(Editor’s note: The Eindhoven Business Briefing is part of our Tech Tuesday series. This week, we focus on High Tech Campus Eindhoven. We cover tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are researchers, founders and entrepreneurs.)
We told you last month that big changes are coming to High Tech Campus Eindhoven, and so it begins. Last Wednesday, High Tech Campus Eindhoven marked the opening of its latest advanced tech hub – the fifth – with an invite-only gathering of sponsors, entrepreneurs and founders.
Coming up on 20 November, a bigger reveal ….
High Tech NEXT promises to be the biggest tech event of 2024. It will include HTCE officials’ presentation of the further growth and development of High Tech Campus Eindhoven, including the debut of the new Lucis One building, the tallest on Campus. The invite-only event will include announcements, panels and demos.
Scheduled panel participants include:
• Otto van den Boogaard, Campus CEO, and Paul van Son, head of strategy
• Maurice Geraets, NXP executive director
• Ton van Mol, director of the Holst Centre
One speaker we’re looking forward to hearing is Derya Eker, the Eindhoven site manager for Synopsys. Synopsys, based in The Valley (Sunnyvale), acquired Eindhoven-based Intrinsic ID back in March. Synopsys has remained on Campus and we’re guessing Eker wouldn’t be coming unless she has good news about the company’s future here.
The keynote, will be by Christian Kromme, a futurist and author of “Humanification: Go Digital, Stay Human,” an Amazon bestseller.
It’s been three years since LA-based private equity/asset management giant Oaktree Capital acquired the campus in a joint venture with CIG, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund. Broadly speaking, PE thinks in terms of 10-year commitments before investors start to redeem their investments. So, in that sense, the fun is just starting.
3EALITY opens
The new 3EALITY immersive tech hub opened on 16 October at High Tech Campus Eindhoven. The new hub is in HTC 37 in a completely renovated space that includes about half of the ground floor.
HTCE CEO Otto van den Boogaard opened the invitation-only event with an explanation of the mission of the new 3EALITY hub for immersive technologies: “We’re turning tech into businesses … we want to see small companies grow into big companies. This is the beginning.”
The various campus hubs, including 3EALITY and the AI Innovation Center, help startups innovate faster, van Den Boogaard added, with events meetups and seminars. “That’s what we do with the hubs …bring people and ideas together.”
Pretty bold for a technology category that doesn’t even exist in any meaningful way. Rufus Baas, OASIS program director, talked about his startup journey, developing software for training in immersive technologies such as VR and AR for jobs that technically don’t exist, yet.
That said, Meta and other companies have, as with AI, invested billions in developing immersive technologies.
One of those investors was at the 3EALITY event.
Moderator Jan Scheele introduced Andy Lürling as an entrepreneur and investor who’s sold several startups, including iOpener before founding LUMO Labs with Sven Bakkes. Andy was on a panel (in photo above) with Lusanne Tehupuring, CEO of Entaom, and Chris Hordijk, CEO of MedicalVR, a 3D surgery platform that gives surgeons far more detail as they operate. Both are LUMO Labs companies.
Lürling told the gathering that he’s not all that interested in investing in the here and now, but rather in what’s coming five years from now. He sees the convergence of technologies and the end of silos as the defining transformation, along with the interoperability of technology. “You make System A and you make System B and you make System C and they and won’t work together, that causes a lot of problems.”
Lürling also used the panel to announce a LUMO Labs investment in Medical VR.
So why immersive technology and why now?
Moderator Scheele introduced 3EALITY Innovation Manager Philipp Werle as “a gamer to the bone,” a guy who used to overclock a server with an old NVIDIA GPU, using fans to keep it cool. Werle then rose and said, “the most important thing about that story is it’s true.” The trend, Werle said, is for big tech companies to invest a lot of money into developing the right hardware for the next era of computing, and that is basically blending digital with physical.”
Eindhoven is part of that global trend. In 2022, Meta acquired 3D printing lens firm Luxexcel, which makes AR glasses. Snap acquired GrAI Matter Labs and announced its own AR glasses. The Eindhoven region has startups that can help the big companies fulfill their vision of the 3D Internet, Werle said.
