CEO interview: Meet Amazec Photonics' Pim Kat and PhotonDelta's Eelko Brinkhoff

Commercializing photonic technologies often takes a village. This is where groups like PhotoDelta play an instrumental role is facilitating connections and limiting the challenges. In 2023 PhotonDelta received €471 million in public funding to accelerate the photonic chip industry by stimulating industrialization of photonic integrated circuit (PIC) technology, and PIC-based application building, and forging connections with viable markets and stakeholders.

Eelko Brinkhoff, a veteran in economic development, became CEO of PhotonDelta, which was set up in 2018 to accelerate the emerging Dutch integrated photonics industry.

Part of this program is to provide loans to startup companies like Amazec with the aim of helping them reach international markets and growing the PIC ecosystem. Amazec CEO Pim Kat founded Technobis Group, as the first company in Europe to start using integrated photonics for sensing. In 2019, Kat retired and sold the company. Shortly afterwards, he was contacted by a medical doctor who had the bright idea of using the PIC technology initially developed at Technobis for a medical application.

They wanted to address how to quickly measure the precise amount of blood left in the body after a trauma or major heart surgery, as too much or too little blood can cause death. Currently, the only way to effectively measure cardiovascular parameters is by thermodilution. In the conventional approach, a small volume of 4◦C saline is injected into the patient, causing a decrease in blood temperature. The decrease in temperature is measured by a temperature equipped catheter placed in a pulmonary artery that creates a thermal indicator dilution curve (IDC), which indicates cardiac output.

Kat and a few partners established Amazec in 2021 to provide an alternative to a temperature-equipped catheter in the form of a fiber-optic sensor based on fiber Bragg gratings that can provide high-resolution temperature sensing (fractions of 0.1 milliKelvin) and multiple IDCs. Advantages of this approach are that cardiovascular parameters can be measured in minutes rather than hours and it’s minimally invasive, as the glass fiber sensors can be positioned outside the vascular system on the skin over an artery.

Ivan Nikitski: How has Amazec evolved?

Pim Kat: Currently we are conducting trials with live pigs, working towards a proof of concept. When the trials are complete, we will do clinical trials in hospitals and work towards scaling to an industrial level.

The founders are all retirees, so what we do is contract my old company PhotonFirst and others to handle the packaging and electronics. It’s been very time-consuming—I worked four days a week for a couple of years in a row, which was much more than I anticipated. A major problem is that in the medical system, it takes a long time to get your product on the market. First is proof of concept, then you have to convince the clinicians that it works, and then you need to get it certified, which takes a minimum of 10 years.

Nikitski: How does PhotonDelta support companies like Amazec?

Eelko Brinkhoff: In the case of Amazec, we have provided loans from the Dutch National Growth Fund. In 2023, PhotonDelta received €471 million in public funding for a six-year program, which we’ve put in the market to accelerate the PIC industry. We do that by providing loans, running the funding of innovation projects, stimulating international cooperation, and promoting the industry for talent attraction.

Following the CHIPS Act, the EU has launched 5 pilot lines up until today. The first 4 lines are dedicated to the semiconductor industry and we felt an opportunity was missed in accelerating the emerging integrated photonics industry. After a lobby initiated by PhotonDelta, a 5th pilotline was announced dedicated to integrated photonics. The proposal for this pilot line, called PIXEurope, was approved last October with a total budget of €380 million, of which €133 million will be invested in the Netherlands. These pilot lines will offer PIC companies a faster and more affordable way to having PICs produced.

Ultimately, our aim is to grow the PIC ecosystem in the Netherlands from around 600 employees and a turnover of €50 million to an industry of 5,000 employees with a turnover of €1 billion.

Nikitski: What are the main challenges for integrated photonics in Europe?

Brinkhoff: Our competition is with the U.S. and China, but in these regions, particularly in the U.S., it’s way easier to get funding and to scale up. In Europe, we’re still basically in a pre-competitive stage, and to enable us to compete we need a level playing field. This means a more united approach with more funding from the European Union so we can build the right infrastructure, create the right talent, support companies at the start, and attract private investors.

As the Draghi Report says, one way to increase our competitiveness is to cut a lot of red tape and make it easier for companies like Amazec to access funding. We basically need a culture change in the way we look at companies and how we measure success because currently, we are too risk-avoidant with too-long processes in getting funding, and it’s almost impossible as a startup or scale-up to take part in European innovation programs. As Pim has found out, in Europe, the CEO of a startup typically goes from one funding round to the other, and it takes so much time. What we want is for a CEO to work on growing a company and not be preoccupied with interminable funding rounds.

Kat: In this connection, one of the conditions of getting EU funding for Amazec was that I had to source from European companies outside the Netherlands. It’s not the end of the world, but it's harder to find a company outside of the Netherlands that knows what to do with integrated photonics for sensing because they haven’t developed as far as we have.

Brinkhoff: Then, there’s the issue of risk. Recently, a top-level person looking at our draft recommendations to get more funding for integrated photonics from Europe commented that 99% of European funding seemed to be focused on funding old industry. While some preservation is necessary, we need to look more at the opportunities that new technology, like photonics technologies, have to offer the ‘old’ industry rather than the keeping them alive.

In the Netherlands, entrepreneurship should be more at the forefront, because the number of startups becoming a successful scale-up here is too small. Funding at the startup level is not the issue, but successfully closing a deal of €50 to €100 million is. In the Netherlands and the EU, we need to create a venture capital market where getting this funding is easier and more accessible. In the culture shift, we also need to embrace that failure is a way to success. We are too risk-avoidant and hinder the speed in which a startup can scale.

Kat: Yes, failure is a way to success. A major difference between the U.S. and Europe is that if you fail here, everybody is angry because they’ve lost their money, and a failure can stick with you for the rest of your life. But in the U.S., failure is seen more as a learning point.

Nikitski: Any advice for the next generation of entrepreneurs?

Brinkhoff: It’s crucial to check the market. I see people sticking to a belief in their technology only to find that when they are ready, there is no market demand. That’s why there's a program in the Netherlands, and we apply it as well, to challenge startups in this respect.

Kat: I still see startups making a lot of mistakes in choosing the wrong material or the wrong type of packaging for an application. Packaging companies have completely different approaches, so it’s important to get good advice about choosing the right platform, the right technology, and the right packaging—otherwise, there's a big chance you will end up disappointed.