Hi, I'm Simon Demarmels.
Over the past years, I've worked with scale-ups and SMEs on fundraising, M&A, commercial DD's, and various strategic projects. Over time, my focus has shifted from highly scalable software businesses to science-based and technically complex ones. These are companies built on substantial R&D, long development cycles, and complex commercialisation pathways. Translating their progress into something investors can value is not always straightforward.
This gap between real, tangible progress and something investors can confidently underwrite is what led to the creation of Evolute.
In practice, that has meant working closely with teams to clarify what actually drives value in their business, and making the calls that follow. This includes positioning the company, sharpening go-to-market, deciding what to prioritise and what to abandon, scaling internal operations, grounding that in financial reality, and building an equity story and capital strategy that reflects the opportunity ahead.
Building Evolute itself has been a version of the same exercise. Setting strategy, shaping operations, hiring, and executing commercially and in projects. Where all outcomes carry direct financial and reputational consequences.
Most of the time, the work is less about applying a predefined playbook and more about structured experimentation, disciplined execution, and exercising judgment under uncertainty. That is where I tend to do my best work.
Projects
Thoughts
Teaching
Guest lectures & projectsI give guest lectures to the various student finance associations at Erasmus University Rotterdam, typically on real deals and how they actually unfold. The aim is to move past textbook framings and into the judgment calls, tradeoffs, and dynamics that shape outcomes in practice.
Alongside the lectures, I run scoped projects with student teams through Evolute. Each project is built around a hypothetical company I design end-to-end, pushing students to conduct rigorous market research, work through competitive and pricing dynamics, and build toward a pitch deck, capital allocation plan, and valuation. The arc closes with a sell-side simulation, where the team pitches the company back to me.
