Level Up 2026 — Evoluon, Eindhoven

🎬 Event Overview

Level Up is an annual Dutch startup/deep-tech conference held at the Evoluon in Eindhoven, bringing together founders, investors, and ecosystem builders from the Brainport/Eindhoven deep-tech cluster (semiconductors, photonics, quantum, materials) alongside broader European startup topics (fundraising, governance, scaling). The day combines a pitch/investor track, fireside interviews with industry veterans, panel debates, and the Level Up Awards — a pitch competition where ten nominees are narrowed to five finalists and then to one winner, who receives a fully hosted trip (booth + program) to CES 2027 in Las Vegas.

These notes are built from audio recorded across the day, transcribed locally (Whisper large-v3) and filtered to drop music/crowd-noise/dead-air artifacts and unrelated personal chatter recorded when the device kept running between sessions. Speaker and company names are transcribed to the best of the audio's clarity — some (marked with a note) may be slightly off from the official spelling, since several are non-English names caught by an English-language speech model.

Running order covered in these notes

  1. [Investor & Startup Pitch Track](01-investor-pitch-track.md) — Lumo Labs impact-fund intro, a reverse pitch, and seven early-stage deep-tech startups pitching to a room of investors (organ-on-chip pharma testing, photonic sugar sensors, offensive-security validation, memristor AI chips, rapid-prototyping semiconductor manufacturing, antenna/RF testing automation, neutral-atom quantum computing, perovskite X-ray detectors).
  2. [Fireside: Peter Wennink on Europe's Innovation Ecosystem](02-peter-wennink-fireside.md) — the former ASML CEO on informed risk-taking, why US venture capital outperforms Europe's, and what founders should ask of the ecosystem around them.
  3. [Panel Debate: Who Controls the Company?](03-founder-control-panel.md) — three founders and one investor debate founder control, cap tables, board composition, down rounds, and exits, including a live audience vote on a term-sheet scenario.
  4. [Fireside: From Research to Market — Scaling Deep Tech](04-deep-tech-scaling-fireside.md) — AIO's CEO (photonic image sensors, spun out of imec) and an Eindhoven-based deep-tech investor on turning a lab technology into a venture-backed product company.
  5. [Keynote: The Ten Commandments of Fundraising](05-jacqueline-fundraising-keynote.md) — Carbon Equity's founder/CEO on her own fundraising rollercoaster and ten hard-earned rules for raising capital well.
  6. Level Up Awards — Five Finalists Pitch — the jury (CM.com co-founder, the Netherlands Patent Office, the 2025 winner) and five finalist startups, each with a 60-second pitch and a live Q&A. This session gets different treatment from the rest: a [verbatim, speaker-labeled transcript](06-awards-pitch-transcript.md) of exactly what was said, plus a separate [pitch-by-pitch critique](06-awards-pitch-analysis.md) of what each founder did well, what could have been sharper, and how their jury Q&A answers held up.
  7. [Closing Keynote: The Death Zone, and the Level Up Awards Winner](07-death-zone-keynote-and-winner.md) — a semiconductor-metrology CEO's mountaineering metaphor for scaling past product-market fit, an interview with Techleap's Constantine van Oranje on what separates funded startups from the rest, and the announcement of the 2026 winner.

Why this matters, read end to end

Two threads run through the whole day and are worth reading across sessions, not just within one:

  • Trust and relationships compound before you need them. Jacqueline's "build relationships early," Peter Wennink's "engage the customer, be curious," and Constantine's "Dutch founders are too transactional" are the same observation from three different chairs.
  • Speed and focus beat completeness. The AIO fireside's "minimum viable market" story, the "talking monkey on a pedestal" outsourcing principle, and Hamed's "you have to spend time raising even when you don't need it yet" all point at the same failure mode: startups that wait to be ready lose to startups that move.