MTECH-X

MTech-X makes a nanofiber pad that absorbs around 50 times its own weight in oil. It had already been used in real spill response in four countries, and it was not generating sales.

• whatA Singapore deep-tech company with a real materials breakthrough and no go-to-market.
• my partAI growth operator, reporting straight to the COO. Brand, messaging, outbound, and the AI agents that ran it.
• result$1M+ in pipeline I sourced myself, four named accounts at final-stage evaluation. Nothing closed before I left.

I joined in 2025, remote from San Francisco, reporting to COO Kou Nishimura. I had no assigned title and was told to do whatever the company needed done.

When I joined, the science worked. Nothing else did yet.

No brand. No simple way to explain what the fiber actually does. No outbound motion, and nothing built to turn a real technical edge into something a buyer outside materials science would act on.

The sentence I had to fix first

MTech-X's own line for what it does is that they can intentionally manipulate matter at the nano level. It is accurate, and I watched it lose people who were close to buying. A procurement lead at an airline does not need the physics. They need to know how many pads they have to buy, store and dispose of after a fuel spill on a stand, and whether that number goes down.

So the first thing I built was the translation. The ICP, the outbound sequences, the deck and the one-pagers all ran off it afterwards.

How I found buyers

I was new to sales when I started. I learned it from the COO directly, and I ran PDCA on myself every day: plan the next day's outreach the night before, run it, check what actually got replies, fold the fixes into the following day's plan. A/B test the message, double down on whatever landed.

The outbound itself ran on PhantomBuster and n8n across LinkedIn and email, about 100 touches a day at roughly a 5% reply rate, so about five real conversations a day. That is where most of the top of the funnel came from: oil refineries in Texas, sustainable-cleaning companies, other airlines, other governments.

The two best accounts came in another way:

• Japan Airlines came through a warm introduction.
• Kochi came through a friend, who put me onto a political contact, who got me to the Kerala state government. I ran that in parallel with direct outreach to the Kerala Fisheries Department and the Kerala State Disaster Management Authority, and both responded.

When a container ship spilled oil off Kochi in May 2025, the team mapped the state government offices and the press covering the spill the same day, from the Chief Minister's office down to Fisheries and Pollution Control. I worked that map with them and used it to get the product in front of the people actually responding.

That was one positioning call playing out. I had pushed the team to treat governments and regulators as channel partners in their own right, because environmental law is what creates the urgency to buy in every one of these markets: spill-response mandates, hazardous-waste rules, marine pollution acts. Getting the fiber into an official stockpile reads as an endorsement, and the private sector follows it.

Where the deals got to

The pipeline came to $1M-plus. That is the number people ask about, so here is exactly what is behind it:

• I sourced all of it myself, and the COO qualified every deal in it.
• Enterprise deals in this market average $200,000 to $250,000, on a roughly 12-month cycle.
• More than four accounts, four of which I can name.
• They advanced to final-stage evaluation, some through proof-of-concept work around month six.
• Nothing closed before I left.

The four I can name, and what each one was actually for:

• Kerala State Government, spill response, off the back of the Kochi spill.
• Daikin, a proof-of-concept nanofiber filtration material for air conditioning.
• Japan Airlines, oil absorbents plus nanofiber filtration and soundproofing.
• Chicking, a large UAE-headquartered fried chicken chain, for grease-trap absorbents in their kitchens.

What MTech-X actually makes

Headquartered in Singapore, manufacturing in Malaysia, founding team in Japan. The fiber is SGS certified, the patents are held across several countries, and it won the Japan Ministry of the Environment's Disaster Response Support Award in 2020. It has been used in real spill response: a factory spill in Japan, mangrove protection after a major spill in Mauritius, a tanker spill off the Philippines, trials in Singapore.

The manufacturing edge sits underneath the absorption number rather than in front of it. The company runs at about 30 kg/h against roughly 0.5 to 1.0 kg/h for competing electrospinning methods, which is what makes the price work at volume. Kou talks about the fiber as the starting point rather than the product: decentralized fiber factories running on a shared"Factory OS," with the absorbent as the low-capital-intensity way in.

I graduated in August and worked remotely through October, which is when my US work authorization came through. The company wanted me in Singapore, I wanted to work in the US, so I left.