NP-Hard Ventures

Congrats to our portfolio company tldraw on their $10M Series A, led by Lux Capital and Definition. What started as a side project of Steve Ruiz is now a design-led, developer-first platform used by thousands and generating over $1M revenue in licenses. We’re proud to have them on our portfolio. Huge congrats to Steve and the team. Onward! Cc: Anke Huiskes, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, Paul Veugen

🥂 Whoop! NP-Hard Ventures has been nominated for Emerging Manager of the Year 2025 at the EUVC Awards, the 2nd year in a row! Being recognized in this category, where firms on funds I–III are evaluated not only on their financial and portfolio performance but also on innovation, ecosystem impact, diversity, transparency, fairness, and team culture, is truly an honor. A big thank you to all of our LPs who have nominated us 💙 How are we doing? We just closed our investment # 30 so we've been busy! In 2025 alone we welcomed: 🔋 Engrate 🇸🇪 - > Developer-first integration platform for the energy landscape. 🌀 Supervised 🇨🇭 - > AI-powered knowledge orchestration. 📹 It Just Works, Inc. 🇷🇴 - > Deep search technologies for multimodal applications. 🏭 Isembard 🇬🇧- > Forging industrial acceleration by making manufacturing faster, cheaper and greener. 🚀 Gama 🇫🇷- > Making space sustainable. If you're a European product obsessed technical founder on a quest to solve hard problems, pls email us at hello@nphard.vc, we have 5 more investments to go from Fund 1 💶. Big thank you to team Isomer Capital, EUVC Andreas Munk Holm for this initiative. See you in London on May 14th :-). 🙌 Paul Veugen // Micha Hernandez van Leuffen // NP-Hard Ventures #EUVCsummit #EUVCawards #VentureCapital #StartupFunding #Europe

Stock option law reform is a step closer in The Netherlands! Today Anke Huiskes and I handed a petition with over 1,500 signatures from startups to Minister Dirk Beljaarts and Staatssecretaris Tjebbe van Oostenbruggen. Thank you to everyone who signed, everyone who helped get us there, and everyone who supported this from the sidelines. In The Netherlands, we’ve invented quite a lot. Next to the crowd favorites, like orange carrots and stroopwafels, the Dutch have invented essential human technologies like the microscope and bluetooth. We’ve also built startups from Adyen to ASML, from Booking to Backbase, from Coolblue to Crisp, and I can keep going through the alphabet. The one thing they have had in common is that it didn’t happen in isolation. It didn’t happen just because of the founder, but because of a team that came together to take the risk of invention. That’s what we have in The Netherlands: the talent. What we’re missing is a flywheel. We need talented individuals to go back and invest in future startups, like Anke. We need them to start new companies with their expertise, or join the ones that need a boost. That’s why we’re calling for stock option law reform in 3 ways: 1: Lower the administrative burden of stock option plans 2: Charge an internationally competitive tax rate for stock options 3: Only pay taxes when money is earned, not before These are incredibly important. Everyone who signed the petition is counting on you, Minister and Secretary, to bring it home now that the momentum is here. Similarly, you can count on us to keep inventing and building that flywheel.

Excited to announce that we're co-hosting a meetup with Parseable and Fiberplane around modern observbility in Amsterdam, April 9th. We'll be covering OpenTelemetry on top of Object Storage, the Model Context Protocol and how it fits into the debugging landscape, and more!

Can an Observability Platform be faster than purpose-built analytics databases? For months, we’ve been optimizing Parseable to push the boundaries of observability performance. The results are in, and they’re better than we expected! We put Parseable through the standard industry benchmarks, typically dominated by specialized analytics databases, and the numbers speak for themselves. Our Head of Engineering, Nikhil Sinha, is excited, and so are we! Stay tuned as we share our findings and what they mean for the future of fast observability on S3. 🚀

Europe is quickly realizing that investing in defense tech is impact investing. The sobering new reality of having to invest in the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. Friday’s Oval Office meeting sent a shockwave through Europe, finally realizing we counted on an ally that no longer shares the same beliefs, truth and values. Less than a year ago, we feared losing our bank account or facing pushback for investing in a European drone company. Today, that year-old company is playing a growing role in the defense of Ukraine and our European borders. Investing in European sovereignty and resilience is more important than ever. If I look back at our hesitation and decision making just months ago, I realize how quickly the sentiment turned in Europe. The only silver lining is that new leaders are standing up, Europe can finally shake off its Calimero complex, and existing and new coalitions are forged. Time to put our money where our mouth is and invest in European resilience, safety, productivity, and foundational technology.

