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Founded in 2014, VSParticle enables scientists to accelerate material development to discover the materials that will underpin new sustainable technologies 

VSP is unlocking material discovery, with its unique technology that enables industry to accelerate material discovery, production process optimization and mass production, reducing the time to market from 15 years to one 

The company’s technology is applicable to many industries starting with accelerating and simplifying the production of Catalyst Coated Membranes, crucial for sustainable hydrogen innovations, and next-generation gas sensors

Delft, 4th July 2023: VSParticle (VSP) - the leading supplier of nanoparticle printing tools - has raised €14.5 million in funding led by Plural to power its mission to accelerate material development and unlock innovation at scale. 

Founded in 2014, VSP accelerates material development to power next-generation products. Its technology enables materials to be broken down to the size of nanoparticles and produced at the push of a button, allowing university researchers and commercial R&D teams across the world to experiment to create new materials that form the basis of revolutionary products. Moving ten times faster will enable VSP to unlock a century of innovation in the next 10 years and solve urgent global challenges from climate change, to energy transition and healthcare innovation by reshaping global material development efforts.

Delivering a century of material innovation 

The ability to develop new materials has impacted society tremendously but today it can take up to 10 years to discover new materials in the lab and a further five years to test and scale a new discovery to mass production, which is holding back innovation across the globe. By accelerating every step of materials development, VSP’s technology reduces the overall time of material discovery from 15 years to only one. In a peer-reviewed research paper, VSP helped reduce the production and discovery cycle from months to only an hour. It's able to do this because it is the only technology that can be directly transferred and scaled through all three steps of the material innovation cycle; from trial and error in the lab, to optimization of the production process and scaling towards mass production. 

For instance, VSP’s technology is at the forefront of helping to decarbonise society, through the mass production of Catalyst Coated Membranes (CCMs). These membranes are the key component in electrolysers, a technology that is essential to the production of green hydrogen, which is used to decarbonise industries such as shipping, produce renewable electricity for transport and heating and enable the conversion of carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals, such as Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF). Europe alone intends to produce 10 million tons of green hydrogen a year by 2030, creating massive demand for increasingly efficient catalysts. 

At the moment, the process relies on using scarce and expensive metals such as platinum and iridium. Yet VSP’s technology will help teams to develop new material combinations to make it more affordable to scale the production of CCMs, with a predicted 10x savings in scarce metals, and introduce new products faster and cheaper than ever before. To launch its first production tools, VSP has already built strong relationships in the CCM and the precious metal markets, including Germany-based Heraeus Precious Metals. 

VSP’s technology will also accelerate and simplify the production of new gas sensors. Today gas sensors are used to detect specific molecules but with VSP’s technology, it will be possible to develop advanced sensors that can, for instance, detect air pollutants in buildings and the environment or even detect early signs of illness from human breath to improve healthcare outcomes. VSP is already working with industry partners and leading research institutes such as MCL to develop sensors for the chemical, food and agriculture sectors, as well as for everyday devices. These are just two of hundreds of industrial markets VSP will focus on in the coming years.

VSP is focused on making this new technology accessible to researchers, developers and manufacturers in the form of R&D, process development and production systems so that industry and academia can leverage each other’s work by enabling reproducibility. VSP’s technology can also be combined with robotics and advanced data processing to enable automated labs to further material discovery and development, such as supporting the University of Toronto Acceleration Consortium’s efforts in developing an automated lab for CCM production. 

Scaling VSP’s impact

VSP was born out of decades of research by materials scientists working in the award-winning research facilities at TU Delft. Co-founder and CEO Aaike van der Vugt (Forbes 30 under 30 winner 2019) first worked on the technology as a Master's student before collaborating with his professor Andreas Schmidt-Ott, co-founder and CTO Tobias Pfeiffer, and co-founder and COO Tobias Coppejans to scale this technology into an R&D tool for universities and organizations. 

In the past few years, VSP has already participated in MIT’s student venture accelerator DELTA V and is recognised as one of the Netherlands’ high-potential companies through the Techleap Pole Position cohort for deep tech startups. This latest round of funding led by Plural Platform included participation from BlueYard Capital and a €3.5 million grant from NXTGEN HIGHTECH, bringing the total raised by VSP to €17 million. The funding will be used to scale up the production of VSP’s tools and services and grow the operations and commercial teams. 

Aaike van der Vugt, co-founder and CEO of VSParticle, said: “Scientists spend decades of their life on discovering new materials, which means that it takes generations to unlock the innovation we need as a society. We’ve only been able to unlock about 1% to enable technological innovation so far, but with our technology, we will unlock the other 99% in the next two decades. From the climate crisis to preventative healthcare, the implications of accelerating materials development are huge. Plural understands the potential impact of our work and has proven experience to help us scale this technology. We’re thrilled to be working with them.” 

Sten Tamkivi, who led the investment round at Plural Platform, said: “Europe is uniquely well positioned for building world-leading companies solving difficult problems. To solve some of the biggest global challenges, such as decarbonising society in the next generation, manipulating physical matter smartly is required. We need to be able to break molecules down to the nano-level and experiment with them to find new optimised material structures. VSParticle is the only company I’ve come across that can enable experimentation and discovery with software-defined materials at scale. As investors, we are very excited about working with Aaike and his team of world-class scientists in this incredibly important field.” 

