Prince Constantijn of the Netherlands seemed notably relaxed when he joined our virtual meeting, offering the same calm, grounded presence that has come to define his public role in recent years. Since taking on the position of Special Envoy of Techleap in 2016, he has become the most recognisable face of the Dutch tech ecosystem, a strategist, a connector, and an advocate who has helped elevate the country’s profile on the global innovation stage.
Under his leadership, Techleap has grown into a pivotal platform that supports founders, strengthens valorisation, and champions the Netherlands as a competitive hub for emerging technologies. His relaxed demeanour can also be interpreted as a sign of success, with Techleap receiving confirmation of new funding for its deeptech programs in late September. The announcement effectively extended its mandate for government-backed initiatives through 2029.
For Prince Constantijn, this renewed support is not just a financial milestone, but a sign of growing confidence in the country’s ability to lead in fields where science-driven innovation meets long-term societal impact. As he reflects on Techleap’s progress and the road ahead, his focus remains clear: helping the Netherlands cultivate the next generation of breakthrough companies that can shape Europe’s technological future.
During our interview, Prince Constantijn reflected on the early days of StartupDelta, the uncertainty around Techleap’s continuation, the new mandate, Techleap’s privatisation, the Dutch startup ecosystem, European tech sovereignty, and his criticism of the EU over AI regulation.
The following conversation has been edited for clarity:
You took the Special Envoy role in 2016. What was the most important gap you saw in the Dutch ecosystem at the time, and what was your first move to close it?
At the time, we were thinking mostly about systems change. We looked at how we could increase access to capital, access to talent, access to networks — as we called it — access to markets and technology. Basically, we looked at all the inputs and tried to figure out what strategies we could develop to give companies higher levels of investment, ensure the talent pool would grow, and also work with the government on many of these topics. So it was more at a systems level and less with the individual founders.
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Techleap grew out of StartupDelta and other initiatives. How would you describe Techleap’s DNA now, and how has it changed since day one?
Well, our DNA is indeed very much focused on creating bigger ambition and helping founders scale. But we also have a deep commitment to creating a better environment for tech entrepreneurs in the Netherlands. Especially if you look at our deep-tech activities — they are still very much engaged with all the stakeholders in the ecosystem, working to create a better environment for them.
So how do we improve the tech-transfer system? How do we ensure there’s a better tax ruling for shareholdings or options? All of these things. So the DNA is really also about identifying bottlenecks and helping to remove them. But the focus, the lens through which we look at the world, is always the tech entrepreneur. That’s really important.
Techleap has helped so many startups become scaleups. How do you measure that success, or do you think there’s still a lot on the table to achieve?
Well, in many things we do, it’s hard to actually establish the causality of the success. We can measure the funds that were raised after we engaged with those companies. We can look at valuations, the number of startups scaling, the scale-up ratio, how many companies are growing into successful businesses, and the number of unicorns; all of these things we obviously measure.
But when it comes to what Techleap has contributed to that growth, it becomes very qualitative. We have NPS scores for our activities, we gather testimonials, and we have a relatively good understanding of what our contribution provides — but it’s very hard to measure directly.
As someone who sits between government, corporates and founders, how do you maintain credibility with each, and where do you see the most friction?
One thing we do is employ a number of founders, ex-founders, and people with investment backgrounds. So within the team there’s a lot of knowledge and empathy for founders. We stay credible by being very close to the community. And we try to build a brand that represents what TeamNL is for Olympic athletes. What we aspire to is that every tech founder, whether aspiring to become a unicorn, is already a unicorn, or has surpassed that mark, feels they want to be part of this community. And we want the Netherlands to be proud of those entrepreneurs.
In many ways, the metaphor of TeamNL for Olympians is also a metaphor we use. We want successful founders to become the mentors and coaches of the next generation and invest back into the ecosystem. We’re providing an infrastructure for founders to improve. We’re looking for excellence and improving excellence in the Netherlands so that these companies and their founders can compete at a global scale. It’s very much like selecting the best athletes, training them to become even better, helping them win prizes, and then enabling the nation to be proud of them — and encouraging them to give back.
