Brainport Is Breaking Out.
From quiet powerhouse to Europe's next deep tech engine — semiconductors, health, energy. The numbers, by quarter, since 2020.
Six years. Three numbers.
Not a spike. A climb.
Steady growth, not just spikes.
Smoothed over four quarters, Brainport's line bends upward. Several peers ride a couple of outsized quarters, but don't show the same growth.
Deep tech is the story.
Semicon.
Photonics, AI silicon, packaging — built on decades of high-tech know-how around High Tech Campus and ASML's gravity well.
Health.
Implantables, bio-electronic medicine and precision diagnostics — engineered with the same rigour as the chips next door.
Energy.
Iron fuels, electric mobility, grid hardware — climate tech made physical, scaled out of factories not pitch decks.
Yes, we're smaller.
And we're accelerating fast.
Among the larger European deep tech ecosystems, Brainport posts one of the steepest jumps — and unlike a few peers, growth here comes off a meaningful base, not a single mega-round.
We punch above our weight.
Normalised by the population of each Dealroom region — Brainport (Southeast Brabant), MRA Amsterdam, Greater Helsinki, Canton of Zürich, Capital Region Copenhagen, Greater Boston, and so on.
The capital stack.
Brainport already builds the deep tech the world needs. The job now is to make sure investors, talent, and policymakers everywhere hear it — every quarter, in numbers.
Corporate alumni feed the founder pool.
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Founders of Brainport-HQ ventures, by prior employer.
From ASML's labs to a Nvidia challenger — built in Eindhoven.
A Brazilian-born physicist who built his career inside Brainport — TU/e, Philips, then 15 years at ASML — Kastrup is now backed by Peter Wennink, former CEO of ASML. Euclyd is in talks for a €100M round to scale AI inference chips it claims are ~100× more power-efficient than today's leaders.
The pattern repeats across the founder pool: deep-tech know-how from inside Brainport's giants, paired with capital and credibility from the same alumni network.
Universities & research labs.
The pipeline is concrete: student teams, PhDs and lab IP — funded.
Where they cluster.
566 Brainport companies launched 2018+ with a recoverable street address · classified by Eindhoven postcode · Braventure Dashboard.
How we counted.
Dealroom — funding rounds, company tags, employee counts, founding year & HQ region for all 11 ecosystems benchmarked.
Braventure Database — Brainport company registry, founder profiles, corporate alumni links & street-level addresses.
Company logos via logo.dev. All amounts in EUR.
VC round types: Seed, Early VC, Series A/B/C/D, Late VC, Growth Equity VC, Angel, Private Placement VC, Convertible. Grants, debt, IPO & exits excluded.
Source: aggregated ecosystem-level totals from Dealroom — we do not re-aggregate company-by-company. Each ecosystem corresponds to Dealroom's own metro-region definition.
Deep tech: Dealroom's "deep tech" industry tag. Pillar totals sum every round tagged with that industry — overlaps counted in each.
Momentum chart: trailing twelve months (TTM) to smooth lumpy late-stage rounds. Per-capita divides Dealroom's ecosystem total by official metro-area population.
Universe: Brainport startups & scaleups, status operational or low activity, HQ region Zuidoost-Brabant, with a recoverable street-level address.
Each company assigned to its single nearest hotspot within ~1.1 km (Automotive Campus ~2.2 km — larger site footprint).
Dot size & colour scale with total funding raised (log). City-centroid pins excluded to avoid false clustering. Automotive Campus reports employees.
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·Retrieved May 2026