Christian Gebauer, Head of Hydrogen Systems, Global Business Unit at Heraeus Precious Metals (part of Heraeus Deutschland GmbH & Co. KG), said: “To meet the ambitious goals of producing green hydrogen, we need to optimise electrode manufacturing in new ways, for example, new ways of using materials like iridium for PEM electrolysis. VSParticle’s solution has the potential to improve electrode manufacturing and further technological benefits for the world.”

Anton Köck, key researcher at Material Center Leobon (MCL), said: “VSP’s printing technology is of high interest for gas sensor developers because it provides a tremendous degree of flexibility in terms of material compositions, which is key for optimizing chemical sensors. This technology enables direct deposition of nanomaterials on a wafer without further post-processing, which will simplify mass production. I am very optimistic that VSPs technology will accelerate the development of new, optimized gas sensors for a variety of emerging applications.”

M. Kozdras, Co-lead MI Materials for Energy, said: “VSParticle’s nanoprinting technology is seen as a critical synthesis pathway for accelerated materials discovery of energy materials (automated labs)”

DUTCH NANOTECH STARTUP MAKES POSSIBLE THE INVENTION OF ENTIRELY NEW MATERIALS LEADING THE WAY TO INVENTIONS IN INDUSTRIES INCLUDING SEMICONDUCTORS, BATTERIES, SENSORS AND MORE..

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Delft, February 14, 2018 - VSPARTICLE, the Delft start-up enabling a revolution in nanotechnology through their innovative machines, receives an investment from Invaco Management, the investment vehicle of Dutch off-shore entrepreneur Keesjan Cordia.

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Last week, the moment had finally arrived for Delft nanotech startup VSParticle: the start of the Soft Landing Program by InnovationQuarter, Medical Delta and UC (Berkeley) CITRIS. The Program is being implemented under a MoU signed in 2016 by the above parties in the presence of Minister Jet Bussemaker.

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DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY OF VSPARTICLE ALLOWS RESEARCHERS TO PRODUCE NANOPARTICLES AT THE PUSH OF A BUTTON.  Beijing/Delft, November 16, 2017 – Delft University of Technology spin-off VSPARTICLE enters the booming Chinese market with a radical technology that allows researchers to produce nanoparticles at the push of a button. VSPARTICLE’s nanoparticle generator uses atoms, the worlds’ smallest building blocks, to provide a controllable source of nanoparticles. The start-up from Delft signed a distribution agreement with Bio-Sun to make their VSP-G1 nanoparticle generator available in China. 

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Tuesday, February 24th, VSParticle won the STARTUP Competition. This competition is a collaboration between Delft University of Technology and MIT to encourage entrepreneurship. The winners of the competition will be fully sponsored to go to MIT for three months this summer to take part in the Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator.

Pitch

The finals took place during the Entrepreneurship Forum in the Auditorium of Delft University of Technology. In front of a packed auditorium the six companies, consisting of PowerWindow, VSParticle, Atmos UAV, Samsara, Beacon en CoH co., had ninety seconds to pitch their startup and answer a few questions from the jury. A great success, according to Kyle Judah, Program Director MIT GFSA: “Students were excited, the teams performed really really well”. After a short discussion by the jury, the jury chairman Theun Baller, dean of the Faculty of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering, announced the winning team. The jury selected VSParticle based on the following criteria: “Is it real Delft Technology? Is it close to market? And which team would benefit most from a stay at MIT?”.

VSParticle

Aaike van Vugt and Tobias Pfeiffer are the founders of VSParticle. Having a background in Chemical Engineering at Delft University of Technology, they developed a bench top unit that enables the production and deposition of nanoparticles on a carrier in one step, removing all intermediate processes, shipping, and handling costs. For this they used a process based on spark-ablation, developed at Delft University of Technology, that reduces all process steps back to just one single process. This is ground-breaking technology that could lead to many innovations, or how Aaike put it: “We want to bring you guys the next generation of products!”.

Prestigious startup-programme

De MIT Global Founders’ Skills Accelerator is an annual educational programme for students of MIT and is the premier university student accelerator in the world. Each year about ten teams of MIT will be selected as well as four teams from other universities. Due to the close collaboration between Delft University of Technology and MIT, this year a team of Delft students gets the opportunity to partake in the programme. From June till September teams are being prepared for entrepreneurship and are being supported in developing their startup. During these three months teams can earn up to $20,000 by meeting monthly milestones. In the beginning of September the teams will present their startup to American investors during Demo Day to secure enough investment for a successful start of their company.

Selection

At the beginning of February a selection of the applicants for the STARTUP Competitionpitched in front of a jury during the semi-finals. Five teams were then selected to pitch at the finals. The winners of the course ‘Turning Technology into Business’ became the sixth candidate this year.

Entrepreneurship Forum

The Entrepreneurship Forum is an event organised by YES!Delft Students to which around a thousand students attend yearly. At this event founders and CEO’s of successful companies share their stories with students and in between their presentations the finalists of STARTUP pitch. In this way an interesting mix forms of lectures from professionals on the one hand and pitches of young talent on the other hand.