Ex-ASML and Snowflake CEOs back Graduate Ventures’ €125M seed fund for Dutch university spinouts

Graduate Ventures has kicked off its second seed fund at €125 million, and the number that matters is how quickly it got there: €100 million was already committed by October 6, 2026. That’s not just a bigger pool of money. It also landed well above the €80 million target the Rotterdam firm had set in May 2026, and it comes after a first seed fund of €50 million.

The supporter list is built for headlines. Peter Wennink, the former CEO of ASML, and Frank Slootman, the former CEO of Snowflake, are both backing the fund, alongside Michiel Muller of Picnic and Jonas Ruyter of DataSnipper. Invest-NL and Oost NL are in as well. Graduate Ventures says its seed investments range from €500,000 to €3 million, while pre-seed checks stay below €100,000.

This is not a generalist venture fund pretending to like universities. Graduate Ventures only backs companies that come out of Dutch universities. For pre-seed, at least one founder has to come from a partner institution. For seed, the founders must be Dutch university alumni. The firm works with eight universities and three university medical centres, and its model leans hard on alumni who bring more than cash: expertise, contacts and market access.

The pitch is part American campus myth, part Dutch industrial policy. Graduate Ventures says it wants a culture of giving back, closer to Stanford and MIT than to the usual polite European shrug. Founded in 2021 by alumni of Delft University of Technology and Erasmus University Rotterdam, it now counts more than 90 startup investments, around 200 alumni with entrepreneurship experience, 10 professionals on the team, and about 20 students joining each year.

The timing matters because the gap in Dutch scaling is still wide. Graduate Ventures points to 2025 as a year with 265 venture capital deals worth €2.64 billion, yet smaller rounds are getting scarcer and Dutch scaleup rates trail Germany and the US. In AI, the difference is even starker. The question now is whether a €125 million alumni machine can do what the rest of the market hasn’t: keep promising Dutch spinouts from needing their breakout money elsewhere.