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By Bibi van den Berg, Analyst at FORWARD.one
Returning to TU Delft wasn’t a nostalgic detour. It was a chance to put a classroom of engineers through the same pressure test we apply to early-stage industrial tech founders: limited time, incomplete information, and the demand to form a hard investment view anyway.
Instead of lecturing about venture capital, we dropped a fictional robotics and AI startup into the room and asked the students to assess it using the exact framework we use at FORWARD.one.
Thirty minutes. Four angles. One question: would you invest?
The exercise delivered a pattern we know well. Technically strong founders with the ability to build, but thin commercial muscle. A product with fast deployment and a flexible interface, but weak defensibility and no meaningful data advantage. Clear customer pain, but immature software, slow sales cycles, and early ARR that still depends on hardware. A large market on paper, but a fragile path to real traction.
In short: potential, but no performance yet.
Most student teams came to the same conclusion we did. Interesting technology. Not investable today. The missing pieces were the same ones we flag in real cases: commercial clarity, evidence of scale, and a moat that can survive contact with the market.
What stood out wasn’t the decision, but how quickly they learned to think like investors. They challenged assumptions, quantified markets, surfaced risks, and defended their view. They didn’t hide behind uncertainty. They worked through it.
The session reinforced a simple truth: deeptech investing isn’t about being impressed by what a system can do in the lab. It’s about understanding whether it can become a business. Repeatable, defensible, and commercially durable.
And seeing a room full of future engineers reason that way gives us confidence in the next generation of European industrial tech builders. They’re already learning that performance beats potential every time.
European universities are producing world-class engineers, but the commercialization gap remains the continent’s competitive bottleneck. Technical excellence is abundant. Commercial instinct is not. When students begin training that muscle early before founding a startup, and before the first prototype leaves the lab, the entire ecosystem shifts. It creates founders who understand that product, market, and revenue need to mature together, not sequentially.
The room at TU Delft reflected an emerging trend we see across Europe: young engineers who aren’t satisfied with building elegant technology alone. They want to understand unit economics, competitive dynamics, and the brutal mechanics of industrial sales. That mindset is what turns research projects into companies, and companies into outcomes.
As deeptech sectors like semiconductors, robotics, automation, and climate hardware accelerate, Europe needs founders who combine engineering depth with commercial discipline. Teaching the investment mindset early isn’t about converting engineers into VCs. It’s about making them stronger builders.
At FORWARD.one, we follow performance, not plans, and Europe’s next generation is starting to think the same way.
