For a select number of hardware startups each year, we deploy $50,000 in engagement capital alongside our embedded team — a strings-free injection you can put toward tooling, supplier-side investments, inventory, or whatever the cost-down work calls for. Our team comes at no up-front cost. We recover the $50K from verified savings. No equity. No board seats. No cap table complexity.
Every hardware company we've worked with has cost hiding in their BOM. 30 to 50 percent reductions, repeatedly — as a pattern, not a lucky outlier. The unlock isn't knowing the cost is there. Plenty of teams suspect it. The unlock is building the evidence that pulls it out.
Traditional consulting is misaligned for this work. Hourly billing rewards the firm for taking longer. Fixed-fee engagements reward them for promising more than they deliver. OLV Capital flips the structure — we put our own capital at risk, and we only get paid on verified savings.
Term sheet below. No surprises, no small print, no bait-and-switch. Every engagement uses this structure.
The Program isn't a check. It's capital deployed through an embedded group of operators who've done this at companies where hardware cost discipline was existential.
Deploy it wherever the cost-down effort needs it — tooling investments, supplier-side prepayments, new inventory to unlock better pricing. Strings-free. We won't necessitate how it's used. Structured as at-risk engagement capital under a services agreement — not equity, not a convertible, and not a loan in the traditional sense. No guaranteed repayment, no interest, no collateral. You return the capital only if the savings we unlock earn it.
Not a deck. Not a dashboard. The people who actually rebuild your BOM, sit across the table from your suppliers, and restructure your freight. Trained at hardware companies where every dollar was engineered out.
A small number of engagements per batch. We're looking for companies that are already winning — and want to accelerate by freeing up cash that's currently locked in their BOM.
Typically $25M–$50M+ in annual revenue. Real product shipping, real POs.
A drop in unit cost is real fuel — it accelerates growth for a company scaling hard.
We amplify margin, we don't create it. The business has to work before we arrive.
Enough forward volume for savings to deliver shared upside to both sides.
One person — founder, head of ops, or CTO — empowered to greenlight strategic cost-down decisions.
Not even a sliver. OLV Capital is a services engagement with capital deployed alongside — not a venture investment vehicle (yet).
Your governance stays clean. We report on progress, we don't vote on it.
We promise process and effort. We only charge on savings confirmed in supplier quotes or shipped parts — never projections.
If your BOM is too small, your volumes too low, or your production horizon too short to recoup the investment — we'll say so as soon as we know.
Every engagement is bounded by a fixed duration cap. Once it expires, fees stop automatically. No auto-renewal. No trailing obligations past the cap.
Against the options most hardware founders weigh: hire a consultant, hire in-house, or just try to do it themselves.
Five questions, no deck required. We review every interest form within 72 hours.
If it's a fit, we'll reach out to start a conversation and request your costed BOM for the lightweight assessment.