VSParticle

What is the mission?

VSParticle will unlock a century of material innovation in the next decade. Its technology breaks down materials to the size of nanoparticles. Then, at the push of a button, materials research and industrial users can simply “print” new composite materials of these particles to match their desired properties for new products. 

Who are the founders?

VSParticle began life as a long-term research project in TU Delft in the Netherlands, the home country of their great domestic role model and most expensive tech company in Europe, ASML.

Aaike van Vugt (CEO) worked on spark ablation as a Master’s student before collaborating with his professor Andreas Schmidt-Ott, co-founder Tobias Pfeiffer, and co-founder Tobias Coppejans to scale the material discovery technology. Deeply rooted in science, the team had already gotten out of their comfortable lab and sold their devices to 40+ customers around the world already by the time Plural got involved. 

Why did Sten get involved?

Creating a matter printer is the science-fiction dream that will fundamentally change economies of producing physical things. Imagine solving a challenge for renewable energy generation by simply instructing a computer as to what end product properties are required.

For me as a third generation physics geek and a software guy, this era of truly software defined physical materials is exciting. Imagine an ever-growing catalogue of possible materials, carefully tagged with structured data on their properties – accessible as simply as we use Pantone codes today for matching colours. Hit and miss experimentation that currently takes 15 years will instead happen in months, if not days – and at scale.