HighTechXL’s XL Day celebrates deeptech success and perseverance

On June 27, the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven hosted the latest edition of HighTechXL’s XL Day, a celebration of deep-tech innovation and entrepreneurial grit. With pitches from venture-building graduates, three dynamic breakout sessions, and keynote stories from scale-up founders, the event spotlighted the maturing deeptech ecosystem and the rollercoaster journey of building world-changing technology from scratch.

“We found a five-ingredient recipe,” said Robin van Scheijndel of HighTechXL, as he opened XL Day with the essence of the organization’s success model. “We start with top tech, then find entrepreneurial people - PhDs, former founders, and even people in their cosy seats here today. Then we guide them through our 12-month venture-building program. After that, we continue to support them. But the most important ingredient is collaboration.”

That last word, collaboration, resonated throughout the afternoon.

HighTechXL’s CEO, John Bell, took the stage to reflect on the past twelve months. “If you were here last year, a lot has happened since,” he said. Among the milestones: a strategic partnership with Singapore’s deeptech ecosystem to enable startups to scale internationally, and a European effort under the Rise Europe umbrella that brought together 20 key players to advise the EU Commission. “That culminated in a concrete new startup strategy launched in May,” Bell noted. “It’s about making life easier for founders.”

Closer to home, Bell highlighted a series of HighTechXL-led initiatives: an investor day, a job fair, the second edition of “She Can XL” with the Expat Spouses Initiative, and the launch of a €10 million Pre-Seed Excel Fund aimed at helping deep-tech startups bridge the gap between lab idea and VC funding. “It’s still too hard for founders to focus on building rather than fundraising,” Bell argued. “That needs to change.”

Hope on the rollercoaster

In his keynote, Dr. Hamed Sadeghian, founder and CEO of Nearfield Instruments, personified the highs and lows Bell described. Nearfield, which spun out of TNO a decade ago, is now a global player in high-precision metrology systems for semiconductor manufacturing.

“Power to compute is power to compete,” Sadeghian opened. But he warned of the energy cost of AI’s insatiable compute needs. “Today’s data centers consume more electricity than Germany,” he said. “If we continue like this, future AI workloads will surpass total world energy consumption. That’s not sustainable.”

Nearfield addresses the bottleneck in advanced packaging: inspecting microscopic hybrid bonds at angstrom precision. “Our Quadra system is non-destructive, high-throughput, and brings 3D capability to the fab floor,” Sadeghian explained. “Customers can now inspect full wafers, not just samples. That’s a game-changer.”

The journey, however, wasn’t linear. From a two-desk office in 2011 to a €124 million order book today, Nearfield’s path was marked by customer rejections, round-the-clock engineering, and pandemic-era quarantines. “We had to fly to Korea overnight to save a deal,” he recalled. “Our people lived through five quarantines. It was 24/7, a real rollercoaster. But we made it.”

A second moonshot

Hans de Neve, founder and CEO of Carbyon, told a similarly ambitious story. His startup aims to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere using direct air capture (DAC) technology. “We want to bring the atmosphere back to pre-industrial concentrations,” he said. “There are 140 DAC companies worldwide, and none have found a cost-effective solution yet. We think we will.”

Like Nearfield, Carbyon started with an idea at TNO and a hackathon at HighTechXL. Six years later, the team has raised €35 million and will install its first outdoor demo unit at the High Tech Campus this summer. “It’s next to the food truck area,” De Neve smiled. “Go and see it.”

But building a DAC machine is a multidisciplinary challenge that involves chemistry, nanotech, machine design, and scalable mass manufacturing. “We’re not reinventing the wheel,” De Neve said. “We reach out constantly. You need the ecosystem.”

When asked about leadership, he didn’t sugarcoat it. “It can be lonely. As CEO, you’re the tiebreaker. Sometimes, people want to go right, and you say left. It’s a gamble. And you’re accountable.” Still, he praised his team’s loyalty and celebrated the culture they’ve built. “We have a small party every month. You need that to keep the energy up.”

The real takeaway

If there was one unifying message from XL Day, it was this: building deep-tech ventures is hard, but possible. “Don’t accept ‘no’ as an answer,” Sadeghian told the audience. “At the end of the day, it’s about you. If it’s a success, it’s your team. If it’s a failure, it’s yours. Live through what you need to make it happen.”

For the new startups pitching that day, and the many more yet to come through HighTechXL’s five-ingredient recipe, that’s the spirit they’ll need to carry forward.