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CIC ROTTERDAM’S 2017

IMPACT REPORT

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TABLE OF CONTENTSCIC IMPACT REPORT 2017

We sincerely thank all of our CIC Rotterdam clients and partners who helped us compile and present our f irst annual impact report. All data was received through surveying and interviewing, and does not include any information from other CIC locations. Design of the report has been created by The Phoney Club; our CIC Titan interviews have been writ-ten by Mina Nacheva; our CIC Titan photos have been taken by Raymond de Vries. Also - a special ‘thank you’ to Venture Cafe for sharing some of your data with us!

01. GENERAL DEMOGRAPHICS 02. FUNDRAISING03. JOB CREATION04. VENTURE CAFEROTTERDAM05. EVENTS

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P12

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P18

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06. TITANSSKYECHODASHTAGWHALE BAY & COPARX PLASTICSINNOVATIONQUARTER

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EDITOR’S NOTECIC IMPACT REPORT 2017

Dear Reader,

What a year it has been, and what an adventure we have had during the first official year of CIC Rotterdam!

Our journey to create a space and community for startups in the heart of the hard-working City of Rotterdam began more than four years ago. From a strong foundation, and with the help of countless amazing partners, we first opened our door with the “Beta space” - a handful of coworking desks in an open room - in 2016. Finally, in September 2017, we officially opened the first 4.000 m2 of CIC Rotterdam.

This report shares some of the high level numbers of the com-munity that has grown within CIC Rotterdam over the past year. We’re incredibly proud of each and every company that has chosen CIC as its home - from a dozen brave early adopters, to now a thriving network of approximately 150 companies. CIC Rotterdam’s own team has also grown from a few brave souls to a driven and energetic group of thirteen.

We do what we do so passionately because we truly believe the entrepreneurs and companies locating within our walls have the power to change the world for the better. We hope these numbers and interviews accurately convey what is but a fraction of the activity happening at CIC Rotterdam, and just a start of what we believe we can accomplish and the impact we hope to have. In 2018, we will expand beyond our first 4.000m2 to open an-other 4.000m2 in a continuation along the fourth floor of the incredible Groot Handelsgebouw. We will be doubling in size, and doubling our community, and we are optimistic about the future.

We’re optimistic because we believe in Rotterdam, and that Rotterdam Central District, this city, and this region have the special mix of ingredients necessary to become a truly bright spot of innovation. We believe it already has begun.

Thank you to the countless partners who have helped make it happen.

Melissa Ablett General Manager CIC Rotterdam

Marcus FernhoutFounder, CIC RotterdamExecutive Director,CIC International

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TITELSUBTITEL

01. GENERAL

DEMOGRAPHICSof CIC Rotterdam Clients

We polled our clients to have a general picture of the demographics and industries represented within CIC.

Crowdfunding

Award

Subsidy

Grant

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TITELSUBTITEL

Business Consulting

IT/Tech

Legal

Life Sciences/ Health

Public Sector / Policy

Software / Web / Mobile

Venture Capital

Manufacturing / Design

Marketing / Media / Communication

Education

Energy / Environment

Finance

Hardware / Devices

01 02

0403

GENDER AGE

INDUSTRYCOMPANY TYPE

02

26-35

<25

36-45

46-55

55>

0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 %04

01

02GENDER

36-45

46-55

55>

COMPAGNY TYPE

STARTUP(fewer than 5 years in existensce

or less than 100k in annual revenue)

NON-PROFIT / ACADEMIC

CORPORATE

03

(<250 employees)

(>250 employees)

SME

SOLE PROPRIETOR / FREELANCER

INVESTOR (Venture capital, angel)

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Bringing innovators together locally and connecting them globally

Innovative workplaces

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DATACIC IMPACT REPORT 2017

Ang

el /

Frie

nd/ F

amily

Ven

ture

Cap

ital

Cro

wdf

undi

ng

Aw

ard

Subs

idy

Gra

nt02.

