HSD Office Connecting Investors, Startups and Scaleups

Access to Capital is one of the drivers to let innovative companies grow and develop innovative ideas into working products. As HSD Office, we have a good view of both the investors landscape and security domain. This provides the opportunity to connect investors with security startups and scaleups. To give insight in how HSD Office acts, we give you a sneak peak in this week's schedule of our deputy director Joris den Bruinen highlighting the activities on creating 'Access2Capital'.  

Monday:

Finalising the annual plan 2019 of the HSD Foundation, including a.o. another Access to Capital Event. The annual plan will be discussed during the HSD Board meeting on 21 November. Then it was time for a bilat with HSD Innovation Liaison Bram Spitzer, who is point of contact at the HSD Office in relation to 'Access to Capital', is the coordinator of SME Connect and also works for EIT Digital Accelerator. We spoke about our meeting with Patrick Essers, director EIT Digital and the role of EIT Digital in helping SecurityMatters get into contact with (inter)national investors for their funding in 2016. In addition we discussed the latest news: the exit by KPN Ventures last week as a result of Forescout acquiring SecurityMatters.

Tuesday:

TIIN Capital is developing a Dutch Security Tech Fund, of which InnovationQuarter and HSD Office are amongst the initiators. During a call with the partners of TiiN Capital the progress of the fund was discussed. In relation to the Bitdefender RedSocks deal in October 2018, we contacted and congratulated I5Invest that assisted the acquisition. We are now looking to set up a meeting to hear more about the case and possible future collaborations.

Wednesday:

Invited by Katja Berkhout, director International Director Startupdelta and Tjarda Molenaar, managing director NVP, we joined a meeting with KRR; a global investment firm in (cyber) security. We spoke with David Petraeus (KRR partner, former US army general and former director CIA), Lucian Schönefelder (member of KKR’s European Technology, Media, & Telecommunications team) and Ludo Bammens (Managing Director, Head of EMEA Corporate Affairs). In addition, several organisations spoke with the investors: BitSensor, Cynation, Sweepatic, Compumatica and EclecticIQ.

Thursday:

At the initiative of Rinke Zonneveld (director InnovationQuarter) a meeting with Erel Margalit, founder and Chairman of worldwide investor JVP was scheduled at the HSD Campus. The programme included an introduction on the Dutch security cluster, illustrated by Cybersprint and Startmail, and a tour at the HSD Campus. And as we say: all collaborations start with a good cup of coffee (see: picture with Erel Margalit, Martijn van Hoogenhuijze (IQ) and Joris den Bruinen)