Happy holidays from all of us here at imec.xpand! Thank you for being part of our journey in 2024. We’re looking forward to another year of bold ideas, big dreams, and shared success.
imec.xpand
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
Heverlee, Flemish Region 3,813 followers
Turning nanotechnology into business
About us
Imec.xpand is a revolutionary way of investing in early stage innovation on the crossroads of technology transfer, corporate venturing and traditional venture capital. The fund will heavily leverage the extensive technology, knowledge, vision and expertise of imec and of its strategic investors, targeting nanoelectronics-based innovation projects in smart applications for a sustainable society such as smart health, smart mobility, smart cities, smart industries, smart energy.
- Website
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http://imecxpand.com
External link for imec.xpand
- Industry
- Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
- Company size
- 2-10 employees
- Headquarters
- Heverlee, Flemish Region
- Type
- Partnership
- Founded
- 2017
Locations
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Primary
Get directions
Kapeldreef 75
Heverlee, Flemish Region 3001, BE
Employees at imec.xpand
Updates
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"Training AI without perturbation diversity is like training a Large Language Model (LLM) on a single website instead of the full spectrum of the internet." With this striking analogy, our colleague and Partner Benoit emphasizes the importance of diversity in realizing AI's potential in drug discovery.
Diversity is the missing piece to unlock the full potential of AI in early drug discovery. To truly harness the power of AI for early-stage drug discovery, we need solutions that simultaneously excel in three critical areas: 1️⃣ Scale 2️⃣ Data quality 3️⃣ Diversity While (1) scale and (2) data quality are largely addressed by the cutting-edge platforms that we get from Illumina, 10x Genomics, Parse Biosciences, … the simultaneous need for (3) diversity often goes overlooked. Think about it: current tools enable us to study the effects of a limited number of perturbations induced by small molecules, antibodies, cell therapies, … on vast numbers of cells. They indeed deliver scale ✅ and the paired multi-modal data ensure a suitable data quality ✅. But here's the problem: training AI without perturbation diversity is like training a large language model (LLM) on a single website instead of the full spectrum of the internet ❌. As we head into 2025, I’m eager to see new solutions emerge that can generate large, paired multi-modal datasets with extensive perturbation diversity. This is the next frontier for unlocking the transformative potential of AI in drug discovery. To my brilliant network of scientists, technologists, and innovators—what are your thoughts on this? Let’s discuss how we can collectively move the needle. And yes, Alex Dickinson and Benjamin McLeod, I’m especially curious to hear your perspectives! #DrugDiscovery #AI #BioLLMs #Innovation #Pharma imec.xpand imec
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This evening, we’re hosting the final Xpand Academy of 2024 at De Hoorn here in Leuven. The theme is "Boards, IP, and the Road to Riches". The program began with a keynote from Peter Vanbekbergen, Partner and Co-Founder here at imec.xpand. Peter shared his insights on smart board stakeholder management. He explained how CEOs can effectively engage, manage, and leverage their Board of Directors. Next, Pieter Vorenkamp, COO of Syntiant Corp., shared his knowledge of product lifecycle management. His session provided helpful tools to get semiconductor companies to revenue. Next up, Adonis Reyes, IP strategy consultant at TMC, will share his expertise on IP strategy for high-tech ventures. We’ll close the evening with a winter BBQ. Thank you to our speakers and everyone who joined us at one of the sessions of our Xpand Academy this year. We hope to see you again next year! #XpandAcademy #GrowingTogether #IPstrategy
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For the second time in a week, Frank Bulens, Partner here at imec.xpand, will be sharing his insights on stage. After participating in a panel at MedFIT Event last week, he will now join an expert discussion at Tech Spirit Barcelona. Together with Elisenda Bou-Balust (former Vilynx (Acquired by Apple)) and Montserrat Vendrell ( Aliath Bioventures), he will give an investor's perspective on company creation. Moderated by Josep Lluís Sanfeliu (Asabys Partners), they will explore how science, engineering, and venture capital converge to create successful companies. If you’re attending Tech Spirit Barcelona, this is a session you won’t want to miss! #TechSpiritBarcelona #VC #TSB24 #GrowingTogether Tech Barcelona