FUNDRAISINGby CIC Startups

Access to capital, and connecting entrepreneurs and investors is a growing focus of CIC Rotterdam. Clients shared

their funding sources and amounts.

Angel / Friend/ Family

Venture Capital

Crowdfunding

Award

Angel / Friend / Family

Venture CapitalCrowdfundingAward

Grant

Subsidy

Subsidy

Grant

TYPE OF FUNDING 2017

Total amount of capital managed by investors located

at CIC Rotterdam:

Over €315M

Funding raised by CIC Startups in 2017:

Over €3.3M

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TYPES OF LIFETIME FUNDING

03. JOB CREATION

& Expansion

Clients were asked to share how many new employees in full time roles they added to their teams. CIC Rotterdam is also a

strong international community.

Angel / Friend/ Family

Venture Capital

Crowdfunding

Award

Angel / Friend / Family

Venture CapitalCrowdfundingAward

Grant

Subsidy

Subsidy

Grant

TYPES OF LIFETIME FUNDING

Total amount of funding raised by CIC Startups:

Over €20.5M

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104 new full time jobs were directly created by CIC

startups

CIC Rotterdam facilitated a total of seven entrepreneurs

from South Africa, Australia, Indonesia, and India in 2017 through the

startup visa program

CIC corporates, academic institutions, and non-profits

hired more than 4.600 people in their organizations

in 2017

10% of CIC companies are headquartered outside of the Netherlands or led by an international founder

DATACIC IMPACT REPORT 2017

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04. VENTURE CAFE

ROTTERDAMCIC Rotterdam’s sister non-profit organization,

Venture Cafe Rotterdam, had an impressive 2017.

Service Provider

13%

4% Corporate Employee

17%Investor

35%Startup Employee

or Founder

31%Student

DATACIC IMPACT REPORT 2017

In 2017, Venture Cafe Rotterdam held no less than 353 sessions

with 286 program partners. On average, they welcomed over 300

visitors per week.

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170+ innovation events were hosted at CIC Rotterdam in 2017

52% of these events were organized by external

companies and organizations

CIC DONATED MORETHAN €80K OF EVENT

SPACE AND SERVICES TO STARTUPS, INNOVATION ORGANIZATIONS, AND NON-PROFITS IN 2017.

7.600+ people attended events held at CIC Rotterdam

05. EVENTS

At CIC Rotterdam

In addition to all of the great activity and attendance via Venture Cafe Rotterdam, CIC Rotterdam is becoming

a hot spot for events.

DATACIC IMPACT REPORT 2017

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06. CIC TITANS

While the data from our clients gives insight into the activity at CIC Rotterdam, we interviewed

a handful of companies - CIC Titans - to tell the stories of their work, passion, and ambitions.Here we present five interviews, with more to be released over the coming months, with the

impactful entrepreneurs doing big things at CIC.

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The Team of SkyEcho

CIC TITAN

SkyEcho: Tracking weather change through highly accurate rainfall data

The weather is an unpredictable thing – and especially so in the Netherlands. From sun and clear skies in one moment, to clouds, wind and rain only minutes later, short-term weather change has been difficult to pinpoint with the technology currently out there. Yet, that may not be the case for much longer.

SkyEcho, led by co-founders Yann Dufournet, Igor Stepanek and To-bias Otto, is on a mission to make rainfall- and storm monitoring more accurate and timely. A lot more accurate and timely, that is.

Bringing nowcasting to the city of Rotterdam

The idea came about a few years back, when Yann was Assistant Professor at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), and worked on a project that monitored urban rainfall at very high resolutions. “The technology to do such moni-toring was already up and running, but it was mainly used for scientific purposes,” he says. “What I wanted to do was explore its commercial applications.”

