(Editor’s note: This Eindhoven Business Briefing focusing on startup investment is part of Dispatches’ Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech and investment because so many of our highly skilled internationals are founders and investors.)
The Eindhoven startup ecosystem is dominated by deep tech, and deep tech takes longer than, say, simple software to get to market and to get results. But dare we say it … we’re starting to see signs of a coming windfall, with so many startups and scale-ups getting funding and reaching maturity instead of flailing or fleeing to the United States for funding.
This isn’t just an Eindhoven phenomenon. Delft-based QuantWare and Groove Quantum have just raised a combined 178 million euros. QuantWare’s 152 million euros will go to build a quantum chip factory in Delft. Both companies are spin-offs from QuTech, Delft’s research institute for quantum computing and quantum internet.
In Eindhoven, the days of puny 1 million euro Series As are over. We hope.
Image-sensor startup eyeo just announced a 40 million euro A round yesterday. The company is developing the next generation of image sensors through their proprietary color splitting technology.
From their release:
eyeo has developed the world’s most advanced nanophotonic color-splitting technology, redefining imaging for consumer, industrial, XR, smart city and mobile applications with color-splitting photonics technology that triples light sensitivity and breaks sensor resolution limits, delivering unprecedented picture quality, color accuracy and resolution.
The new capital will accelerate design capabilities, deepen its OEM partner ecosystem and “drive commercial deployment across a $30 billion global imaging market.”
The round – led by Innovation Industries, with participation from existing investors imec.xpand, Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, QBIC fund, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF) and Brabant Development Agency (BOM) – pushes eyeo’s total funding to 55 million euros.
eyeo, an imec spinout, is based at High Tech Campus Eindhoven, yet another coup for the Netherlands’ largest deep-tech research campus.
You can see the full release here.
LUMO Labs investing millions in portfolio companies
Eindhoven-based VC LUMO Labs is either the lead investor, or part of an investment syndicate, in deals for its portfolio companies across the Netherlands.
• AirHub, a Groningen-based drone operations software company, has raised 4.4 million euros in a Series A. AirHub creates software for drone missions in security, defense, public safety and critical infrastructure. The company will use the capital injection to grow its international team, enhance the AirHub Drone Operations Centre and expand its portfolio with MilHub and SecHub. MilHub targets defense-related operational settings, while SecHub serves wider security operations and provides a counter-drone solution for organizations that need to detect, manage and respond to drone threats.
• Regional economic development agency BOM and LUMO Labs are leading a 2.2 million euro seed investment in ‘s-Hertogenbosch-based Avendar, with the goal of creating an AI alternative to Peter Thiel’s dominant AI surveillance software Palantir. The investment will be used to accelerate development of Avendar’s platform for “critical investigations and intelligence, supporting crime and fraud investigations in the public sector,” according to a media release.
Avendar’s software is used by organizations including the Dutch National Police and the City of Amsterdam, following successful pilots and ongoing implementations through programs with the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Safety, supporting applications such as criminal investigations and Bibob screening.
• LUMO Labs portfolio company BeyondWeather just secured up to 2.5 million euros through EIC’s Transition Program Project TAILOR, focusing on client-tailored AI weather forecasts. Beyond Weather is an Utrecht-based Vrije Universiteit spin-off company
LUMO Labs is based at High Tech Campus Eindhoven.
Smart Robotics raises a 10 million euro Series A
Smart Robotics closed a 10 million A round last month. Rotterdamse Havendraken, based in Rotterdam, was the lead in the round. Rotterdamse Havendraken invests in innovative companies related to ports, maritime, logistics and energy. Innovation Industries, based in Amsterdam, already is an investor.
Based in Best, an Eindhoven suburb, Smart Robotics has developed smart robotic pick-and-place solutions – software and hardware – picking and palletizing goods for shipment. To date, the company has deployed more than 120 systems across five industries and 15 countries, with 99.5 percent uptime and throughput of up to 1,000 picks per hour, according to the Innovation Industries website.
ASML ready to break out … again?
If you’re in the Eindhoven semiconductor ecosystem, you already know about ASML and how it builds the machines integral to the microchip industry … especially now in the AI Age. If you don’t, then you’ll want to read this TechCrunch interview with ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet.
In the interview, Fouquet says:
• AI is causing a chip crunch that will require ASML to step up its game and ship more of its tools. “If you talk to the hyperscalers, I think they will tell you that for the next two, three, even five years, they’re not going to get enough chips,” he says.
• Peter Thiel-backed Substrate’s claims that it will replace photolithography are hyperbolic. ASML created the concept of EUV 30 years ago, “and we still needed 20 more years of hard work to turn it into a manufacturing system.”
• Rumors that engineers in China have reverse-engineered ASML’s machine are nonsense. “To reverse-engineer anything, you first need to have the machine. And there is no EUV machine in China — we never shipped any tools there,” Fouquet said.
By the way, our sources are telling us that once ASML completes its new campus and finishes the transition to EUV system from low-NA systems, all hell will break loose. We have one source who recently completed the first “get to know you” informal call with ASML and who had the ASML recruiter dangle a completely different job mid-interview. So, it seems the ASML hiring freeze is over or may be soon.
ASML executives are clearly hedging their bets, acquiring a majority share in French AI startup Mistral for 1.5 billion euros.
Keiron gets real
We were at HighTechXL back in the day and saw Keiron’s young team pitch at a FasTrackathon. This was spinout technology from TNO Holst Centre. In those early days, Keiron was a lab-on-a-chip concept but was conflicted as to what to do with the TNO microfluidics technology.
In 2019, we even had one of associates from the U.S. come in to work with them, an engineer with deep experience at some of the largest and most advanced companies in the world. Even he couldn’t figure out how to get them pointed in the right direction.
Now, years later, we saw them pitch last week at XL Day 2026, but with a new CEO and new team, and laser induced forward transfer, or LIFT, technology. It is the same microfluidics (manipulation of fluids on the microscopic level) concept as in 2019. But now Keiron 2.0 uses LIFT to precision solder components onto printed electronics boards. And it has a product, the HF2, which they’re selling.
At that same event, HighTechXL announced the launch of its PreSeedXL Fund, an 11 million euro fund dedicated to backing deep-tech ventures, something that’s been missing in the Dutch startup ecosystem as a whole.
Briefs:
Dutch pension fund investing 400 million in deep tech
The Financieel Dagblad is reporting that pension funds PMT and PME are investing 1.1 billion euros in Dutch and European deep-tech SMEs in the manufacturing, metal and high-tech sectors. This is not direct investment but private lending, with loan maturities of five to 10 years.
If you’re wondering what PME and PMT stand for, they started out as investment funds for American tobacco company Philip Morris International and remains to this day the Philip Morris equity funds.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