Congratulations on the confirmation of new government funding on 23rd September, extending Techleap’s mandate through 2029. Can you walk us through how this renewal came about and what conditions or goals were critical for that extension?
One thing I didn’t mention about our DNA is that we are always renewing ourselves. At StartupDelta, every one and a half years, we had a new plan, strategy, and budget and it was never taken for granted that we would continue. With Techleap, we had four years. At the end of that period, we wound down the organisation from 50 people to 15 because there was no certainty. We were working toward privatising, but then the government decided to give us an extension of three years at €5 million per year. That allowed us to continue our activities, but also came with the obligation to privatise most of what we were doing — at least the founder-facing work.
So programs, community work, events — all of that had to be privately funded within three years. And that’s exactly where we are now; we are nearly there. At the same time, there was also the challenge of finding a more permanent funding base for our deep-tech activities and our ecosystem work, the things that are harder to fund privately.
The government evaluated Techleap and concluded it was a very useful initiative to support the deep-tech sector. So now we are developing two things: A thematic program, starting with a pilot around the future of compute, companies in semiconductors, quantum, integrated photonics, etc. Next topics: energy, then clean-tech and climate, and possibly defence and security.
We chose those topics because they’re strategic. The government recognises them as strategic, and there’s a clear need for new companies in those areas. We also looked at whether the Netherlands has a strong enough foundation — a “right to play.” And third, we asked whether Techleap could meaningfully contribute.
For instance, in health and biotech, there’s already a strong support system. Same in food-tech. So we felt our contribution there would be limited, hence the focus on other areas. That’s one part of the program. The second is a generic deep-tech initiative, where we work with ecosystem players, investors, universities, and tech-transfer offices to create an environment where more companies are generated by knowledge institutions and where they can scale more efficiently.
Early-stage funding is a big challenge in the Dutch tech ecosystem. With the specific mention of risk-bearing money in the new mandate, do you think it will help address this challenge?
Yeah. We looked at many ways to address that. Our preferred option is a fiscal stimulation similar to what happened in the UK, perhaps in an adjusted form. But so far, the Ministry of Finance has not been very helpful in exploring that option. The Ministry of Economic Affairs is still negotiating with them, but progress seems far off.
So there are other ways to make early-stage investment in very risky deep-tech companies possible: debt options or convertibles, but also subsidies, grants, which I’m not the biggest fan of.
There are instruments you can develop, or guarantees, to make it less risky for private investors. There’s also philanthropy. One interesting development is the Graduate Entrepreneur Fundin Rotterdam and Delft, where alumni have pooled together to create a pre-seed fund and a follow-on seed fund. So ultimately, it will require a public-private approach to bridge that gap.
You mentioned on LinkedIn that Techleap is evolving into a hybrid structure, with both a non-profit arm (public) and a B.V. to support scaleup founders beyond the government mandate. Could you elaborate on that transition?
The government, when it decided to continue the funding for another three years, also asked us to write a proposal specifically focused on deeptech, with the condition that we separate those activities into their own legal structure. That will be the current foundation, which will handle only deeptech work.
The other activities will be moved into a BV structure, where income comes from partners and founders contributing as members of the community and paying for certain services. The aim is not to be profitable per se, but to cover our costs and grow the community.
Can you elaborate on which programmes will be supported by the public arm and where the private arm will focus?
Programs are agnostic, and they can be funded from either side. But yes, similar programs for deeptech companies will be publicly funded, and programs like Rise under the private arm will be funded by the companies themselves.
Since this is the first time you are talking about the B.V. structure in detail, how do you want the Dutch founders to interpret this change?