SkyEcho, now a team of four, is looking to go to market with a weather surveillance system that can monitor and visualize precip-itation – from different types of rain, to hail and snow – on a very short-term, very local scale. The goal is to employ the technology,

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alongside a user-friendly app, as a service to cities, and the first stop is Rotterdam.

“This is the first time the system has been placed in a city in Eu-rope, and there’s a lot of interest,” Igor says. “We’ve been contracted by the municipality of Rotterdam to provide them with precipitation data at a very high resolution.” The system’s unique selling point is its ability to provide such high-resolu-tion data on a minute-by-minute basis for the upcoming half hour.

That’s barely weather forecasting anymore. It’s nowcasting.

The team has also received a grant from CityLab010 to further develop

the SkyEcho app. The system and application are to be launched by mid-2018.

From managing traffic to han-dling port logisticsThe benefits of such a system for the city are unprecedented. It is not only able to generate and pro-cess data in near-real time, but also account for very high levels of accuracy. “Most weather forecast-ing platforms have a resolution of 1x1km, while we can do 100x100m,” Yann says. “That’s ten times more detail.”

The applications of the technology are numerous, too. The municipal-ity of Rotterdam, for instance, is looking to use the system for safe-

ty reasons. Being able to foresee heavy rain- or snowfall can help manage traffic and keep roads safe and clean.

Logistics is another area that holds great potential for the start-up’s technology. Think of the Port of Rotterdam: There’s containers being loaded and unloaded all throughout the day, and heavy rain can pose risks. At the same time, the port is tens of kilometers long, so if there is rain in only one area, the rest could still remain op-erational. Very local, near-real time weather data can help make such decisions easier.While SkyEcho’s system is par-ticularly useful for municipalities, it also comes at the steep price of

€500,000. To spread the cost, the team is looking to have part of the system paid for by municipalities, part by in-app advertising, and the main chunk – by businesses that want to use the data.

And their proposition seems to be coming at just the right time.

“Recently, the Dutch government asked all municipalities to per-form stress tests and assess if their cities are climate resilient,” Yann says. “In that, they will also have to show that they’re able to monitor weather changes and their im-pact on urban areas. That’s where we come in, and it looks like we’re right on time.”

That’s barely weather forecastinganymore. It’s nowcasting.

CIC TITANSSKYECHO

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DashTag: Bringing FIFA-like

stats to soccer players in

the US

Young people nowadays are brought up with a smartphone in their hand. They’re online and they’re on social media. They play games and share their experiences with their virtual friends. Yet, more often than not, there’s a certain disconnect between what they do and achieve in the online world and what they do and achieve of-fline, and vice versa. Epco Berger, Cliff de Roode and Dirk van den Berg have found a way to bridge this gap – especial-ly when it comes to youth soccer players. As co-founders of Dash-Tag, they’ve developed a wearable, called the Dash, that gives soccer

players access to their own sports data after every game, and a bot that pushes that data directly to their favorite messaging platform. FIFA, in fact, has been quite the in-spiration for the ambitious team. They’ve designed DashTag to pro-vide players with FIFA game-like stats in a way that they can easily understand and relate to. “On the platform, we communi-cate with players in a way that they’re already familiar with from popular video games like FIFA 17,” Epco says. “With their stats deliv-ered in a personalized way, they can use them to compete with other players, and essentially, train and improve their skills.”

The Dash helps track the speed, acceleration and pace of each play-

The Team of DashTag

CIC TITAN

CIC TITANSDASHTAG

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CIC TITANSDASHTAG

er with a high level of accuracy. As a result, the team of now 12 is on a mission to bring professional stats to amateur soccer players around the world. First international stop: The USDashTag has a proposition for a very specific target audience – youngsters between the ages of 13-24. “So far, we have 11.5 thousand players that have shown interest and signed up, of whom about 10,000 are from the US,” Epco says. With such interest coming from the US market, the team decided to validate their concept there, and indeed, the results spoke for them-selves. “We talked to a lot of young soccer players in the US and learned that they are very dedicated, competitive, and they want to be the best. It’s a different attitude than here in Europe.”

