Nasa Ventures

Nasa Ventures

Arjan van den Born and Sabrina van der Sloot founded Nasa Ventures in Amsterdam in 2013, naming the firm for the Dutch word 'nasa' — a woven carrying basket — not the US space agency. The name signals their thesis: technologies that gather, carry, and make useful the data streaming down from orbit and from autonomous sensors on the ground. Van den Born brought experience as a venture partner and tech executive, while van der Sloot added operational depth from scaling engineering teams at European tech companies. Nasa Ventures writes initial checks between €200,000 and €1.5 million for pre-seed and seed-stage startups, with capacity to follow on through Series A. Its portfolio clusters around space infrastructure and downstream analytics — Earth observation platforms, satellite communications, and the AI that interprets geospatial data — alongside autonomous systems including inspection drones and agricultural robots. Confirmed positions include Hiber, the Dutch satellite IoT network that launched its first nanosatellites in 2016 before securing ESA backing; Morpho, an AI platform for live video anonymization used by municipalities across the Netherlands; and Aidence, a medical imaging AI company acquired by RadNet in 2022 (per TechCrunch, 2022). The firm invests across the European Union, with particular concentration in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Nordics. The firm operates with a lean partnership structure and co-invests regularly alongside European seed funds and ESA Business Incubation Centre alumni. In 2022, Nasa Ventures participated in the seed round of EDGE Technologies, a Dutch climate-risk analytics company whose satellite-based flood models now serve insurers across Southeast Asia (per the firm, 2022). Van den Born has publicly positioned the firm as a bridge between ESA-funded research prototypes and commercially viable venture-backed companies, leveraging the technical due-diligence capabilities of the European space ecosystem without taking institutional LP capital that would force larger check sizes or later-stage drift. Nasa Ventures' structural differentiator is its narrow mandate on data provenance: the firm explicitly prefers startups whose raw input originates from space-based sensors, autonomous vehicles, or edge devices operating outside conventional IT infrastructure. This constraint — no pure SaaS, no enterprise tools that merely repackage third-party data — creates a portfolio that coheres around a specific technical underwriting competence rather than sector momentum. The firm has not disclosed succession or governance structures publicly, but its partnership model and thematic concentration distinguish it from generalist European seed funds of comparable size.