Accelerating Science-based Ventures

TechScout Venture Fund

TechScout Venture Fund

The TechScout Venture Fund supports early stage projects at TU Delft with commercial prospects. This investment fund grants a number of awards each year to support young spin-off companies.

Delft Enterprises, which administers the Fund, is interested in innovative projects that could lead to new products or services that will have a positive impact on society, including:

  • Demonstrating the commercial feasibility of an idea or innovation
  • Developing working software or a device prototype
  • Obtaining supporting evidence or proof-of-concept for new ideas

Investment decision criteria
Applications are welcome from all fields of inquiry and will be judged based on 8 (Pre-)Seed investment decision criteria. The amount that can be applied for is EUR 50,000. Funds may be spent by the spin-off company formed to commercialise the innovation.

Applications will only be judged if the following conditions are met:

  • The innovation must originate from research at TU Delft.
  • The company may not be older than 2 years on the date of application.
  • Consultancy ideas are not eligible for awards from the Fund.
  • TU Delft employees involved in the project must have prior written approval of their Faculty.

The amount of EUR 50,000 will be provided by Delft Enterprises under a convertible loan agreement (CLA) with conditions based on the Capital Waters model document. A 25% discount will apply upon conversion, a valuation cap upon conversion is not applicable. Any proceeds from the CLA will be returned to the Fund to be used to finance future awards.

Apply
Are you interested in exploring the commercial feasibility of your technology or invention? Before you have to write a full proposal, we would like to get to know you, your team and your innovation a bit better to see how we can help you best. Please complete the Expression of Interest Form and the Fund management will be in touch within 2 weeks to plan a meeting.
If after this meeting we consider your project eligible, you can continue by completing the Application Form. Your application will be judged by the Fund management and if the scores of the 8 criteria meets the required threshold you will be invited to present for the Investment Committee. The Investment Committee will make the final decision after the presentation.

Fund management and Investment Committee
The Fund is managed by Mathijs Heutinck of Delft Enterprises. Mathijs has one vote in the Investment Committee. The other members of the Investment Committee will be a successful entrepreneur of a (past or present) Delft Enterprises portfolio company and an external expert (technical or commercial). They will both have one vote.


Latest grantees

Michiel van Nesselrooij of MuTech is developing wind turbine blade add-ons that reduces their intrusive noises up to 6 decibels.

Dorien Duives from City Analytics works on a crowd monitoring platform to map streams of pedestrians with multiple data sources.

Lucas Veel and Ignis Trollman founded Fluss to restore the water ecosystem with a modular toilet water treatment system for boats.

Pieter de Bruijn began Hypersoniq to monitor water quality with a sensor that can detect a broad range of (micro)contaminants with only a single device.

Aisling Foley and Ilaria Poledri started ExCulture with the idea of mixed-culture fermentation that can be applied for the development of new pharmaceuticals.

Aytac Yilmaz established Ore Energy to create an innovative iron and air based energy storage solution that is very cost effective and can save up electricity for a long-duration.