(Editor’s note: This post on LUMO Labs is part of Dispatches’ Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech and finance because so many of our highly skilled internationals are entrepreneurs and investors. Full disclosure: LUMO Labs is a client for Dispatches’ marcom services.)
In 2020, we met LUMO Labs Founding Partner Andy Lürling, chatting and hanging out at the LUMO Labs offices HTC 6a on High Tech Campus Eindhoven. Little did we know what was coming. LUMO Labs was really just getting going, moving to HTCE from Strijp-S. Lürling and fellow Founding Partner Sven Bakkes had started what was then a venture builder with a small fund.
Bakkes and Lürling bring a strong entrepreneurial pedigree to LUMO Labs, with an exit with iOpener, which they founded in 2005. With iOpener, they raised the first 100,000 euros from the European Space Agency in 2006, then 4.2 million euros in 2008 from a German VC. Those raises allowed Lürling, Bakkes and their team to quickly get traction with their IP, a high-accuracy geo-location technology for fast-moving objects such as race cars and competition aircraft.
Five years later, LUMO Labs has become a full-on venture capital firm, arguably one of the most aggressive pre-seed and seed investors in Europe – with a global reach from Eindhoven to Barcelona to Los Angeles. From 2020 to 2025, LUMO Labs has grown into being the largest digital health and med tech investor in the pre-seed and seed phase in the Benelux, according to Lürling: “Our objective is to help Europe through our investments with digitalization, optimizing health and well-being as well as with the climate challenges.”
Contrarians
One of the complaints we hear constantly is that European VCs are too small, too conservative and too slow to invest, investing only after startups are cash-flow positive. “We invest, pre- investment, pre-revenue when nobody wants to invest,” Lürling said. “We believe and dare to invest as contrarians,” he added. “When the market is down, you should start investing in startups because only after five to seven years do they begin to thrive. This gives them time to focus on their product.”
In the years since we met Lürling, LUMO Labs has raised funds totaling in the higher double digits including a Thematic Technology Transfer on AI (TTT.AI) pre-seed fund, in collaboration with the Dutch government and a knowledge institute. “Now they [TTT.AI] asked us to do it again.”
In July 2024, LUMO Labs launched its second fund: 100 million euros, investing in European startups focused on the development and application of emerging digital technologies for a greener and stronger society. During the next four years, LUMO Labs will invest in 30 to 35 impact-driven digital technology startups with this fund.
Most notably, Lürling and Bakkes have increased LUMO Labs’ footprint, searching out both investment syndicates with other VCs, which they prefer, and scouting for startups far beyond their home base of Eindhoven. “That means that we identified where the tech hubs in Europe are, where we have to source based on what we invest in, and we make sure that we have a finger in that,” Lürling said.
He sat down for an hour-long interview earlier this month.
Here are the key points, edited for brevity and clarity:
Dispatches: Where are those tech hubs?
Andy Lürling: Barcelona, Valencia, for health and climate tech a bit, but also Madrid. Spain in general is upcoming. That’s why we engaged with Jorge Blasco, who’s doing a really great job there.
Of course, Sweden has Stockholm. You have Oulu and Tampere for smart city technology in Finland, and Tallinn in Estonia. You have Munich. You have Cologne, Düsseldorf … which have quite some interesting ones. You have climate tech in Oslo, Copenhagen. You have Ghent and Leuven in Belgium. And then, of course, in the Netherlands for what we invest in, we see Groningen as quite good. We see Utrecht, Amsterdam and also Heerlen is coming up.
Unfortunately, in what we invest in, we see too little in Eindhoven. Though we should see more, as I really believe Eindhoven should diversify more. We are looking at one case now in Eindhoven.
With top tech companies here, Eindhoven’s economy is overheated.
That’s what I see different in Barcelona, because the salary level is not that high over there. Here (in Eindhoven), everybody can have a job where they get a higher salary than that they would get as an entrepreneur. So, you become an entrepreneur, and you will start earning a lot less. That gap in Barcelona is not that big. The potential upside is so much higher there and now, with the pension age going higher, people are thinking, ‘Oh, I can. I can take a jump.’ And, of course, that’s the same in America. You don’t have a (social) safety system, so it’s easier to jump.
In our experience, the universities drive startups. Is that the model here?
You’re right. That’s the difference between America and universities and Europe, including the Netherlands, but with exception Estonia. In America, you are also taught – and supported – to be an entrepreneur. I just had a meeting with the vice president of the European Investment Bank, together with John Bell (CEO of HighTechXL), and more or less that’s what she also said.
We don’t see that in Europe.
