About
I invest €1–8M into Europe's most ambitious defense tech, advanced manufacturing, and dual-use founders from Seed to Series A at Keen Venture Partners.
Alongside my VC career, I play professional field hockey for HC Klein Zwitserland. I bridge the military domain, the startup ecosystem, and elite athletics — three environments that reward the same fundamentals: precision, discipline, and decisive action under pressure.
A specific focus: supporting Ukrainian founders establishing EU entities as they bring critical defense and dual-use capability into the European ecosystem.
Focus Stack
Press
Nederland droneland: 125 defensiestartups, een fabriek in Born en orders voor honderden miljoenen
"Er zit heel, heel veel potentie in het Nederlandse dronelandschap. Vergis je niet in de cijfers: wij zien 125 Nederlandse startups die actief zijn op het terrein van defensie."
— Ties Klinkhamer, Keen Venture Partners
Amsterdam's Keen Venture Partners announces first close of €150M fund
Featured front-and-center in the header image alongside the founding partners, covering the first close of the European Defence and Security Fund.
Largest Defense-Tech VC Fund Hits €150M First Close
Named as part of the founding leadership trio for Europe's largest defense-tech VC vehicle.
Projects
Euro-defense is a geospatial intelligence platform that maps Europe's defense production infrastructure — ammunition plants, land systems facilities, air defense and missile manufacturers, and naval shipyards — with interactive supply chain flows, cross-border dependency mapping, and severity-scored bottleneck analysis.
It is built for analysts, investors, and defense professionals who need a ground truth answer to one question: "Where is Europe actually building capacity — and where is it not?"
Doing deal work in European defense tech, I kept hitting the same wall: there was no single, reliable source for production capacity data. The information existed, scattered across policy papers, parliamentary hearings, corporate filings, and industry databases — but nobody had assembled it. As a VC, that fragmentation costs you conviction at the exact moment you need it most.
So I built what I needed. Euro-defense is a direct expression of my Open-Source Learning principle: I did the work, and I made it public. If the data helps a founder articulate their market, an analyst sharpen a thesis, or a government official prioritize procurement — that's the point. Intelligence shouldn't be gated behind consultancy fees when Europe's rearmament is the defining industrial moment of this decade.
Blog
All postsWhat three weeks in Kyiv taught me about building under fire
Ukrainian founders don't iterate — they survive. A trip that changed how I think about resilience, speed, and what "urgency" actually means in a startup.
The five questions I ask every defense tech founder in the first meeting
Most pitches get the market framing right. Almost none of them nail the manufacturing reality. Here's where I focus.
Playing professional hockey while doing VC: what one teaches the other
Both require high-repetition pattern recognition and composure when the decision clock is running. The crossover is more literal than it sounds.
Why I passed on a €20M ARR defense SaaS company
Revenue looked clean. Customer logos were impressive. But one conversation with their procurement lead changed everything. On the hidden risk inside "government contracts."
Writing & Research
The European Sovereign Capability Gap
Why Europe cannot defend itself without rebuilding its industrial base from the ground up — and where capital should go first.
Navigating the NATO Innovation Ecosystem
A founder's field guide to DIANA, the NATO Innovation Fund, and how dual-use startups should engage with the alliance.
Why Dual-Use is the Future of Deep Tech
The civilian/military technology divide is collapsing. The best founders aren't choosing sides — they're building for both markets simultaneously.
Experience
Sourcing and evaluating defense tech, advanced manufacturing, and dual-use companies across Europe from Seed to Series A. IC materials, founder relationship management, and engagement with government bodies including NATO, EDA, and national MoDs.
Competing at the highest domestic level. Elite team dynamics, performance under pressure, and the discipline of maintaining peak output across two high-performance careers simultaneously.
Dutch institutional capital deployment and national development finance. Worked at the intersection of public capital markets and private sector innovation to accelerate strategic Dutch companies.
Represented the Netherlands in youth international competition. Developed the mental framework of competing under national pressure — composure, accountability, and executing when it counts.