Hamed Sadeghian: after the valley of death, another death zone

A customer calls at two in the morning on a Saturday. It is mid-July, and much of the Netherlands is on holiday. Inside a semiconductor factory, however, the calendar offers no relief: production must continue, and a problem needs solving.

For Hamed Sadeghian, founder and CEO of Nearfield Instruments, these moments determine whether a promising technology company becomes a lasting business. The customer will remember whether someone picked up, took responsibility, and delivered a solution. “Customer trust is the oxygen,” he told founders and investors at LEVEL UP 2026.

His keynote warned entrepreneurs who assume surviving the startup phase puts the hardest work behind them. Beyond the familiar valley of death lies another dangerous stretch: the death zone of scaling, where customers depend on you, employees build their futures around you, and the organisation must mature fast enough to carry the weight.

Start with the customer’s pain

Nearfield’s journey began with a prediction. In 2011, Sadeghian and his team anticipated that semiconductor chips would become so complex that controlling the manufacturing process would become a critical bottleneck alongside lithography.

The company develops metrology systems: equipment that measures the tiny structures on chips so manufacturers can check whether production is proceeding as intended. Nearfield was founded in 2016 as a spin-out of TNO. Its technology addresses a growing challenge as chip structures shrink and become increasingly three-dimensional.

Yet Sadeghian’s account of building the company started with prospective customers. From the outset, the team asked whether the problem it had identified was real and whether solving it would matter. The response contained both encouragement and doubt. Customers recognised the problem and expected it to become more pressing. They were less convinced that the proposed solution could be built: it looked too complex.

For Sadeghian, those were two different questions. Customers could validate the need; making the technology work was his team’s responsibility. “You tell me about the pain,” he said, recalling that distinction. That remains his starting point for entrepreneurship. Asked what he would do if he were building a new company today, he returned to customer pain and the opportunity to add value. The commercial test is whether someone will pay for that value.

A bridge across the valley

On stage, Sadeghian showed photographs from Nearfield’s early years: a hand-drawn concept, a proof of concept, long days and nights in a small laboratory, and eventually shipping its first product to Asia. Each represented a bridge across the valley of death. The proof of concept, completed in 2015, allowed potential customers to test the approach. The first product gave the team something it could ship and improve through customer experience.

The conviction was to get it into customers’ hands as soon as possible and let their needs shape its development.

Sadeghian acknowledged the importance of the surrounding ecosystem: investors, research institutes, talent, and infrastructure. He believes that support has improved substantially over the past decade. Entrepreneurs still need commitment and the right technology, but they have resources to draw on. The strongest bridge, however, is a customer who wants the problem solved.

For Nearfield, a defining milestone came in 2023, when a major customer decided, after extensive evaluation, to use its system in high-volume manufacturing. It felt like confirmation that the company had crossed its most important valley. Then came purchase orders, additional production capacity, and shipments to semiconductor manufacturers worldwide.

When success raises the stakes

Nearfield’s growth now comes with substantial financial backing. In June 2026, the company announced a $380 million Series D round at a $1.6 billion valuation. The funding is intended to expand production, customer support, and its technology roadmap. Sadeghian used those achievements to introduce the next challenge. In his mountaineering metaphor, the company had climbed into the death zone: the altitude where oxygen becomes scarce, and the margin for error narrows.

At scale, the technology works. Customers are counting on it. An ecosystem has formed around the business. Sadeghian described the responsibility of having 500 employees and their families putting their futures in the company’s hands. At that point, demand creates obligations. Semiconductor manufacturers are exceptionally demanding customers, and they need their suppliers to deliver when production requires it. Calling the resulting pressure a “luxury problem” understates what is at stake.

Customer trust provides the oxygen to keep moving. A broken commitment can consume it quickly. Sadeghian chose K2 as his image for the climb because, in his analogy, the infrastructure that helped earlier in the journey becomes less available higher up. The company must develop the capacity to navigate increasingly difficult conditions itself. The answer is faster organisational maturity: learning to manage more employees, more partners, and more customer problems while maintaining reliable execution. That, he argued, is one reason why building a large, successful scale-up is so difficult.

Conviction needs self-criticism

During the audience questions, Sadeghian returned to the tension between determination and doubt. Founders need enough belief to attempt something customers may initially consider impossible. They also need to examine whether their chosen technology is viable and recognise its limitations, risks, and potential showstoppers.

Falling in love with a technology can make those weaknesses harder to see. Passion helps a team persist, but it must leave room for self-criticism. The same balance applies to leadership. Asked how he makes decisions as the stakes rise, Sadeghian described trusting his judgement, taking advice from people with different perspectives, and accepting responsibility for the outcome. He did not claim that intuition always produces the right answer. His approach is to decide quickly and monitor closely enough to recognise when a decision needs correcting, before the consequences become unmanageable.

Other shoulders to carry the load

Asked whether he had ever wanted to quit and enjoy an easier life, Sadeghian said he had never had such a moment. He also made clear how tough the journey can be, particularly in a competitive industry with relatively few customers. Yes, there are moments when a founder is down. Those are the moments when the team becomes essential: people who can lift the founder’s spirits, share responsibility, and put other shoulders beneath the load.

His emphasis on grit came with a demand for ownership across the organisation. Reaching a milestone is valuable when it produces the intended result for the customer. The work continues until that outcome has been achieved.

For the founders at LEVEL UP, Sadeghian’s warning was that growth changes the nature of the challenge. Early on, a customer helps prove that a company deserves to exist. As it scales, that customer needs proof that the company can be depended on, especially at two in the morning on a Saturday in mid-July.