Graduate Ventures Launches a €125 Million Seed Fund

Graduate Ventures has launched a €125 million second seed fund for Dutch university founders, with €100 million already committed. The Rotterdam platform was set up in 2021 by alumni of Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam.

The cheques come from people who already ran ASML, Philips, Snowflake and Picnic, and from the Dutch state. Managing partner Auke van den Hout said the €100 million came in over ten months.

€125 Million for Dutch University Founders

The new vehicle is a target of €125 million, not a finished close. Van den Hout’s team still needs €25 million to hit that figure. In May 2026 the same firm had told partners the second seed fund would total €80 million, so the October target sits 56% above that plan.

Named backers of the second fund include Peter Wennink, the former chief executive of ASML; Frank Slootman, the former chief executive of Snowflake; Michiel Muller, co-founder of Picnic; and Jonas Ruyter, co-founder of DataSnipper. Invest-NL, the Dutch state’s investment institution, is in. So is Oost NL, the regional development agency for the east of the country.

Frans van Houten, the former Philips chief who co-founded Graduate Ventures and chairs it, framed the raise as alumni putting both money and time into the next cohort. The other foundation-board names are Menno Antal, formerly of 3i Group; Sandro van Hellenberg Hubar, co-founder of Xindao; and Gert Jan van der Hoeven of H2 Equity Partners.

THE SECOND SEED FUND

• Target: €125 million, with €100 million already committed after ten months of fundraising.
• Still open: €25 million remains before the stated ceiling is reached.
• Earlier plan: An €80 million second-fund goal was set on 13 May 2026, 56% below the October target.
• First seed fund: €50 million, raised largely from the same entrepreneurial circle after the 2021 launch.

Van Houten said it is great to see such a large group of successful entrepreneurs and alumni in the Netherlands coming together through the platform to help the next generation with venture capital and hands-on support from their networks. Wennink put the industrial case in plainer words.

Startups and scale-ups are essential to the future of a prosperous Netherlands. Graduate Ventures meets the need for venture capital and support to help these startups and scale-ups succeed.

Peter Wennink, former CEO of ASML

That is the wager. The people who ran the country’s hardest hardware and software companies are writing early cheques so the next lab team does not stall at prototype. Europe still has too little local seed sitting next to its technical universities, and this raise is an attempt to put that capital in Dutch hands first.

QuantWare Already Raised More Than the Fund

The exhibit they keep using is QuantWare, a 2021 spinout from QuTech at TU Delft. Graduate Ventures invested when the company was still early. On 5 May 2026 the firm closed an €152 million Series B in May ($178 million), which QuantWare called the largest Series B ever for a Dutch deep-tech company and the largest private round for a dedicated quantum-processor maker.

New money in that round came from Intel Capital, In-Q-Tel and ETF Partners. Existing holders who stayed in included FORWARD.one, the Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, InnovationQuarter Capital, Ground State Ventures and Graduate Ventures. The company is putting a large share of the cash into KiloFab, a Delft plant meant to make its VIO processors at industrial volume. It says it already sells into 20 countries.

Matthijs Rijlaarsdam, co-founder and chief executive, has said on the Graduate Ventures site that the firm was a true partner in the early years and that its network helped the company grow. Rui Li, an associate principal at Graduate Ventures, said in QuantWare’s own release that the Delft team is building a category-defining company. Yvonne Greeuw, a senior investment manager at Invest-NL, tied KiloFab to Dutch standing in the global quantum supply chain.

The awkward arithmetic sits in plain view. One portfolio company has now raised more at Series B than the entire second seed fund is supposed to hold. A seed cheque gets a lab team to a product and a first customer. The companies this circle wants, the ones that look like baby versions of ASML, need a later cheque that is larger than the seed pool itself.

QuantWare is not a one-off in that Delft cluster. On 8 May 2026 Graduate Ventures marked its 80th investment with FrostByte, another Delft quantum startup. In July it joined a €575,000 pre-seed for MagiQware, which is building software for fault-tolerant quantum machines, alongside Delft Enterprises and LUMO Labs. The bet is that the same university can throw off more than one hardware company, and that the alumni network can stay in the cap table as those firms grow.

From Delft and Rotterdam to a National Map

Graduate Ventures now partners with eight universities and three university medical centres, a national map that did not exist when the first fund opened. The original pair was TU Delft and Erasmus University Rotterdam, with Erasmus MC beside them. Wageningen University & Research joined in March 2026 with its own pre-seed sleeve. On 13 May 2026 the University of Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit and Amsterdam UMC came in, with Eindhoven added through a tie to Round One Ventures and Amsterdam student deals running through ASIF Ventures. Leiden and Twente complete the list in the October materials.

PARTNER CITIES

• Delft and Rotterdam: The 2021 core, mixing TU Delft hardware with Erasmus commercial training and Erasmus MC.
• Wageningen: Joined on 3 March 2026 to pull agri-tech and climate spinouts into the same alumni pool.
• Amsterdam: UvA, VU and Amsterdam UMC signed on 13 May 2026, with student deal flow via ASIF Ventures.
• Eindhoven, Leiden and Twente: Technical, medical and regional labs now sit on the same platform, with three medical centres in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and Leiden.

The live site counts more than 90 investments and 200 alumni who will take a call. A team of ten runs the firm. About 20 students a year sit inside the university nodes, hunting teams and bringing them in. The May 2026 tally, taken just before the Amsterdam expansion, was 80 companies: 62 had taken a pre-seed cheque of up to €75,000, and 18, including Workwize, QuantWare and Eddy Grid, had taken seed money of several million euro.

The current pre-seed and seed funding window on the firm’s site says it will put up to €3 million into a company across those two stages. Pre-seed money is still the small first cheque. Seed is the larger follow-on, aimed at Dutch university alumni, with the option to stay into later rounds.