NVIDIA provides Medical VR with an A6000 AI chip, and relationships with HP and NVIDIA allow his team to train the AI model overnight, Hordijk said.
“An important part of our visualization software is that we put in the CT scan and within 10 minutes … the outcome of the AI is being visualized. That’s the coloring of the arteries, veins, airways and lungs,” said Medical VR founder Chris Hordijk said,
3EALITY is partnering with Epic Games, Metacampus and Design Academy Eindhoven. Tenants include naext, Prespective and VRinSchool and several others. 3EALITY also hosts the innovation cells of larger companies, including Philips, ASML, TomTom, Signify and NXP.
Coming up:
3EALITY is hosting an XR coworking day, part of the fourth XR Creators Connect meetup.
LUMO Labs expands to Barcelona
Speaking of LUMO Labs, the Eindhoven-based venture builder/VC has announced they’ll run their operations for Spain and Portugal from Norrsken House in Barcelona. This move will give start-ups from the region direct access to LUMO Labs’ capital network and expertise, “and illustrates the fund’s commitment to the thriving ecosystem on the Iberian Peninsula,” according to their LinkedIn post.
LUMO Labs recently announced its 100 million euro follow-on fund for the commercialization of emerging digital technologies for a greener and stronger society. Over the next 4-to-5 years, LUMO will invest in about 34 or 35 impact-driven European start-ups. In addition to investing in early-stage start-ups in the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, the fund is now proactively targeting innovative start-ups from Spain, Portugal, Scandinavia and the Baltics.
Noorrsken House is Sweden’s Norrsken Foundation’s incubator in Barcelona. Touted as Europe’s largest technology and impact hub, Norrrsken House is a 10,000-square-meter, four-story beachfront building.
“With our presence in Barcelona, we want to strengthen the Impact-Tech axis between Northern and Southern Europe,” stated Andy Lürling, co-founder of LUMO Labs . “Over the past four years, we have been actively assessing start-ups from all over Europe with our previous fund. We chose Barcelona as our regional hub because this is where we see the most activity of impact-driven tech start-ups that fit our investment philosophy.”
JW Player – now JWP Connatix – needs a software engineer
We reported how JW Player, the Eindhoven-born company that created the technology for YouTube and other streaming video, merged with an American company to form JWP Connatix. Customers include Accuweather, Axel Springer, Dotdash Meredith, McClatchy, Penske Media Co., and more.
The new company is looking for a software engineer who’ll work remotely in the Netherlands. In fact, most of their employees work remotely, per company policy.
Job description includes:
- Architect, develop, and maintain backend services utilizing Python and Golang within a microservices architecture
- Analyze system performance and identify areas for optimization and improvement
- Conduct code reviews to uphold high standards of code quality and best practices
- Collaborate with team members to design scalable solutions for the SSAI product
- Develop and integrate new features, ensuring compatibility with existing infrastructure
- Troubleshoot production issues to maintain system reliability
- Participate in technical discussions, offering insights and contributing to the decision-making process
You can see more details and apply here.
A few words about transportation (or the lack of)
A few days ago, I needed to get to High Tech Campus, so I took the bus, my only option other than driving because trains don’t run to campus. What a mistake. None of the buses arrived on time or, for that matter, arrived at all. The schedule at the bus stop didn’t match the online NS schedule. I finally got on the 407 bus from the Park Theatre stop to campus, and after about five minutes we had a near crash. I flew through the air, watching my laptop fly past until we both ended up in the facing seat.
It took me two hours to go from the Jansborg stop outside Leende, about 15 minutes by car south of campus.
The week before, we had a meeting outside Amsterdam. We got on the train at Eindhoven Centraal and got off close enough to our destination that it was a 10 euro Uber to the door. And we could’ve taken a tram.
It took less than 90 minutes to go 124 kilometers as opposed to two hours to go 16 kilometers.
Eindhoven’s glaring weakness is a 1950s transportation matrix, which is built over a 12th-century network of village roads. And of course the solution of the 2.5 billion euro Operation Beethoven is an underground bus station.
That ain’t gonna work. It’s going to be expensive and painful to take Eindhoven into the 21st century with trams, trains and metros. But the longer we wait, the more painful and expensive it’s going to be.
–– Terry Boyd
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.