The key takeaways and learnings from IGNITE | 2022 Techleap Summit

Key takeaways:

• While there are many investment opportunities in the Dutch market for VCs and more funds are becoming available for VC investments, investors are still not founder-centric and ambitious enough to fuel growth. . It is therefore crucial that Dutch VCs give founders more ownership and control to grow their companies, and focus on the upside potential instead of covering downside risk. Liq prefs are generally bad and – if any – should not go beyond the value of the investment.
• Dutch VCs get involved in a rather late stage for the startups to benefit from the advantages that venture capital funding provides. Instead, more angels, informal investors, and family offices invest in early-stage companies in the Netherlands, which can limit the growth in that stage and diminish the eventual chance of success for Dutch startups.
• There is not enough co-investment and general collaboration among Dutch  VC funds and with foreign funds, which could provide startups with a longer runway. There is also not enough transparency in the Dutch VC landscape in terms of standardising what, for example, a Series A can look like in terms of deal structure and financial terms.
• Both founders and investors should keep their cap tables and other deal terms clean in order for later-stage (international) investors to be more likely to invest in the Dutch ecosystem.
• To founders: do your research and choose your investors carefully to ensure alignment on terms, purpose, and even exit expectations. Be aware of taking money purely on valuation, but look at the terms and the kind of investor you are dealing with.

Where does Dutch deeptech currently stand?

• Deeptech is currently one of the star industries in Dutch tech. The Netherlands is well-positioned to be a leader in deeptech.
• However, the funding gap is particularly tough for deeptech businesses. Other countries outperform us, and as a result, Dutch deeptech potential remains untapped. You can especially see that reflected within the quantum computing industry, where the Netherlands is still in the early startup activities.
• More so, Dutch deeptech lacks diversity as well as focus on business growth. Many first-time deeptech founding teams tend to prioritise science and technology over scaling and market expansion.

What would make the Dutch deeptech sector truly competitive?

The first priority should lie on creating the best possible environment and infrastructure for market and product development.

Constantijn: We have a growing venture-capital sector that is focusing on deeptech, but it’s still pretty small. Talking from the government & universities’ perspectives, it is important to invest in science. But if you want to transfer science into business, and generate real societal impact, you have to look at what scientists and entrepreneurs need to create successful businesses. We can learn a lot from other countries where the deeptech sector is more developed, such as the US and Israel for example. We need a culture shift, in which we are proud of academics that spin out deeptech companies and where this becomes ordinary university practice.

Also, we should celebrate when a research concept, funded by public money,  is transformed into a successful business because we need more repeat entrepreneurs in academia and the capital generated by these companies will flow back into science and universities eventually.

However, this takes more than just the universities. Therefore we initiated Science2Impact to work with all stakeholders to improve tech transfer in the Netherlands.

Moderator: Anne Strobos – Director of Technologies, Techleap
Speakers: Crijn Bouman – Co-founder and CEO at Rocsys | Sven Bakkes – Founding Partner, LUMO Labs, Marissa de Boer, Co-founder and CEO at Susphos