The pre-seed sleeve is a different animal from the for-profit seed funds. TU Delft’s university fund describes alumni donations into a revolving pre-seed fund that is meant to recycle returns into the next cohort, with a goal of running as a full revolving pool by 2030. Graduate’s May note put that donation pool at nearly €10 million, raised through the affiliated university funds. Seed Fund I, at €50 million, was always for profit and was backed largely by the same people now writing Fund II cheques.

Only One in Five Dutch Startups Becomes a Scale-Up

The reason this group is writing the cheques is not a shortage of labs. Graduate Ventures, citing TNO, says the Netherlands sits among the top five most innovative countries in the world, yet one in five startups becomes a scale-up. In the United States, TNO’s comparison says, more than half do. Four in five Dutch startups never make that jump.

Van den Hout’s line in the October communiqué was that capital alone is not enough, and that founders need people who have built companies, who can think with them and open doors. He said the €100 million in ten months shows both support for that method and a conviction that the Netherlands needs to build and retain more successful startups. The last verb is doing work. The fear inside this raise is not only that a Delft chip team fails. It is that it succeeds and then hires, raises and lists somewhere else.

Innovation often emerges from ecosystems surrounding academic centres. Graduate Ventures works closely with universities and medical centres in Rotterdam, Delft, Amsterdam, Eindhoven, Wageningen, Twente and Leiden. But capital alone is not enough. Founders also need support from people who have built companies themselves, who can think alongside them and open doors.

Auke van den Hout, managing partner, Graduate Ventures

Luc Sels, president of the executive board at Leiden University, said strong research is often the base for tomorrow’s economy, and that the tie gives entrepreneurial students and researchers capital plus a national alumni network while giving alumni a way to put money and time into the next generation. Richard Goldstein at the University of Amsterdam and Hans van Goudoever at Amsterdam UMC made the same trade in May: the labs produce the ideas, the operators shorten the years between a paper and a product.

That is a cultural import as much as a financial one. The May expansion note named a wider bench of founding supporters, including Kees Koolen of Booking.com, Raymond Cloosterman of Rituals and Eline van Beest of Hybridize Therapeutics, and compared the model to alumni at Stanford and MIT who recycle both cash and hours. Whether a Dutch operator network of 200 people can match that depth is the part of the bet that will not show up in a first close.

A State Cheque at Seed and Series B

Invest-NL is not a silent logo on the Fund II tombstone. The same institution’s Deep Tech Fund sat in QuantWare’s Series B beside Intel Capital and In-Q-Tel. Oost NL’s presence pulls regional development money into a vehicle that started in Delft and Rotterdam and now covers Twente. The state is, in effect, betting twice on the same kind of company: once at alumni seed, and again when the factory has to be built.

THE THREE GRADUATE VEHICLES

Dealroom’s Netherlands guide, presented with Techleap, shows why that double bet exists. Dutch startups raised $3.2 billion of venture funding in 2025. In the trailing four quarters through the second quarter of 2026, 47% of Dutch venture capital sat in scale-up rounds of $100 million or more, 36% in breakout rounds of $15 million to $100 million, and only 17% in startup rounds under $15 million. The fat part of the market is now the late cheque. Seed is the thin end.

QuantWare’s May round sits in that fat part. Picnic’s $473 million growth round in November 2025 and Nearfield Instruments’ $380 million Series D in June 2026 sit there too. A €125 million seed fund cannot follow every winner into those sizes. The design assumes someone else, often the state or a foreign strategic, will. Intel Capital and In-Q-Tel doing exactly that for a Delft processor company is the optimistic reading. The pessimistic reading is that the next QuantWare still has to leave the country to find the Series B.

What a Seed Cheque Cannot Cover

Fund II will not build KiloFab. It will not hire a Galapagos veteran as finance chief. It will not fill a $100 million scale-up round. What it can do is sit in the lab doorway with a first cheque, a second cheque of up to €3 million, and a named operator who has already run a factory, a supermarket chain, or a software giant. The rest of the path is a handoff.

HOW THE PLATFORM GREW

1. 2021: Alumni of TU Delft and Erasmus University Rotterdam launch Graduate Ventures, with Erasmus MC in the original group.
2. 9 November 2021: First close of the seed fund, later sized at €50 million, beside a donation-backed pre-seed pool.
3. 3 March 2026: Wageningen University & Research joins and opens a dedicated pre-seed sleeve.
4. 5 May 2026: QuantWare closes a €152 million Series B, with Graduate Ventures still in the syndicate.
5. 13 May 2026: Amsterdam and Eindhoven join; the second seed fund is still described as an €80 million raise; the tally stands at 80 companies.
6. 6 October 2026: The second seed fund launches at a €125 million target, with €100 million in and a map of eight universities plus three medical centres.

The remaining €25 million is a fundraising task, not a verdict on the model. Van den Hout already has the harder job: turning more than 90 early bets, most of them still tiny, into a second company that can raise like QuantWare without being sold or moved in the process. Seed gets the lights on in the lab. The industrial alumni who wrote this fund are betting they can stay in the room after that.

Disclaimer: This article is news reporting and analysis of a private venture fund launch. It is for information only and is not investment advice, an offer to subscribe for fund interests, or a recommendation to invest in Graduate Ventures, QuantWare, or any other private company named here. Venture funds and early-stage shares are illiquid, can fall to zero, and are usually open only to qualified or professional investors under applicable law. Anyone considering an allocation should speak to a licensed financial adviser and, where relevant, a fund counsel before acting. Figures, commitments and fund terms reflect the statements and data sets cited as of 6 October 2026 and can change as the second seed fund continues to raise and deploy.