Why is there still no dedicated landing track for deep tech?

Almost every soft-landing programme in Europe was designed for software. A desk, a mentor, a demo night, a visa letter. For a company whose product is a robot, a reactor, a satellite bus or a wafer process, that package solves the least difficult part of the move.

The hard parts are elsewhere, and they are unglamorous. A hardware company needs a workshop with three-phase power before it needs an office. It needs to know whether its equipment clears customs as capital goods or as samples, and what that does to the timeline. It needs a landlord who will accept a foreign parent company with no Dutch trading history, for a lease long enough to justify the fit-out. It needs to know which of its engineers can be relocated under the highly-skilled migrant route and which cannot. None of that fits in a programme built around desk space.

The money is the strange part. On paper, the Netherlands is unusually well suited to exactly this profile: the flagship R&D subsidy rewards R&D-heavy payroll, which is precisely what a deep-tech team is. And yet 36% of Dutch R&D-performing companies leave that subsidy unclaimed. If domestic companies with a Dutch accountant miss it, a foreign founder in month three, still looking for a workshop, has very little chance of catching it.

Time makes it worse rather than better. The median gap from seed to Series A is 2.1 years across the market, and a hardware company burns that runway faster than a software one, because its progress is made of parts, tooling and iterations rather than releases. Every month spent solving landing logistics is a month not spent on the milestone the next round will be priced on.

So a dedicated track is not really a building. It is a sequence: establish the entity so the subsidy clock can start, apply for the equity-free money while the space is being fitted out, and time the round to land after the first hardware milestone rather than before it. An early-stage grant roughly doubles the odds of follow-on venture funding, which means the sequence is not administrative housekeeping. It changes the round.

That sequence is what we maintain, per country, for 18 origin markets. It is less exciting than a demo night, and it is the part that decides whether the company is still standing when the round opens.