Innovation Industries

The firm maintains formal relationships with the four Dutch technical universities — TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, University of Twente, and Wageningen University. These partnerships give Innovation Industries early visibility into faculty research commercialization, often before startups engage other investors. University deans and former CTOs sit on the firm's advisory board, embedding the sourcing advantage structurally. This pipeline generated the majority of the firm's portfolio companies and is considered its primary competitive moat.

Yes, though selectively. The firm's core geographic focus is the Netherlands and the Benelux corridor, where approximately two-thirds of its portfolio companies are headquartered. It also participates in syndicated rounds in Germany and the United Kingdom when the underlying technology originates from Dutch university research or when portfolio companies expand internationally. It does not operate a dedicated non-European practice.

The three flagship funds have attracted pension capital from Pensioenfonds PME and Pensioenfonds PMT — two of the Netherlands' largest metal-and-technology sector pension funds — as well as the European Investment Fund, several university endowments, and Dutch family offices. Fund III at €300M more than doubled the firm's institutional LP base relative to Fund II.

The firm writes initial checks between €1M and €10M, targeting Series A and Series B rounds for companies with demonstrable intellectual property and technical validation. It reserves roughly half of each fund for follow-on capital, supporting portfolio companies through later-stage rounds and occasionally into pre-IPO growth. It does not operate a seed-stage practice or an accelerator platform.

Innovation Industries does not invest in consumer internet, generalist SaaS without hardware or deep-physics components, pure-play e-commerce, or financial technology. The firm's mandate explicitly excludes biotech therapeutics and medical devices, keeping its focus on physics-first and engineering-first companies in industrial technology, photonics, semiconductors, robotics, and computational AI applied to energy and agriculture.

The investment committee includes the named partners — Nardeet van Egmond and Chris Sonnenberg — alongside senior members of the investment team. An external advisory board composed of deans from the partner technical universities and former C-suite executives from ASML and Philips reviews IP quality and go-to-market assumptions before committee votes. No single LP or university holds veto rights over investment decisions.

Innovation Industries invests exclusively through direct equity, convertible-note, and SAFE instruments in operating companies. It does not make fund-of-fund commitments, does not deploy into secondary positions, and has not launched a parallel fund-of-funds vehicle. Its model is pure direct-deal venture capital backed by pension and institutional limited partners.