Making Deep Tech Make Sense: How I Reframed Talos’s Investor Story

Talos was helping make the world a safer place. That was the story I saw inside a highly technical pitch deck—and the story I helped its founder tell.

Before a commercial aircraft carries passengers, engineers use computer simulations to investigate how its design will behave. Automobile engineers simulate airflow, structural forces, and crash scenarios. In chemical plants, simulations help teams understand how heat, pressure, and fluids interact, revealing conditions that could cause equipment to fail.

These are virtual experiments with real-world consequences. They help engineers evaluate ideas, identify risks, and improve designs before committing to expensive physical testing and construction.

But complex simulations take time and substantial computing power. Engineers have to choose which possibilities they can afford to investigate.

Talos Innovation was developing AI technology to help them explore more, faster, while keeping established physics software responsible for checking the calculations.

My job was to make that value clear to investors.

One week to change the story

Finlay Bertram, Talos’s founder and CEO, contacted me through Upwork in late December 2025. The company already had backing from Antler and was preparing for a seed raise of approximately 10 million.

His January investor schedule included conversations with Heartcore, Augustinus Fonden, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation. He also had warm introductions ready for CapitalG, NVentures, and AMD, awaiting a stronger deck.

The opportunity was significant. The communication needed work.

The existing presentation contained technical depth, performance claims, and an ambitious market opportunity. But the explanation made investors work too hard to understand what distinguished Talos and why it mattered.

Finlay hired me on December 31. We had roughly one week before the first January meetings.

I’m Madeline Johnson, a senior marketing strategist and founder of Modern Marketing Strategy. I brought decades of experience finding compelling stories, building brands, and translating unfamiliar businesses into language their audiences could understand.

For Talos, that began with asking better questions.

The breakthrough: speed mattered because trust mattered

I worked through Finlay’s explanations, questioned the terminology, and examined what changed for an engineer using the technology.

The important distinction was how Talos used AI.

Talos’s approach kept the physics solver—the software performing and checking the engineering calculations—in the process. AI helped it work more efficiently.

That gave me the strategic center of the story: engineers could investigate more possibilities while retaining the verification they depended on.

For aircraft, that could mean exploring more aerodynamic designs and operating conditions. For automobiles, more opportunities to evaluate performance and safety. For chemical plants, more ways to investigate heat, pressure, and flow before those conditions occurred in a physical system.

I saw Talos’s larger purpose as helping make the world safer through better-informed engineering decisions.

That insight connected the technology to something an investor could understand and care about.

Turning the insight into an investor narrative

I rewrote and restructured the pitch deck around the decisions investors needed to make.

The opening needed to explain the problem and its significance. The technical explanation needed to establish differentiation. The commercial story needed to show where Talos could begin, why customers would care, and how the business could expand.

I made choices about what to emphasize, what to explain in plain language, and where supporting technical detail belonged.

As Finlay and his team supplied feedback, I refined the story and developed slide-by-slide talking points. I also provided creative direction and created revised presentation versions to keep the work moving toward the deadline.

The challenge was to preserve the substance while making the opportunity easier to grasp and explain to someone else.

Giving the website and founder the same clear story

Investors would also look at the website and the person leading the company. Those materials needed to reinforce the pitch.

I rewrote the website messaging around practical value, industry applications, and trust. The headline I developed brought the positioning into focus:

“Empowering the Way Industries Innovate. Safely.”

I also rewrote Finlay’s biography and LinkedIn profile, connecting his industrial experience to the problem he was solving. And I wrote three initial newsroom articles to extend the company’s ideas into educational content.

Across the deck, website, founder profile, and articles, I built a consistent explanation of what Talos did and why it mattered.

What I brought to the moment

This was a concentrated holiday sprint with frequent questions, revisions, and tight turnaround times.

Finlay gave positive feedback throughout the work. The website continues to use messaging developed during the engagement.

My contribution was senior strategic judgment: learning a complex business quickly, identifying its most meaningful value, and turning that insight into materials the founder could use at an important moment.

That is the work I do through Modern Marketing Strategy.

I help founders connect sophisticated products with the people who need to understand, trust, and adopt them—through positioning, go-to-market strategy, website messaging, thought leadership, and public relations.

Looking for a senior marketing strategist to clarify your business’s value and help you grow? Connect with Madeline Johnson at Modern Marketing Strategy.