Youth soccer in the US is a lot more diverse, too, as girls are eager to train and improve almost as much as guys are. For DashTag, a market with such interest in and dedication to soc-cer, and sports in general, is just the right place to be. Starting 2018, the team will be expanding to the US and basing their marketing and sales operations there. As Dirk puts it, “It’s like seconds before the kick-off: we have trained hard, and now we’re ready for the match!Perhaps unintentionally so, the team has always had a bit of a US approach to their business. “When we first started out, we did it the Silicon Valley way,” Epco says. “We invested our own savings and boot-strapped for a while, then moved on to the 3 Fs – friends, family and fools. We later got support from angel investors as well.”

It’s like seconds before the kick-off: we’ve trained hard, and now we’re ready for the match!

DashTag has successfully raised two funding rounds: One in 2016, in the amount of €300,000, and another one in February 2017, in the amount of €500,000. Looking forward, there are more – and bigger – milestones to come. After all, the ambition is to go glob-al. “Once we establish DashTag in the US, we’d like to come back to Europe, then go to Asia,” Cliff says. “We also plan to expand to more sports in the near future.” For now, however, Epco, Cliff and Dirk see the need to have a fo-cused proposition, and that focus is on soccer and the US market. “We really need to be where our customers are,” Dirk says. “We need to breathe and feel the US soccer environment.”

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TITELSUBTITEL

The Team of Whale Bay & Co

CIC TITAN

Whale Bay & Co: Getting

medicines to the patients

“In the life sciences, collaborations are the key to furthering knowl-edge, developing new and better products, and getting them quick-ly to market,” says Cees de Wit. Collaborations, in fact, are what he believes will bring innovation in the field to the next level. Cees and his business partner, Jas-per Evers, co-founded Whale Bay & Co, a life sciences consultancy firm, about two years ago. The goal? To help innovative healthcare com-panies bring curing technologies closer to the patients who most need them. In doing so, the team supports companies to position their health solutions for the health care market, and attract the neces-sary partners and funding.

Two spin-offs and a support sys-tem for life science innovators

At Whale Bay & Co, a spin-off from Deloitte the Netherlands, Jasper and Cees work with a variety of life science companies across Europe and the US. Those range from es-tablished businesses that want to introduce a new medication on their market, to startups develop-ing regenerative medicine tech-nologies. Regenerative medicine is, in fact, a great example, both Jasper and Cees agree. It’s an emerging field that focuses on engineering and replacing human cells and organs to restore their normal function. “What we offer to our clients in this field is a strategy: Which steps do they need to take to bring this very promising therapy to clinics, and how can they do so in financially viable manner.”

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Researching and developing such complex and innovative technol-ogies is time- and resource-inten-sive, so getting sound business guidance is a real need for most of those companies. Yet, that is not everything Whale Bay & Co has to offer. “Over the years, we built a strong network of contacts in Europe and Boston, and Boston – let’s not for-get – is the life sciences hub in the world,” Cees says. The two entre-preneurs have, thus, recently fo-cused not only on supporting and coaching healthcare companies, but also on building a bridge be-tween the Dutch and US health-care and capital markets. That is what gave the start of their second spin-off: the Holland-US Bridge program, or “HUB”, which runs between CIC Rotterdam, where Whale Bay & Co is based, and CIC Boston/Kendall Square.

A business bridge across the At-lantic“Given the great technology that we have in the Netherlands and knowing that we, as a team, are good at strategically helping com-panies enter new markets, we saw the HUB program as a logical next step,” Cees says. “It’s great to have those medical devices and tech-nologies brought to the largest health care market in the world.” Success in this market provides Dutch health technologies with the opportunity to have global suc-cess. The program is initially financed by the Province of South Holland, and aims to prepare businesses to en-ter the US market. Those eligible to participate need to have their con-cept already proven and be looking for a fresh round of funding to scale up. The selected companies are coached for 6-12 months, in which time they get everything ready to enter the US market – from their

positioning and pricing expecta-tions, to their pitch for VCs. The last stage is an introduction to the HUB’s network of VCs and special-ized healthcare companies.