I want them to become more owners of the community. I want them to be deeply engaged. Entrepreneurs in the Netherlands can be quite isolated, individualistic, and transactional. We don’t invest enough in relationships yet relationships and networks are crucial. You can learn from other founders, support each other, collaborate, and build investor relationships. We’re facilitating that, and we hope founders embrace our values: think bigger, pay forward, and give back. One of our core values is that once you’re part of Techleap, there will be a moment when others call on you, and you should be available to help.
With the BV structure, do you see an opportunity to collaborate with EU-Inc to create a more holistic approach?
In the private arm, there will definitely be government-affairs-as-a-service. Many of the companies we work with don’t have government-affairs capabilities, so helping them is important. It’s also about storytelling, about why we should be proud of our tech founders. That’s something we can do better collectively than individually.
Regarding EU Inc, we don’t collaborate with them, but we support them. I’m one of the first signatories to their paper. As Europe, we need to pull together because this could be a first step toward creating a friendlier environment — a true single market — for tech companies in Europe. My message to the European Commission is: keep it simple. Focus on a few things. Don’t try to harmonise everything. Just make it easier to start and grow a company in Europe.
You recently said the Dutch AI ecosystem is “brimming with potential but that’s not enough to win.” What precisely is “not enough to win”?
It’s a few things, but foremost culture. We have a culture that keeps people’s feet on the ground, which makes big thinking feel unnatural. But if you want to build a global company, you have to think big from the start. Velocity is part of that. You need to go fast. You need to understand how your competitors are moving quickly in a rapidly changing environment. Capital can enable that, but if you’re a strong founder with ambition and product-market fit, you will find funding.
I’m speaking about generic tech, not deeptech, which is more capital intensive and where risks are more technology-linked. But in general, it’s about velocity, ambition, and raising the right amount of capital.
According to the State of Dutch Tech 2025, deeptech companies have a scale-up ratio of about 35%. How do you access the sector? What are its strengths and weaknesses?
I wouldn’t call them weaknesses, but there are challenges – mainly industrial scaling. There’s a lot of startup activity and support for early growth. But deeptech companies often haven’t found product-market fit yet. They may have a working prototype, pilots, or experimental customers. When they want to scale industrially, they need a very different toolkit, production facilities, manufacturing optimisation, and related capabilities. That skill set isn’t readily available.
Investment instruments for first-of-a-kind facilities are also limited. These can require €40–100 million for a new battery factory, chip production line, clean rooms, etc. They’re very risky and very hard to finance. It starts with acknowledging the challenge and then finding the right parties. This is a European challenge. So we work with organisations like the European Innovation Council, Invest-NL, Bpifrance, and others — all exploring how to keep production and manufacturing in Europe and how to capitalise these companies.
Do you think the Netherlands should pursue an industrial policy for AI and deeptech, focusing on openness, talent, sovereign compute, data trusts, etc.?
AI is a foundational technology. Every country should have a policy and think about where it wants to play across the stack. The stack isn’t just large language models; it’s much broader. The Netherlands is better positioned in the application layer.
We’ve also seen ASML’s investment in Mistral, applying AI to industrial processes. ASML sits at the total bottom of the AI stack: making the machines that produce the wafers that produce the chips.
We think we can play in the equipment space, in the application layer, and in specialised large language models — not the commoditised ones, but domain-specific ones. It will be hard to compete with OpenAI, DeepSeek, or Anthropic. And then there’s cloud, a European-level issue. How dependent do we want to be on US hyperscalers? Should we build our own capabilities? That’s not just industrial policy, it’s strategic autonomy.
When it comes to building an AI hub, do you think a nationalist approach or a pan-European approach is better?
It depends on what you want to achieve. We are supporting an initiative by a group of AI founders. We did a study on AI’s position in the Netherlands, what founders are working on and their challenges. They clearly stated they need more density of capital and talent. They want a national space where top AI founders can come together, a place attractive to international investors and corporates. Berlin has Merantix. France has Station F. Something like that would be very helpful here.
Is this where EU Inc could change the landscape, maybe act as an anchor?
