You finish your phase 1 in 9 months to a year depending. Then you apply for phase 2 which takes 3-6 months to review and fund. That's the death valley I mean, the lag between finishing phase 1 and starting phase 2.
If you don't have non-grant funding by then, you're self-funding the company for six months of being strung along waiting for them to make a decision. It sucks, especially when VCs have no interest in funding projects that are as hard to understand as my stuff (catalysts and chemicals and machine learning) when they can just fund Uber for cats or whatever.
I'm too tired to keep trying for it, but at least people are finally starting to recognize that chemical manufacturing infrastructure is pretty critical and that we don't understand much of it at all and that if we want to use bio-sourced chemicals we need to really understand this at a global systems level an awful lot better.
But we won't, we'll just try to bolt on bio stuff to horrible legacy systems and make a marginal improvement instead of a generational breakthrough. But if anyone reading this happens to actually be working on this give me a ring... it's my passion in life to fix this because I see it as reducing energy consumption and also improving agriculture through improved ammonia production processes. I am just unable to work on it because of life. And I really don't want to start another company at this point.