(Editor’s note: This Eindhoven Business Briefing featuring Salvia BioElectronics and ASML is part of Dispatches’ Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers and entrepreneurs.)
One of Eindhoven’s most promising and fast-growing young healthtech companies just got a big vote of confidence from investors. Salvia BioElectronics executives announced today, 27 May, that they’ve raised $60 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round. The round is led by Amsterdam-based VC Innovation Industries, with participation from Invest-NL, EIC Fund and existing investors Inkef, Panakès Partners, SHS Capital, Dolby Family Ventures, Brabant Development Agency (BOM) and Thuja Capital.
The fresh capital will fund completion of clinical development and commercial launch preparations for MySalvia Therapy in the United States, Europe and Australia, according to a news release.
Salvia, headquartered on High Tech Campus Eindhoven, is a clinical-stage medical device company pioneering neuromodulation therapy for relieving the symptoms of chronic migraine. The company has created an ultra-thin implantable device – invisible under the skin – that targets key nerves in the head involved in migraine to reduce the frequency and intensity of migraine attacks. Patients use an external wearable device to deliver “targeted stimulation exactly when and where it is needed,” according to the release.
Chronic migraine is far more than a “headache.” Migraine is a neurological condition that forces people to stop their lives until the debilitating pain passes. With young women making up the majority of migraine sufferers, it’s one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, resulting in an estimated $110
billion annually in lost productivity and medical costs in the EU and U.S. alone, according to the release.
“Our mission is to restore their freedom,” CEO Hubert Martens stated in the release. “MySalvia Therapy is designed to provide not just relief, but meaningful and lasting impact.”
“Salvia BioElectronics is redefining the migraine therapy landscape with a bold, patient-centered approach that combines cutting-edge neuromodulation with an elegant, minimally invasive design”, said Caaj Greebe, partner at Innovation Industries. “At Innovation Industries, we invest in breakthrough technologies that have the potential to solve the most pressing real-world challenges, and Salvia BioElectronics does exactly that: offering life-changing solutions for millions of people living with chronic migraine.”
Founded in 2017, Salvia is a young company, but with deep institutional knowledge. CEO Hubert Martens, CTO Wim Pollet and COO Daniel Schobbens all came out of Sapiens, one of Eindhoven’s most successful startups, which was acquired by Minneapolis-based medical devices giant Medtronic in 2014 for 200 million euros.
So, this is not their first rodeo.
In a period of declining early stage investment across Europe, Salvia’s $60 million raise is, by our reckoning, the second largest of 2025 for Eindhoven-based companies. Axelera AI raised 61.5 million in March. If you factor out AI, this is a particularly tough time for VCs and the startups they finance. So, these sorts of raises – though far short of the 170 million-plus raises of the early 2020s – are still impressive … and prove that Eindhoven is way more than just semiconductor and hardware.
ASML on CNBC
CNBC reporter Katie Tarasov got an exclusive first look at ASML’s new $400 million High NA photolithography machine, the world’s most advanced and expensive chipmaking machine. So far, Intel is the only chipmaker that has one, and this is the machine, capable of projecting the smallest circuitry onto the most advanced chips. So, NVIDIA, Apple and others are sure to be on the waiting list.
The machine is made up of four modules, manufactured in Connecticut, California, Germany and the Netherlands, then assembled in Veldhoven (which is really Eindhoven) for testing before being disassembled again to ship out. According to the CNBC Post, it takes seven partially loaded Boeing 747s, or at least 25 trucks, to get one system to a customer.
But it’s worth it, according to Tarasov. She interviewed ASML clients and executives, including CEO Christophe Fouquet, who say the next-gen EUV machines are more expensive but far more efficient and dependable.
Tarasov’s explanation of how the insanely complex ASML circuitry printing process works is the clearest we’ve read. Even we understand it … sort of. She also has lots of interesting financial data, including how the older DUV machines still make up a huge percentage of ASML sales. Oh, and not surprisingly, China is the growth market, depending on how Trump tariffs play out.
CNBC, like the Wall Street Journal, has really ramped up its coverage of Eindhoven-based ASML. Check out this earlier post from 2022, that halcyon era when an ASML machine only cost $200 million.
Europe falling further behind
Now, back to reality.
The Wall Street Journal has a detailed, and depressing, post about just how far Europe still trails the U.S. and China, and how the lack of a thriving tech culture is contributing to the continent’s stagnating economy.
In “The Tech World is Huge … and Europe’s Share of it is Very Small,” reporters Tom Fairless and David Luhnow note that Europeans missed out on the first digital revolution and are busy ignoring the rise of artificial intelligence. In Europe, venture capital tech investment is a fifth of U.S. levels, the post notes.
There are lots of other depressing numbers:
Over the past 50 years, the U.S. has created, from scratch, 241 companies with a market capitalization of more than $10 billion, while Europe has created just 14, according to calculations from Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-founder of AI startup Workhelix. The typical company in the top 10 publicly traded U.S. firms was founded in 1985, while in Europe, it was in 1911, according to the International Monetary Fund.
The WSJ post touches on the most obvious reasons Europe is a tech laggard: A timid and risk-averse business culture, strict labor laws, suffocating regulations, a smaller pool of venture capital and lackluster economic and demographic growth.
What’s not so obvious is the need for a cultural revolution here, where the obsession with vacations stymies innovation. it’s really the reluctance to work more than a few hours per week while the US and China are 24/7 that’s the root cause of European underperformance.
A German tech entrepreneur who moved to The Valley points out how slooooooowly European startups work. And Fairless and Luhnow add that everything takes longer in Europe: raising money, complying with regulations and hiring and firing workers.
So, entrepreneurs and tech talent are bolting. Executives at software company Bird, one of the Netherlands’ most successful startups, stated recently how they plan to move core operations out of Europe to the U.S., Dubai and other locations due to restrictive AI regulation. “Stop regulating, Europe. We might be the first, but we won’t be the last (to leave),” Robert Vis, the company’s founder, wrote on his LinkedIn page.
We’d like to point out one thing: This is not a new trend. Venture capital was invented by Frenchman Georges Doriot. At Harvard.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