I fully agree with the mission of EU Inc and support them. I’m one of the first signatories to their paper. EU Inc. is an idea and an agenda for harmonising parts of business law, especially around establishing companies and remunerating employees. It has to be done at the European level because that’s where you create the internal market. But it’s not industry-specific; it’s basic infrastructure.
There was a Dutch Startup Association report saying 37% well-funded Dutch startups may relocate abroad in the next two to three years. What’s your reaction? Is it a warning sign or an opportunity?
We always have to make the ecosystem more attractive to founders, both Dutch and international. I’m not sure about the exact number, but yes, quite a few AI founders immediately go to the US and set up shop. They often keep some activities here, and developers tend to be cheaper and more loyal. In Silicon Valley, it’s very difficult to hire and retain top talent.
We saw that under Biden’s IRA, which focused on climate companies, it became very financially attractive to relocate to the US. But companies typically decide to relocate when they face a major scaling decision: where to build, where to expand. If your customer base is European, it makes sense to stay. If you’re doing cutting-edge AI, it’s logical to go where compute, talent, investors, and customers are, which is often the US.
In health and med-tech, the regulatory environment in Europe is slow and restrictive, so those companies often go to the US. The FDA used to be faster and more efficient, though under the current administration, it has also slowed down due to budget cuts. So in some cases, the US is now less attractive than before, but in AI and cutting-edge technologies, it remains a major hub. Many companies will at least consider starting activities there.
What does Techleap need to do in the next three to four years to be as effective as it was in its first phase?
I think we should be much more effective. I look at Y Combinator, a private initiative that has generated more unicorns than Europe combined. That worries me: maybe we’re not ambitious enough and could have done much more. A privatised Techleap can and should be a much faster accelerator.
We want more involvement from entrepreneurs. We’re also looking at raising our own funds to support the companies we work with, giving them extra capital.
For deeptech, we need to be more strategic: connect scale-ups with corporates and government, create a better scaling environment, and acknowledge their strategic value. And overall, the Netherlands must become much prouder of what entrepreneurs are building. These people are like athletes, giving up private time, taking financial and reputational risks, building things nobody forced them to build. Many of them are working on renewable energy, materials, climate solutions, and societal impact. We should be proud that we have people who dare to step out and build.
What’s your favourite Dutch startup right now?
I’m not going to answer that.
Okay, maybe a couple of startups people should follow?
Well, of course, the big hopeful — the “ASML of the future” — is Nearfield.
In chips, Innatera and Axelera are very exciting. In AI, we have companies like Weaviate, Clickhouse, LLeverage, Polars, General Intuition, etc.
In energy, we have incredible companies like Thorizon. In healthcare too. We shouldn’t forget fintech, where new payment companies keep emerging. There’s a lot of activity across the board. I don’t want to choose one; they’re all remarkable founders making a difference.
What do you think is the biggest myth about scaling?
We’ve always talked about scaling, but I think it’s more about velocity. And it’s tied to the founder. The founder’s vision and ability to move fast are key. We often discuss “founder’s mode” and people say it’s micromanagement. But I truly believe a good founder, at every stage, has a deep understanding of the product, technology, customers, and how to run the company. That might be shared with a co-founder or COO, but the vision and translation of that vision into concrete steps is a founder’s role. You cannot outsource that.
What website do you visit first thing in the morning?
I don’t visit a website first thing in the morning. I check Slack, email, and WhatsApp, but not a website.
What is the one book you believe every founder should read?
Depends on the phase. Zero to One, of course, is a well-known one. But I don’t think it’s just books. I think it’s about identifying a founder or business you admire and speaking to that person. Books won’t give you real-life context. For people building ecosystems, The Community Way by Brad Feld still holds a lot of truth.
At the core, you need a community of founders, and the ecosystem forms around that. That’s very aligned with what we do at Techleap. Every new hire at Techleap used to receive that book, and we gave it to ministries and partners as well.
Rahul Raj contributed to this reporting.
