Tran VC Content Team

In the first 90 days of a deep tech startup, your product will change. Your team may change too. But one thing should not be left to chance: your intellectual property. If you are building robotics, AI, chips, sensors, or any hard-to-copy system, you are not just shipping features. You are creating know-how. The kind […]

Deep tech founders face a quiet, expensive choice early on. Do you file patents and turn your invention into a public asset you can defend? Or do you keep it as a trade secret and rely on silence, speed, and tight controls? This choice shows up sooner than most teams expect. Often it appears right

Building deep tech is hard. You’re not just shipping an app. You’re turning math, code, data, sensors, chips, robots, and real-world systems into something that works in the wild. And here’s the part most technical founders learn too late: if you don’t protect what you build, you don’t really own your advantage. IP strategy is

ISO 10218 sounds like a dry “robot rule book.” But if you build, buy, or deploy cobots, it touches your real life fast: where the robot can move, how close people can get, what guards you need, what tests you must pass, and what paperwork your team will be asked to show. Here’s the practical

Robots are moving out of labs and into real places: factories, warehouses, hospitals, farms, and even homes. That’s exciting. It also means one thing becomes non-optional fast: safety. If you’re building a robotics startup, safety standards are not “paperwork for later.” They shape your design today. They affect what you can sell, where you can

AI products do not fail only because the model is “bad.” They fail because the model you picked, the vendor you depend on, or the chain of tools behind the scenes shifts under your feet. A pricing change, a policy update, a model swap, a quiet data leak, a surprise outage, or a vendor getting

SOC 2 is not a badge. It is a promise. It tells a buyer, a partner, or an investor: “We handle your data with care. We do what we say we do. We can prove it.” If you are building an AI startup, you will feel SOC 2 pressure early. A mid-market customer asks for

Secure ML pipelines are not “nice to have” anymore. If you ship models into the real world, you are already running software that can be tricked, copied, poisoned, or quietly changed. And the scary part is this: most ML failures do not look like a hack. They look like “a strange drop in accuracy,” “a

Open-source AI feels simple at first. You find a model on a repo. You pull the weights. You fine-tune it on your own data. You ship a feature. Then a customer asks: “Can you prove you’re allowed to use this model in our product?” And suddenly, it is not simple. Because “open-source AI” is not

If you are building an AI product and you plan to sell into Europe (or even just touch data from people in Europe), GDPR is not “legal homework.” It is product work. It shapes how you collect data, how you train models, how you log prompts, how you run analytics, and how you talk to