In 2018, Hans De Neve sat down at a table at HighTechXL in HTC 27 and – surrounded by students, expat spouses and a few engineers – started a startup. That moment was particularly notable because all the elements for this organic startup were already on High Tech Campus Eindhoven.
The event was HighTechXL’s signature hackathon event, “FasTrackathon,” and Hans came to pitch carbon capture technology he invented while working at TNO, located at HTC 25. Many of the aspiring entrepreneurs who showed up that fateful day came from Expat Spouses Initiative, which is still an HTC 27 tenant.
Today, Carbyon is still on Campus and expanding into new office space in HTC 32. The team just raised 15.3 million euros to build its carbon capture technology, including capital from Campus resident Innovation Industries.
But those heady early days follow the definitive startup creation stories from the world’s innovation hubs … except for one element.
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Hans De Neve started with the goal of solving one of society’s greatest challenges and not creating technology for technology’s sake.
“Impact means that we can assess address the global societal challenges with technology. It's too often the technology push and then we look for an application,” he says. “In this case, we were looking at the big societal challenges. Climate change was one of those societal challenges. And we went back to see, okay, what technologies can we leverage to tackle climate change? That has been the foundation of Carbyon, and that's impact driven innovation.
“You start from the societal challenge and not from the technology.”
Carbyon’s technology and early beginnings
With a master’s degree in the physics of microelectronics and material science, Hans had developed the fundamentals of a direct air carbon-removal concept at TNO using the Dutch research institute’s revolutionary thin film technology – extremely thin materials with layers a single atom thick. But getting Carbyon to market demanded figuring out which materials were both effective for carbon extraction and financially feasible for production.
Fortunately, HighTechXL plugged Carbyon into a high-level Campus network that includes talents at ASML and Philips. There was even a period early on when Carbyon had a fully dedicated person from Philips for three months as well as access to ASML engineers.
Hans didn’t even have to leave Campus for his seed investment, which came from HighTechXL and his initial office at HTC 27.
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Hans says HighTechXL and the Campus were “the perfect ecosystem to have those first steps,” crucial to Carbyon’s early survival. “I came from TNO. I was a researcher. I had never started my own company, so I had no clue where to start. The first nine months to one year that we were part of HighTechXL, I learned everything that I had to learn in order to make the first steps into turning this idea into a real company.”
Carbyon quickly proved to be a rising star both for HighTechXL and for the ecosystem as a whole. In 2022, Carbyon was one of 15 teams globally to be awarded $1 million each in the Elon Musk-funded XPRIZE competition by Dr. Peter Diamandis’ LA-based non-profit X Prize Foundation.
Earlier this year, Carbyon announced a partnership with Montréal-based Deep Sky to install two Air Processing Units, each with the capacity to remove 50 tons of CO2 per year. Then mid-year, Carbyon raised 15.3 million euros in what is one of the biggest Series A rounds lately in Eindhoven.
Testing will take place at High Tech Campus, and the final machines shipped to pilot partners for field testing. In parallel, Carbyon plans to expand production to 50,000 machines per year by 2031 and continue to gigaton scale in 2050.
The team, at 45 now, is projected to expand to 60. Being on Campus and a high profile part of the larger ecosystem makes the talent search easier, Hans said. “We advertise our vacancies through the channels of the High Tech Campus. This is a major pool of potential candidates. Carbyon is quite visible on the High Tech Campus. People know about it, and I think we do see a lot of candidates that have seen our vacancies and then apply via the careers page.”
Hans acknowledges the lure of the United States and its giant venture capital firms is strong and he’s in touch with several, traveling recently to San Francisco. But he has no plans to leave the Campus. Rather, he wants to leverage High Tech Campus’s location amid the richest concentration of talent in the world to build Carbyon globally.
“I think it's the golden combination of having U.S. investors because there is a lot of money, of course, with European technology. I think it makes perfect sense.”
With the new capital and a higher profile, Hans now has the time and resources to contribute to the Campus ecosystem. “I learned a lot in the early days from other startups. Now I want to pass on those lessons.”
After raising a Series A round, Hans started sharing lessons with other entrepreneurs. “For me, it was a way to give back what I got from that community before. And I really want to be part of that community.”
According to Google Maps, it’s only 450 meters from where Carbyon began at TNO in HTC 25, to early-stage development at HTC 27 and on to scale-up success at HTC 32. That’s only a six-minute walk … yet the distance from where they came to where they’re going with their impact-driven innovation? That’s immense.
Carbyon's story is a testament to the power of perseverance, drive and open innovation. Here's to continued success in their new home at HTC 32!
High Tech Campus is a place to start, scale and STAY. As your company grows, the Campus is growing with you, with office space, technical facilities and support that allow you to scale easily. Download our comprehensive guide and join the HTCE ecosystem.