“The biggest gift we can give those companies is the access to our network of US mentors,” Jas-per says. “We work with some key people in the industry, such as the heads of research and business development at large pharmaceu-tical companies, who are exactly the contacts you need to get trac-tion in the US market.”

It’s not just access that you get; it’s a stamp of approval, too. While bringing innovative Dutch companies to the US is the team’s main priority, bringing US compa-nies to the Netherlands is a close second. After all, it’s called the Bridge program for a reason. It’s a two-way process that Jasper and Cees believe will take the work and positive impact of both Dutch and US healthcare companies to the global stage.

CIC TITANSWHALE BAY & CO

It’s great to have those medical devices and technologies brought to the largest healthcare market in the world.

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Parx Plastics: From a

coworking desk to the

stock exchangePlastic is all around us – from our homes, cars and phones, to dispos-able water bottles, food packaging, and even our dental fillings. Avoid-ing just about every contact with it is, thus, rather unrealistic. Yet, while a lot has been said about the neg-ative impact of plastic on people’s health and the environment, there is now a way to make it a lot safer. Parx Plastics, a Rotterdam-based company founded by Michaël van der Jagt and Michele Fiori, has spent long years developing and perfecting a technology that can make plastics antimicrobial by us-ing a trace element found in the human body.

“All the technologies to make plas-tics antimicrobial and currently available on the market are based on toxic substances,” Michaël says. “In order to eliminate the bacteria, those substances come out of the plastic, which means they can also end up on our table, in our food or in the air we breathe.”

What Michaël and his team do dif-ferently is use an element that is, in fact, a nutrient to humans. Their technology, which they patented in 2014, is also able to make this el-ement become an intrinsic part of the plastic. “While other solutions are toxic and leaching out, ours is not toxic and not leaching out. It’s twice as safe as what’s available on the market.”

Because of its uniqueness, Parx

Parx PlasticsCIC TITAN

CIC TITANSPARX PLASTICS

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Plastics’ technology can be used for a wide variety of applications, yet, food packaging and medical implants is where the team cur-rently sees the most potential. Going public on the stock marketDeveloping a new and state-of-the-art technology is both re-source- and time-consuming. “We have multiple projects run-ning, but before companies agree to use our technology, they want to test how it works, if all characteris-tics of the plastic remain the same, and what benefits they can derive,” Michaël says. In the end, the pro-cess can easily take up to one and a half years.

To support their operations, the team has attracted several angel investors over the years, and they are now looking for other, perhaps less common ways for a startup, to raise both money and awareness of their technology. In early 2018, they are going live with a direct listing on Euronext Access, a stock exchange market in Paris. “With a direct listing, we get access to the financial possibilities that the stock market has to offer,” CFO Felix Guépin explains. “The compa-ny will be publicly traded, and the shares of the current sharehold-ers will be amended to tradeable shares.”

While they expect friends and family to be the first to jump in, the team hopes the listing will in-crease their visibility on the mar-ket, and help them secure a much bigger funding round in mid-2018. The target will be between €2.5-5 million, and raising it will help them scale up. Currently, Parx Plastics is a team of five in the Netherlands, and have already attracted a number of paying customers, among which companies in the food processing industry. They also have 12 peo-ple working in China, focused on selling the technology. They have already gone through the test pro-cess with two clients there, and

are negotiating their first orders.

The next big milestone ahead of Parx Plastics is making their di-rect listing a success, and using it to attract visibility as well as fol-low-on funding. The capital raised from those activities will go into setting up a facility in Rotterdam, improving their laboratory capa-bilities, and serving an ever-larger number of clients as efficiently as possible. It’s all about scaling up from here – and going public is the path they have set on.