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Incredible news from our portfolio company Celestial AI 🏆 Celestial AI has been recognized as the Start-Up to Watch at the 2024 GSA Awards! The Global Semiconductor Alliance recognizes semiconductor companies that have demonstrated excellence through their success, vision, strategy and future opportunities in the industry at its annual Awards Dinner Celebration. It is an honor to be selected as a nominee and an even more distinguished achievement to actually win an Award. This prestigious award highlights Celestial AI’s groundbreaking work in the industry and its potential to shape the future. Congratulations to David Lazovsky, Preet Virk, and the entire Celestial AI team for this incredible achievement! #GSAawards #StartUpToWatch #SemiconductorInnovation
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Meet us at MedFIT2024 2023 was a slowdown year for seed and series A rounds in MedTech, but what about 2024? And what is to be expected in the coming months? Our colleague and imec.xpand Partner Frank will address these - and other - questions at MedFIT 2024 during the panel discussion "Closing 2024, Diving into 2025: Discussing the State of the Early-Stage MedTech Investment Landscape." Together with Albert-Jan de Croes (Novel-T), James Mayer (CABHI Ventures) and Jan Engels (HTGF | High-Tech Gründerfonds), he will explore the current state of early-stage MedTech investment, emerging trends, and future outlook. For more information on the MedFIT Event: www.medfit-event.com Looking forward to seeing you there! #MedTech #HealthTech #InvestmentLandscape
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Big news from our portfolio company Swave Photonics Swave’s Holographic eXtended Reality (HXR) platform has been selected as an Honoree for the CES 2025 Innovation Awards in the XR Technologies and Accessories category! The CES Innovation Awards 2025 program received a record number of submissions – over 3,400. The announcement comes ahead of CES 2025, one of the world’s most powerful technology events, happening in January in Las Vegas. Congratulations to the entire Swave team! We're pleased to see Swave’s platform gain this well-deserved recognition on the global stage. #CES2025 #InnovationAwards #HXR #AugmentedReality #DeepTech #GrowingTogether
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Investing in Xavveo to revolutionize autonomous driving We’re very proud to co-lead the Seed Round for Xavveo. This Berlin-based company is developing a 4D photonic radar system that addresses the limitations of existing autonomous vehicle sensors. The Xavveo technology is the missing link that can enable the breakthrough of autonomous driving. It offers unparalleled precision under all circumstances while still being cost-competitive. Moreover, Xavveo’s system has already been tested in collaboration with a leading car manufacturer. Congratulations to Sven Otte, Stefan Meister, Ulrich Keil, and the entire Xavveo team! #GrowingTogether #VentureCapital #SeedRound #AutonomousDriving #PhotonicRadarSystem Vsquared Ventures
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imec.xpand reposted this
November 5th is THE day if you want to hear the pitches of some of the hottest start-ups in Hardware & Health at Ghent Slush'D, including Azalea Vision, Lynqo, OTIV, QustomDot, RESONIKS, BIO INX, Cortex Machina, OnTracx, FlyBlast and ReVision Implant. I'm sure it will be quite a challenge for Ilse Vanhulle, Alexis du Peloux and myself to judge which of these companies inspired us the most with their pitch. Bonus: If you're around at Ghent Slush'd, you may also bump into our one and only Karolina Liljeroth-Dorozynska and discuss with her how imec.xpand may be able to help your company thrive. Don't miss that chance! #VC #investor #startup #GhentSlushD #innovation #entrepreneurship #imecxpand
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We're very proud to announce our investment in INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, a brain-computer interface therapeutics company based in Barcelona, Spain. INBRAIN’s technology leverages the unique properties of graphene, a Nobel Prize-winning material known for its superior conductivity, to achieve a closed-loop solution for treating neurological disorders with exceptional accuracy. This approach will set a new standard in the emerging field of precision neurology. Congratulations to CEO Carolina Aguilar and the entire INBRAIN team! #GrowingTogether #VentureCapital #InbrainNeuroelectronics #neurology #SeriesB
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