shares in your company, no board seat, no claim on anything you build outside the licensed technology.

Nothing in money. CDI pays for the engineering, the legal work, the branding and the launch, and carries the risk of all of it. What you give up is twelve months of exclusivity — during that window you can’t license the same technology to anyone else.

CDI takes ownership of the technology, and you earn 5–7% royalties in perpetuity — on direct revenues, sublicensing, spin-offs and derivatives alike. Royalties are paid quarterly, with a statement each time, and they are inheritable: they flow through a Royalty Trust to your heirs rather than ending with you.

The licence expires at twelve months and all ownership rights in the original technology return to you. You owe CDI nothing, and the return is written into the contract before you sign rather than decided afterwards. CDI keeps the improvements, derivatives and IP it created during the period — that is what compensates us for spending our own money on a technology that came back. In practice you may get the technology back without some of the work built on top of it. A returned technology is listed as such in our portfolio — that outcome is part of the model, not a footnote to it.

Entry into the market, not profitability. For software: the product is available to paying customers, or there is at least one signed pilot contract. For hardware or hybrids: the prototype is validated with at least one paying pilot or early-adopter contract. The definition is in the contract before you sign, precisely so that “did it launch?” never becomes an argument.

No. CDI is not a venture fund. If you have a company it stays yours and untouched, and we never ask you to raise. The agreement is about a technology, not about you.

CDI does — any improvements, derivatives and IP created during the twelve months stay with CDI, whether or not the technology launches. This is deliberate: it is the only thing CDI keeps when a licence ends without a launch, and it is what makes spending our own money on your technology worth the risk. The original technology is unaffected and returns to you in full. One point still with counsel: where an improvement is inseparable from the returned technology, the exact treatment is set out in the signed agreement — see the terms.

Proof that the technology already works, and a short description of what it does. For software, that means a fully working MVP. For hardware or hardware–software hybrids, a working proof-of-concept prototype. Not a business plan, not a pitch deck, not a company. Send it through the submission form — it goes to the people who make the decision, not to a filter.

Technology that already works and has a market we can reach. Every submission goes through technical validation, IP due diligence and a market study before we commit. See for inventors for what passes and what doesn’t.

No. A granted patent helps, but an unprotected working technology is a normal starting point — protection is part of what CDI funds. What we do need is a clean chain of rights: that the technology is yours to license, with no employer, university or co-founder holding a claim you haven’t mentioned.