Years ago I became acquainted with a company that was entirely research driven, so had the same question as you - how the heck do they actually make money? I ca

Years ago I became acquainted with a company that was entirely research driven, so had the same question as you - how the heck do they actually make money? I came to the following conclusions: -- Have a founder / CEO / lead type who is well-connected and can play the part of "mad scientist." For this company, it was a guy with a phd in something data related who was very good at storytelling. -- Find customers who can benefit from your research. In this company's case, it was government (which can take a lot of forms - cities, school districts, etc), non-profits, university researchers... from what I could tell, they were good about letting someone else find the grant dollars and they would provide the research. Over time they were able to take their reputation from those projects and then start selling the same process to corporate America. -- This company had very little technology or even secret sauce. Sure, they tried to make it look like they had some magic, but once you started peeling away layers, it was clear that they were mostly just doing a lot of data crunching that no one else quite had the desire or skills to do. They delivered a result rather than a lot of worry about how they got there. That same message likely applies today - lots of young companies focusing on some magic new algorithm, but paying customers generally care a lot more about a result that has value to them over the tech you used to get there.