Developing a new and state-of-the-art technology is resource- and time-consuming.

CIC TITANSPARX PLASTICS

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TITELSUBTITEL Innovation

Quarter

CIC TITAN

InnovationQuarter: The

investing powerhouse

Whether very early-stage or more established, innovative companies are constantly on the lookout for new customers, trusted partners and key investors. For a strong net-work, both at home and abroad. For relevant knowledge and exper-tise. If they could find that in one place, too, then all the better. In South Holland, they can, as one organization aims to be the gate-way to all of the above. That organi-zation goes by the name of Innova-tionQuarter.

The ‘lifecycle investor’

“InnovationQuarter is a develop-ment organization for the province of South Holland with the goal to support and strengthen the inno-vation potential of the region,” says Liduina Hammer, Fund Manager of UNIIQ, a proof-of-concept in-vestment fund. The organization acts as a facilita-tor in the region’s innovation scene by bringing relevant stakeholders together, including startups, cor-porates and government players, as well as helping foreign compa-nies set foot on the Dutch market. Above all, it is an investor providing what Liduina calls “lifecycle fund-ing” – or funding for companies in

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other two InnovationQuarter funds – need to be up to par. “Because we have very high standards, many see us as a cornerstone investor,” Liduina says. “Other early-stage in-vestors are increasingly willing to step in because we invest.”

Thus, when UNIIQ decided to invest in Semiotic Labs, a startup working on predictive maintenance and machine learning technologies, energy and technology giant EN-GIE joined the round. Or when UN-IIQ made an investment in Hardt Hyperloop, a company developing an innovative travel capsule, the NS Innovation Fund pitched in, too. What Liduina would still like to see happen in the innovation scene in the Netherlands is for more start-ups to become scale-ups, and for their founders to gradually become investors, too. After all, investing is about money just as much as it is about bringing experience and new knowledge to the table.

“When we [at InnovationQuarter] invest, we contribute a lot more than just money,” Liduina says. “We help startups find other investors and secure follow-on funding, as well as gain access to customers, partners and a wide pool of ex-perts.” In other words, investing is a package: It’s about providing fi-nancial support and expertise as much as it is about building a net-work, connecting entrepreneurs, and driving the innovation ecosys-tem forward.

every stage of development.InnovationQuarter has three funds under management: UNIIQ, which focuses on innovative companies in the proof-of-concept phase; EN-ERGIIQ, which makes investments in the energy sector; and IQCapital, which invests in companies that have reached the proof-of-concept stage, as well as in more estab-lished ones. Since 2014, IQCapital has made 27 investments totaling around €25 million, including one of their lat-est – a €4.5-million funding round with venture capital investor Hol-land Venture in Rotterdam-based medtech company Quantib. “Every time we invest, we make sure it’s in a company that brings real innovation to the table,” Lidui-na says. Quantib is the perfect ex-ample, as it allows physicians and researchers to make more efficient and accurate diagnoses with the

help of advanced medical imaging. Of the three funds, UNIIQ is the odd one in the pack, as it is estab-lished in collaboration with the three universities in the region: the University of Leiden, Erasmus MC and TU Delft. It’s the kind of collab-oration that Liduina says is key to fostering innovation in the region. Believing in startups, early onWhat’s different about UNIIQ is that it invests at a phase where there’s no proof of concept yet. It’s a phase where most other inves-tors would be reluctant to step in because of the high risk. Liduina and the team of UNIIQ, however, are willing to take that risk. They invest up to €300,000 per startup and have already backed 17 companies since the launch of the fund in June 2016. Of course, the startups that receive funding from UNIIQ – or any of the

Everytime we invest, we make sure it’s in a company that brings real innovation to the table.

CIC TITANSINNOVATIONQUARTER

TITELSUBTITEL

CIC Rotterdam

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Created January, 2018