Notes on Starting Nexum

Starting an investment firm is an act of optimism. You are betting, in a fairly literal sense, that your judgment about the future is better than the market's current pricing of it. That is a claim worth making carefully, and one we spent a long time testing before deciding to formalise it into a firm.

The origin of Nexum is unglamorous. It was not born from a single eureka moment or a carefully orchestrated plan to disrupt the European VC landscape. It grew out of a set of frustrations. Frustration with watching deeptech companies in our network struggle to raise capital from investors who didn't understand what they were building. Frustration with the gap between what gets funded and what actually matters in terms of technical progress. And, honestly, frustration with the passive role that most investors seemed comfortable playing in a category that desperately needs active, hands-on partners.

The early version of Nexum was much simpler than what we have built since. We started with a small amount of capital, a thesis that was more intuition than framework, and a bias toward founders we knew personally or had worked with. Looking back, those early investments were probably too concentrated in our immediate network, which meant we got the founder quality right but the market selection was narrower than it should have been. We have since built a more systematic sourcing process, though we still weight personal knowledge and direct relationships heavily.

One thing we got badly wrong early on was how we thought about our own role as builders. We understood intellectually that being operators alongside being investors would make us better investors. But we underestimated how much the build studio would change the way we operate. Having a team that is actively shipping software in domains we invest in creates a different kind of intelligence about what is possible, what is hard, and what is changing quickly. It also creates obligations and sometimes tensions that purely financial firms don't have to manage. We are still learning how to navigate these well.

The Voorburg base is deliberate. The Netherlands has a genuinely strong deeptech ecosystem — world-class technical universities, a deep manufacturing and logistics heritage, and a culture that values precision and long-termism over hype cycles. There is also a significant funding gap at the earliest stages. Pre-seed and seed deeptech in the Netherlands is notably underserved relative to the quality of the science coming out of TU Delft, Eindhoven, Leiden, and Amsterdam. That gap is an opportunity, and it is where most of our investments have been concentrated.

The name took longer to settle on than almost anything else. We went through a long list of options before landing on Nexum. What convinced us was the precision of the Latin meaning: not a vague bond or a general connection, but a specific, mutual, legally and morally binding relationship between two parties who are staking something real. That specificity felt right. It describes what we are trying to build with every founder we back, and it holds us to a standard that a vaguer name wouldn't.

We are still a young firm. We make mistakes, some of them predictable and some of them novel. But the thesis is holding, the portfolio is developing as we hoped, and — most importantly — we continue to learn at a rate that keeps us honest. That is probably the best thing you can say about any early-stage investor.