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What stops my money from reaching a failing issuer?

Two separations protect you. Funds sit with a third-party escrow agent, never the issuer and never us, so the platform never holds custody. Capital releases only in tranches, each gated by an independent certifier with no stake in the outcome and no role in scoring the technology. A project that stalls after milestone one never receives funding for later milestones.

This bounds your exposure to what is actually demonstrated. It does not make capital safe outright: money already released is spent, and the project can still fail afterward. But you are never fully exposed to an unbuilt design.

Is a high TRL score a guarantee this is a good investment?

No. A TRL score measures how far a technology has been demonstrated against documented evidence: witnessed tests, licenses, executed contracts. It does not measure whether the deal is well priced. It is not investment advice, a suitability opinion, or a credit rating. A design can reach TRL 8 and still be unfinanceable on cost, offtake, or price alone.

Treat the score as one input describing engineering risk, published with a confidence band and a named signer, and read the full offering documents for what the score does not cover: cost, revenue assumptions, and competitive position.

Can we dispute or improve our technology readiness score?

You improve it by filing stronger evidence; you cannot negotiate the number directly. Scores come from primary documents, meaning test reports, dockets, supply contracts and lab results, weighed by a reviewer independent of any automated first pass, then signed by a named, credentialed individual with a published confidence band. Where a reviewer disagrees with the initial assessment, that is recorded, not overwritten.

New evidence, such as a permit issued or a contract executed since your last filing, can move the score. Appeals without new evidence will not work, deliberately, since an issuer able to set its own score would make the signal meaningless to investors and undermine the trust that lets you raise pre-revenue capital.

Can international investors buy into our raise?

Not yet. This is a licensing issue, not a business preference. The Atomic Energy Act bars the NRC from licensing any entity owned, controlled, or dominated by a foreign interest, so an open global cap table risks the project's license itself. Regulation S offshore distribution stays closed pending a foreign ownership analysis, and this needs to be designed into your cap table from the start rather than patched in later.

If international capital matters to your raise, plan your investor base and entity structure around this restriction from day one, and treat any future opening of offshore distribution as a structural change requiring its own legal review.

What is a technology readiness level, in plain terms?

TRL is a 1-to-9 scale, used across aerospace and energy for roughly forty years, that measures how far a technology has actually been demonstrated, not how promising it sounds. TRL 1–3 means lab-stage concept work; TRL 4–5 means a component validated in a relevant environment; TRL 6 means a prototype demonstrated in a relevant environment; TRL 7–9 spans an operational system prototype through proven commercial operation.

Each level is tied to specific evidence types: peer-reviewed publications and DOE award letters at the low end, NRC construction permits and executed supplier contracts in the middle, and operating licenses or metered commercial output at the top. On this platform the level is not self-reported. It is assessed against primary documents, published with a confidence band, and signed by a named reviewer before anyone, including the issuer, sees it.

What does the confidence band actually tell me?

The confidence band communicates how much the underlying evidence supports the assigned level, separately from the level itself. Thin or contested evidence produces a wide band; deep, well-documented evidence produces a narrow one.

This matters because two offerings can carry the identical TRL number and mean very different things, one backed by a single test report and another by years of operating data. Rather than collapsing that distinction into a single confidence-free number, the band is published alongside every score so you can see how much uncertainty a reviewer is willing to stand behind. A wide band on a headline-grabbing level is itself informative: it says the evidence has not caught up to the claim yet, and it is worth reading the underlying citations before treating the number as settled.

Why does the TRL decide which securities I am even allowed to buy?

Because the instrument has to match what has actually been proven. A design still at the bench cannot be sold as a fixed-rate note with a defined coupon, and an operating station running since the 1980s should not be structured as a speculative SAFE.

The platform enforces a mapping, rung by rung. TRL 1–3 permits a SAFE or a convertible note; TRL 4–5 permits a convertible note; TRL 6 permits preferred equity; TRL 7 permits a senior note; TRL 8 permits a fixed-rate note or a municipal mini-bond; TRL 9 adds revenue share to those two. An offering whose proposed instrument its TRL does not allow simply cannot be published; that refusal is the core protection, not an edge case.

Each rung also caps the share of capital a milestone can release, from 15% at TRL 1–3 to 100% at TRL 9. A technology that has demonstrated less commands both a narrower set of eligible instruments and a smaller share of committed capital released against it.

• Investors

  investors@criticalinvestments.org

  Questions about your account, verification status, or an offering you are reviewing. For issues tied to a specific offering's escrow or tranche status, include the offering name and we will route you to the right desk.

• Issuers

  issuers@criticalinvestments.org

  Registration, evidence filing, or certification questions. Include your company name and project ID so we can pull up your console history.

• Regulatory and compliance

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  Questions about investment limits, accreditation, or resale restrictions that these answers do not fully cover.

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  Report a suspected account compromise or a technical bug here immediately.

General inquiries are answered within 1–2 business days. Time-sensitive account and security issues are prioritized.