Imec.xpand

Imec.xpand

Imec.xpand was established in 2017 by General Partners Tom Vanhoutte and Frank Bulens as an independent venture capital fund, structurally anchored to Imec, the Belgian nanoelectronics R&D center. The fund was created to commercialize the technologies developed within Imec's labs and the broader deep-tech ecosystem, operating as a bridge between advanced semiconductor research and early-stage company formation. It raised its first fund of €117 million from a consortium of corporate, institutional, and government investors, including the European Investment Fund, KBC, and BNP Paribas Fortis. Investment strategy centers on pre-seed to Series A deep-tech companies in areas that leverage Imec's core competencies: semiconductor fabrication, AI-driven hardware, photonics, quantum computing, and advanced life-sciences instrumentation. The fund writes initial checks typically sized between €500,000 and €5 million, with reserves for follow-on participation. Portfolio companies gain exclusive access to Imec's prototyping facilities, cleanrooms, and technical personnel, a non-dilutive advantage that shapes the entire sourcing pipeline. Confirmed portfolio companies include PsiQuantum — a fault-tolerant quantum computer developer — and Spectricity, which builds miniaturized spectral imaging sensors for mobile devices. Geographic focus extends across Europe, with concentrations in Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, alongside select US deals where Imec maintains a research presence. Fund I closed at €117 million in 2018. A second vehicle, Imec.xpand II, reached a first close of €150 million in 2023 and subsequently hit €300 million in total commitments by May 2025 (per PitchBook, May 2025), attracting Porsche Ventures, Sony Innovation Fund, and the Belgian government's SFPIM as limited partners. The team operates from Leuven but maintains a lightweight presence in San Francisco to support portfolio companies accessing US markets. The fund is not a corporate venture capital arm; Imec is a strategic limited partner and technology partner, not a controlling entity, preserving the GPs' independence on investment decisions while locking in the lab's technical due-diligence capability. The structural differentiator is the non-exclusive but deeply embedded technology-transfer privilege: Imec.xpand is the only venture firm globally with a standing research-collaboration agreement granting portfolio companies priority access to Imec's 5,000-strong engineering workforce and its $2.5 billion fabrication facilities. This allows hardware-intensive startups to compress prototyping cycles by months relative to peers relying on contract foundries, without exchanging equity to Imec. The fund's existence formalizes a path to market for technologies that might otherwise remain in academic journals.