📣 London calling! We'll be in London every other week for the next three months to participate in Mountside Ventures' Emerging VC program, designed to accelerate the next generation of European venture capitalists. Pumped to be selected as one of the very few new funds to join this stellar peer group of 20 European funds, an incredible mentor network of both GPs ( 👋 hello; LocalGlobe’s Robin Klein, Dawn Capital’s Haakon Overli, Speedinvest’s Oliver Holle and Connect Ventures’ Sitar Teli); and LP (Christian Stiebner, KfW senior investment manager, Yvonne Bajela, partner at Basecamp (LocalGlobe’s fund of funds) and Dario de Wet, founding partner at fund of funds LTV Capital, Jaap Vriesendorp, partner at Marktlink) who committed to give 10 hours to the program. And last but certainly not least, access to institutional investors and family offices. 🙏 Thanks Jonathan Hollis, Gregor von dem Knesebeck & team for setting this up. Pumped to be part of this first co-hort! More about the program here: https://lnkd.in/eND38u8a. Link to Sifted article in the comments. Off we go 🇬🇧! NP-Hard Ventures // Micha Hernandez van Leuffen // Paul Veugen

💥 Another memorable Foundry Meetup in the books! The Zero to IPO edition, co-hosted by our friends of INGEN HOUSZ, featuring two incredible speakers: 🦸 Pieter van der Does, Co-Founder & CEO Adyen 🦸 Bas Smeulders, Co-Founder & COO Sendcloud What happens when you bring top founders, builders and investors together? You get an event where over 80% of the Dutch startup market cap is one room. (This was an actual quote of one of our speakers :-)). From Pieter (Co-Founder Adyen) sharing how execution beats vision to Bas (Co-Founder Sendcloud) breaking down the reality of scaling internationally, the night was full of lessons on: ✅ Hiring & scaling culture in fast-growing startups ✅ Why staying private longer is becoming the new IPO ✅ The power of thinking globally from Day One A few memorable quotes from our speakers: 🗣️ “We were setting this up as a global company from the very beginning. We never aimed small.” 🗣️ “Execution matters more than vision—an idea is worthless if you don’t know how to execute.” 🗣️ “I don’t care how young you are—if you’re really good, you deserve the chance to lead.” 🗣️ “Scaling is not just about revenue—it’s about people, culture, and execution.” 🗣️ “The biggest hiring mistake? Hiring great people who don’t fit the culture.” Big thanks to Salar al Khafaji & team at Monumental for hosting. Joukje Baur, Matthijs Ingen-Housz, Quirijn van Veen & team at INGEN HOUSZ for co-organizing, and all incredible founders & builders who skipped their night behind their desk or Netflix'ing to join us. --------- With Foundry Meetups we aim to bring great minds together to foster meaningful conversations and partnership. They are one-of-a-kind events. No two events is the same, largely because the community drives the format. If you'd like to join one of our future Foundry Meetups, pls subscribe here; lu.ma/nphv. Paul Veugen // Micha Hernandez van Leuffen // Anke Huiskes // Melissa van den Brink - Romero // Frank Emous // NP-Hard Ventures #ZerotoIPO #FoundryMeetups #startups #founders #tech

If an investor asks about user retention metrics and takes percentages and time periods as an answer, without any follow-up questions or specification, they learned very little about your business. If their next statement is a conclusion about the quality of that metric, you can draw your own conclusions about their understanding of the underlying mechanics of your business. Some example follow-up questions smart investors might ask (of course depending on the type of business): • How do you measure retention? • Do you measure bounded or unbounded retention? • Do you measure retention based on installs, signups, or another event? • How do you qualify a retained user? • Do you see significant differences between cohorts? • How is your retention evolving in recent cohorts? • How does your user acquisition growth impact retention? • Do you see significant differences in retention per channel? • What is the retention on subscriptions? • What is the retention on monthly versus yearly plans? If you find yourself in a conversation about retention or "benchmark" metrics, especially one where quality is getting judged without qualification, it can be enlightening to turn the tables: • What does good retention look like in your experience? • Do you have any benchmarks you can share? • How would you measure retention for a business like us? • What are the 2 or 3 key metrics you focus on for a company like ours? Grill investors on their understanding of metrics when you're getting judged, and you’ll quickly learn how well they truly understand the market they invest in.

My experiences as founder and investor in Europe colored my opinion of the European venture ecosystem. Anecdotally, it feels there are very few investors with relevant operational or entrepreneurial experience and even less with any product or technical background. So how much of this my own lack of perspective or bias as founder? Or do we really only have former bankers and financial consultants investing in European startups? With the help of chatGPT I dove a bit deeper into the stats. Take the exact numbers with a grain of salt, but it does give you some perspective on the ecosystem in Europe... --- 250 European Seed/Series A investors 1500+ (senior) partners and employees Background: - Financial: ~50-55%  - Founder: ~10-12%  - Operational: ~17-18%  - Technical/Product: ~8–9% The conclusion: Europe’s early-stage investment scene is well-suited to fintech, SaaS, and e-commerce, benefiting from finance-driven and operationally oriented partners. However, the next wave of critical tech industries—developer infrastructure, deep tech, robotics, and AI—demands a deeper pool of technical or product expertise within VC. With European investor teams hovering at only ~8–9% technical backgrounds (vs. ~10–12% in the U.S.) and funding levels in these sectors lagging behind by a factor of 2–3, there is a clear need for strategic changes. Enhancing the ratio of technical partners, forging stronger advisory networks, and harnessing public policy could bolster Europe’s ability to produce globally competitive companies in these pivotal industries for the decades ahead. --- The findings here are in line with this report from Sifted from two years ago: https://lnkd.in/ed7q_B7k. "European VCs talk a good talk about being “founder friendly” and “hands on”. But the vast majority of them have still never actually run a startup — or worked in one." It's pretty hard to find folks who actually deeply understand what they're investing in, beyond the things that can be presented in a spreadsheet. And the background and experience of the folks who allocate capital to growth, can have significant impact on the types of companies that get funded in Europe. We got work to do... Interested in more? Let me know and I'll try to compile the sources and insights in a more detailed post.