In Europe, we see good technology but not support for entrepreneurship. And that’s where we come in. We help people become entrepreneurs, then introduce them to entrepreneurs so they can form a team. We also help them understand their roles. We may tell them, ‘You say you’re the CEO, but in time as the company grows you might actually be a better CTO.’ You have to have the tech people, but you also need commercial people on every team, and they have to be dedicated.
Some people say it’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon. But it’s a marathon where you always have to sprint.
This has not been a great period for VCs in Europe
A lot of VCs didn’t perform and couldn’t raise new funds. Last year, according to the State of Dutch Tech report, 32 percent fewer startups were founded. Part of it is Dutch tax authorities screening for fake employes … “freelancers” who are really full-time employees.
That’s not LUMO Labs.
We expect that of the 23 investments we did in the first fund, seven will reach between 1 million and 2 million ARR (Accounting Rate of Return) this year. It’s a by far higher average than normal VCs reach. We of course also will have companies that will not make it. We have 12 where we just cannot say if it’s going this way or that way because it’s too early.
But we have a few – quite a few – that are doing well.
Has there been a shift in LUMO Labs’ investment strategy since we first talked?
We invest in four SDGs (United Nations Sustainable Development Goals), those being health & well-being, quality education. We invest in sustainable cities (tech) and climate action, where climate action versus climate tech in and for the urban environment. We invest in social and environmental impact, looking at the social impact in the first fund.
But it’s all impact cases?
Yeah, so all of them have an impact thesis and key value indicators. So, what do we invest in as LUMO? If it comes to health and well-being, we invest in propositions that help decrease the exponentially rising costs and also to come up with solutions for the lack of healthcare workers.
The number one reason for the dropouts – and burnouts – of doctors and health workers is the administrative burden. We help them decrease the administrative burden with [portfolio company] Autoscriber an AI-enhanced voice recognition platform. It decreases the administrative burden 35 to 50 percent.
We not only make them happier in their work, but they can also focus on patients instead of the administrative burden. And you have happier patients. What we found out with [portfolio company] Healthplus.ai is, on average, a hospital can save up to four million euros a year paying the license for the software. So, it looks like we are a digital health and MedTech investor, but we only invest if we believe our impact thesis is also a match.
(See the LUMO Labs portfolio below.)
People are going to naturally wonder, “Do I have a startup LUMO Labs might consider investing in? So, give me a profile of investors and a company. I mean, should they be scientists? Should they be engineers?
One of the things that we learned is that we in general don’t invest in single founders. We invest in teams, because typically, a good scientist is not a good commercial person. A good commercial person is typically not a good product person. So, it should be a mixture of everything you have heard about “the hustler, the hacker and the visionary.”
We are looking at different kinds of profiles within teams. Within our thesis, we look at whether we believe the positive impact they create can be done in the business model, so the revenue they make is equal to positive impact. We look at, of course, the markets to see if the market is big enough and if they can be a potential market leader there. And of course, we also always look at the appetite of other VCs to join us.
Where do you get the good (pitch) decks from?
By being at the right events, being visible and approachable. Also, more and more VCs come to us and say, ‘Hey, we got this deck. It’s too early for us, but maybe it’s something for you.’ That’s, of course, interesting to us. And our analysts source the internet for potential exciting startups that match within our investment thesis.
Are entrepreneurs born or made?
I think it’s a mixture of talents and skills. I come from a nest of Chartered Accountants, and I didn’t know what the word ‘entrepreneurship’ was until I was 27. My father always told me, ‘Oh, go and work for PwC, and you have a good life.’ So, I think it should be latent. It should be in your genes that you have drive and energy. But it’s also skills you can learn. You have the talent to handle pain, being tired and being resilient and getting up after every fall.
How is fundraising for the second fund going?
Yes, we are doing fine, and yes, we will go to second closing next month. But for every yes I get, I get about 40 no’s. You need to be resilient both as entrepreneur and as general partner of a fund.
Here’s a history of LUMO Labs investments by year:
2025 YTD investments:
January: Sycai Medical, Scenexus
February: hema.to, Surgical Reality
March: Skyfora
April: Nuclivision
2024:
January: Whispp
April: Beyond Weather, AirHub, Enatom
July: Roboat
2023:
January: Autoscriber (follow on; first investment in September 2021)
May: Protyon
September: Tap Electric
October: Cordys Analytics
November: HULO.ai and CityLegends (follow on; first investment in July 2021)
2022:
January: Linksight
February: chunkx, Maaind, Aiosyn (follow on investment; first investment in 2021)
May: Healthplus.ai
June: Fimo Health
September: Enliven
December: Aiosyn
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
