The Challenge

Founded and led by scientists, the VC-backed DeepTech company had spent a decade building a genuinely category-defining technology.

By early 2025, with ~€21M raised and its product shipping to universities and research labs across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America, the DeepTech business had reached an inflexion point: it needed to leap from DeepTech pioneer to scalable, commercially structured company.

The investors needed to act on two fronts:

• Install operational leadership: bring in a COO/President capable of building and running a structured organisation alongside the founding team
• Accelerate commercial scale: translate world-class technology into repeatable revenue growth across international markets

They turned to The Big Search to find that operational leader.

Overview Of The Executive Search

March 2025 → August 2025 | VC Value Creation: Science-to-Business Transition Phase

The client is a Dutch deep technology company founded by a team of scientists and engineers. The company develops and manufactures nanoparticle synthesis and deposition tools that reduce material innovation cycles from 15 years to as little as one – enabling researchers and manufacturers to move from discovery to production-ready materials at a fraction of the traditional time and cost.

Its client base spans leading global research institutions and industrial players across electronics, renewable energy, green hydrogen, gas sensing, and materials discovery. 

By early 2025, the company was VC-backed with ~€21M raised across a Series A and an A2 extension; had an established international customer base across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and North America; and was ready to shift gears from a research-stage startup to a structured, growth-stage DeepTech business. What it needed was operational and commercial leadership to match the scale of its scientific ambitions.

The mandate was to hire a COO/President capable of building the operational and commercial backbone of a fast-scaling DeepTech business – someone who could partner with a founder-led scientific team, bring structure and process discipline, and drive international expansion without losing the culture and pace that had made the VC-backed startup exceptional. 

The profile required a rare blend: genuine science or engineering depth, large-company operational experience, and the entrepreneurial mindset to thrive in an early-stage DeepTech environment.

Executive Search Across European Deep-Tech, Scientific Instruments & Life Sciences

The hunting strategy targeted COO, President, and Managing Director-level profiles from the intersection of scientific instrumentation, life science tools, DeepTech hardware, and materials science – specifically those with:

• Engineering or scientific academic backgrounds (chemistry, physics, materials science)
• Operational leadership experience inside instrument manufacturers or research technology companies
• Track record of scaling international commercial operations across Europe, the US, and Asia
• Experience bridging the gap between a technical founding team and a structured, growth-stage DeepTech organisation
• Comfort operating in VC-backed environments with Board-level exposure

Target company archetypes included analytical instrumentation companies, scientific equipment manufacturers, life sciences tools businesses, and DeepTech hardware scale-ups across Europe and the Nordics.

We undertook an exhaustive mapping exercise, identifying 156 candidates.

Days to first shortlist delivery: 41 days from kick-off

⏱ Days to first shortlist delivery: 41 days

This was a deliberately thorough process – and the funnel reflects it. Of 156 profiles identified, nearly half were contacted (73), and almost a third of those reached the recruiter interview stage (24) – a signal of how rare the target profile was: scientific credibility, operational maturity, and entrepreneurial mindset rarely coexist in the same candidate.

The three-round client interview structure shows the VC-backed DeepTech company's rigour in assessing cultural fit alongside professional credentials. For a founder-led team hiring their first operational leader, the decision carried significant weight: this person would fundamentally change how the DeepTech business runs. The process was designed to be certain, not fast.

Client NPS: 9/10 - "Really enjoy working with you."

The Placed Candidate: a commercially minded operational leader with a strong scientific foundation

The future COO/President of this VC-backed DeepTech company is a commercially minded operational leader with a strong scientific foundation – a rare profile that sits at the intersection of engineering rigour and business leadership. 

Why they fit:

🔬 Scientific credibility: M.Sc. (Tech.) in organic chemistry and materials science from a top European engineering university; the technical depth to earn trust from a founder-led scientific team.

🏭 Operational leadership at scale: a career built inside one of the world's most respected scientific instruments and life sciences organisations, including completion of a highly selective General Manager Development Programme.

🌍 International commercial experience: track record of managing cross-border operations and commercial teams across European and global markets

📋 Board-ready: completed formal board member training, signalling readiness to operate at a governance level in a VC-backed environment.

🚀 Science-to-business bridge: the rare combination of scientific literacy and business execution that early-stage DeepTech companies need when making the leap from product-market fit to commercial scale.

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Most VC-backed DeepTech companies underestimate how critical the science-to-business transition is to delivering on their investment thesis. Hiring the wrong operational leader at this stage doesn't just slow growth – it fractures the founding team and derails the commercial momentum that investors are betting on.

If one of your portfolio DeepTech companies is approaching a similar inflection point – ready to scale but not yet structured to do so – we're happy to share how we think about finding the DeepTech leaders who can bridge that gap.