HighTechXL launches €11M fund to back deep tech from day one

The earliest stage of a startup's life is also its most vulnerable. There's no product yet, no revenue, often barely a team — just an idea and the people willing to bet everything on it. On top of that, finding investors to bet on this idea from the very beginning can be challenging. 

This is the problem that HighTechXL, the Eindhoven-based deep tech venture builder, is now taking head-on with the launch of PreSeedXL, an €11 million fund aimed at supporting founders from the very first steps of building a company. The fund was launched today, backed by private investors, HighTechXL's own shareholders, and €5 million from RVO (the Netherlands Enterprise Agency).

"We noticed it was getting more and more difficult for founders to get funding during or after our program," says Patricia de Kort, CFO of HighTechXL and fund manager of PreSeedXL. "Ventures were spending 75% of their time fundraising — time they weren't spending on market validation, team building, or technology development."

Addressing a market failure 

The numbers back up the urgency. The recent State of Dutch Tech report by TechLeap showed that while the total amount of money available for Dutch startups has remained roughly stable, the number of new companies at the pre-seed and seed stage is declining — partly because capital for that earliest phase has become increasingly scarce. As money concentrates in later-stage rounds, the pipeline feeding those rounds quietly shrinks.

"If the number of pre-seeds is declining, then the pipeline will become smaller and smaller," says CEO John Bell. "We said: no, we should do this at the very, very early stage."

For HighTechXL, which has built over 100 deep tech ventures from scratch alongside founders over the past six years, this is a natural extension of its activities. Deep tech companies develop innovations based on fundamental science or engineering breakthroughs. Think of areas such as photonics, battery technology, or AI. Therefore, they need early support to test their technology. 

In this way, the PreSeedXL Fund formalizes what the venture builder has long understood: that money at the right moment is essential to unlock customer engagement, team expansion, and new financing. 

How the PreSeed XL Fund works

PreSeedXL is structured around milestones. Startups entering the HighTechXL program can access funding after three milestones, tied to their development progress. In the first three months, focused on market validation, passing the first gate unlocks €25,000. A second gate brings another €50,000. Completing the full program earns an additional €100,000. 

Beyond that, ventures can request an additional €125,000 based on a strong business case — capital that can also function as matching funding when applying for subsidies or attracting other investors.

"Because we start a company with people and technology — we bring them together, we help them create a venture — we really know them well," says De Kort. "We know their products, their potential. And that's why we can decide earlier if we want to invest."

This close relationship with the founders is what makes PreSeedXL different from a traditional early-stage fund, as underscored by De Kort and Bell. While most investors see a pitch deck and a founding team they've never met, HighTechXL sees founders before they're even founders, co-building the company alongside them. 

Patricia de Kort and John Bell - © HighTechXL

Diversity as a flywheel for success 

HighTechXL works closely with partners, including ASML, Philips, as well as the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e) — where, under a formal agreement, they can look deep into the research pipeline to identify promising technologies before they've even left the lab. Technologies also flow in from partner organizations in Germany, Switzerland, Belgium, and Denmark.

But technology alone is never enough. "Having an idea, having a technology, is far away from having a business — let alone a successful one," says Bell. What HighTechXL looks for, and what PreSeedXL will help attract, are entrepreneurial teams. At minimum, a CEO-type and a CTO-type, complementary in background, often diverse in culture and experience. "We've learned over the years that people with different backgrounds complement each other much more than people who are alike," he notes.

One example mentioned by Bell is Senergetics, a team built around a CTO with deep expertise in AI, data, and sensors, paired with a CEO who came from the process insulation industry. Together, they're working on predictive monitoring for leakage and corrosion — a large, underserved market that neither could have addressed as effectively on their own. “We made a team that I don’t think we could have dreamt of in any other way,” he adds. 

Plugging the missing link

The fund's ambition is to support between 40 and 45 startups over five years — roughly eight to nine per year — and to do so selectively. "We will be very selective to get the right founders with the right spirit and ambitions," De Kort says. "We only continue to invest in companies that have potential and are scalable."

The goal is not just to fund startups, but to de-risk them for subsequent investors. Once a venture has cleared PreSeedXL's gates, has capital behind it, and has been through a year of supported development, it becomes a much more credible proposition for venture capital firms, regional development agencies, and subsidy programs. "You get funding, and that opens up a lot of doors," says De Kort. "It creates a funding flywheel."

The initiative also aligns with a broader push across the Dutch ecosystem to close the gap between university research and commercial viability. PreSeedXL is, in part, an answer to that. "We teamed up with TU/e and its Alumni Fund to stimulate former students to invest in bridging this gap. It's a missing link in the market for early-stage financing," says Bell. "A market failure, really. And we're stepping into that."