When the room pitches back

There's something quietly wonderful about pitching a climate tech company inside a robotics fieldlab. RoboHouse sits on the TU Delft campus between the Robotics Lab, MONDAI House of AI, and the Do IoT Fieldlab, a building where prototypes hum, robots practise picking things up, and the air smells faintly of freshly printed plastic. It's not a boardroom. And on 8 April, it was the host of the TU Delft Excellence Fund's Annual Founder Event.

The Excellence Fund has been doing its work quietly since 1925. It's the alumni-backed fund that supports TU Delft's boldest research, helps early-career scientists build labs (most recently quantum physicist dr. Talieh Ghiasi, who moved from Harvard to set up her spintronics group in Delft), and has become the connective tissue for a generation of Delft founders. The evening pulled all of those worlds into one room: researchers, founders, and the alumni whose support keeps the whole machine resourced.

Our co-founder Anthonie took the stage to pitch Hydryx. The invite didn't come out of nowhere: Graduate Ventures, the largest alumni-driven early-stage investor in the Netherlands and one of our seed-round backers, is a close partner of the Excellence Fund. Much of the room shared that lineage, with TU Delft alumni now holding senior roles across Dutch industry, fellow founders in adjacent sectors, and the donors who keep the ecosystem alive.

What made the evening memorable wasn't the pitch itself, but what happened afterwards. Anthonie closed with a specific question: does anyone here know the right people in the waste or energy sectors to help Hydryx scale faster? The feedback that followed was sharp, practical, and refreshingly unsentimental. Within days, several warm introductions had made their way into our inbox. For a company whose whole job is convincing landfill operators to take methane seriously, that kind of intro is worth more than any round of applause.

It's easy to talk about ecosystems in the abstract. It's harder to notice one actually working. What we saw that evening was a quiet, century-old engine doing what it's built to do, connecting researchers to founders, founders to capital, and capital to the industrial networks that turn a good idea into a real business. The Excellence Fund has been patiently assembling that engine for a hundred years. Events like this are what happens when the patience starts to pay off.

Thank you to Rui, Auke, Leonie, and everyone at Graduate Ventures and Universiteitsfonds Delft for the invite, and for the room.