(Editor’s note: The Eindhoven Business Briefing is part of Dispatches’ Tech Tuesday series. We cover tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers, physicists and founders.)
We’re 10 months into the best year we can remember for startups in Eindhoven, with funding rounds climbing from a few million 10 years ago, to hundreds of millions today. We calculate that in aggregate, Eindhoven-based startups and scale-ups have raised somewhere north of 1 billion euros this year. We’ll have more on that later.
We just got this:
ABN AMRO is providing 28 million euros in senior debt financing to XIVER, a leading Dutch semiconductor company based in Eindhoven. The financing forms part of a €55 million investment programme that will enable the company to further expand its production capacity and technological capabilities.
Allow us to translate. The Amsterdam-based financial giant loaned Xiver 28 million euros in a deal that is collateralized … that is, Xiver put up something of value in case they can’t pay back the money. Banks collect senior-secured debt first in case of bankrupcy.
This kind of deal is unusual in the startup business, where investors usually take an equity piece. But in this case, it’s smart because Xiver is not an ordinary startup. It’s already a full-grown company, and the only independent MEMS foundry in Europe. MEMS stands for Micro-Electromechanical Systems. These are microscopic sensing devices that combine electrical and mechanical components on a single chip.
Still, we asked Marieke Ziedses des Plantes, senior press officer at ABN Amro , as well as Xiver executives, for a little more detail:
Your release states that the investment is part of part of “a €55 million investment programme.” So, your loan is senior-secured debt using inventory as collateral, along with public funding/subsidy or risk capital in some sort of a syndicate arrangement?
We’re waiting for a reply.
Like so many of the most successful companies incuding ASML and NXP, Xiver is a Philips spinout. In this case, purchased by Orange Mills Ventures, the investment vehicle of Breda-based Dutch businessman Cees Meeuwis with the goal to bridge the gap beetween prototyping and mass production in the chip industry. Based on High Tech Campus, Xiver designs, develops and manufactures integrated photonic chips, infrared sensor technologies, medical imaging technologies and advanced thin-film products.
One of the points the release makes is that the ABN Amro investment will enable Xiver to purchase an ASML DUV lithography system, an earlier generation system than the most current ASML systems, which cost about 400 million. This investment, whatever the shape, is pivotal at a time that artificial intelligence is driving the semiconductor industy.
It looks like Xiver has four job openings. You can see their careers page here.
Morphotonics lands 40 million
Big shout out to our friend Erhan Ercan at Morphotonics. We’ve watched them grow at their location in Veldhoven near ASML. Now, they’ve just raised a 40 million euro B round. They’ll use the fresh capital to scale its manufacturing technology for AI glasses, Augmented Reality waveguides and advanced photonic components.
The raise includes existing investors 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries and BOM, alongside Invest-NL as a new investor. Further participation comes from the European Innovation Council (EIC) Fund, Ernij Next and the European Investment Bank (EIB).
Morephotonics is in one of the deepest of deeptech categories. The next wave of computing will likely involved fighter-jet type heads up displays. But making the waveguides that direct light is tricky. We went back to some of Morphotonics’ posts to try to understand exactly what they do, and what we can deduce is, they’re developing the advanced printing machinery necessary to mass produce ultra-accurate, yet affordable, mass-market AI smart glasses and displays.
Sounds like yet another deeptech category Eindhoven could rule along with semiconductor and AI. And Erhan, just so you know … you’re buying the next round of meze.
Perplexed about dealing with media? We can help ….
There are two issues we see constantly with startups, and even with scale-ups … a lack of risk capital in Europe and lack of appreciation for what media coverage can do for young companies … a reluctance to stand out from the crowd. (If we never hear a founder say, “We’re staying under the radar” again, it’ll be too soon.)
These latest rounds of funding prove our point: If you fail to establish a digital profile quickly, you’ll fail. How are potential investors going to find you? How is talent going to find you? How are customers going to find you?
We work with economic-development groups, startups, scale-ups, VCs and venture builders. We get to interact and trade insights with all those smart people and we’ve learned one thing in the past 10 years … pitching, business communications, marketing, publicity and media relations don’t come naturally to the cautious engineers and old-line corporate types. And Chat GPT is no substitute for human creativity and smart media strategy.
We can help. Email me at: terry@dispatcheseurope.com and I’ll send you a .pdf of the presentation we just gave at HighTechXL. Lessons learned from decades of being on both sides of the equation as a financial reporter, and as an entrepreneur in the US and the Netherlands.
Briefs:
• High Tech Campus Eindhoven is creating a free shared e-bikes mobility project. From Monday 12 October, High Tech Campus Eindhoven and Drop Mobility are starting a new mobility pilot: free shared e-bikes between Eindhoven Central Station and the Campus. The idea is simple: make the last part of your commute easier and more flexible. Reserve an e-bike, pick it up at the station or Campus, and ride to your destination.For this pilot (about 1 year), we are specifically looking for people who travel between Eindhoven Central Station and High Tech Campus several times a week and would like to use an e-bike for this part of their commute.
• We didn’t make it to LevelUP 2026 but we found this quote from Peter Winnenk:
“When they start talking to me about their product, I always listen very carefully. Within the first thirty seconds, I want to hear the word ‘customer’. What problem are you trying to solve? And how do you know that your solution creates value?” We see a lot of startups forget the fundamentals when pitching. It’s one of the many reasons most don’t flourish … they don’t even understand their own value propostions.
• Staying abreast of trends in the startup/tech world is wildly time consuming. But we’ve found several sources that do a great job of covering and condensing tech innovation into info-packed newsletters.
IO+ and Bart Brouwers have two weekly newsletters that we mark “starred” on our Gmail account. See the website here.
Isabelle Simon & Martin Schilling at Deep Tech Momentum organize tech events in Berlin. They have a Europe-focused newsletter with the latest tech news, events and raises. In a recent newsletter, they wrote about Martin’s book “North Star,” and how “nobody funds a frontier tech solution.” That is, don’t create something that no one needs. “When you build a frontier tech venture, the non-obvious part of the equation is to be crystal clear on the problem you are solving, defined so precisely and priced so credibly that the solution feels inevitable.” We couldn’t have put it better.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
