I spent my early twenties trying to become an astronaut. Two Mars mission simulations in the Utah desert, one zero-g flight and one stratospheric balloon experiment later, I'm an engineer instead, with a PhD in plasma physics. What survived is the conviction that the most interesting problems left are physical ones.

I co-founded ScanWorld, building agricultural analytics on satellite imagery, and exited it to constellr. It taught me that in hardware the physics is almost never the bottleneck. Finding the customer who actually pays is. I then moved into nuclear energy, where I played a key incubator role in creating three companies across fission, fusion and defense. That's where my thesis took shape: betting on science and betting on engineering execution are very different games, and nearly all deeptech capital goes to the first.

At Hexa I co-build hardware companies from day zero. What I bring as founder is someone who will read your thermal model and your cap table in the same afternoon, and help you get a prototype in front of a paying customer in months rather than years.

I'm Belgian, with a Dutch grandfather who passed down a certain scrappiness philosophy. I live in Brussels with my wife and three kids.

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I look for technologies where the science is already demonstrated in a lab somewhere and the remaining difficulty is engineering execution: integration, cost, reliability, manufacturability. That risk can be retired in build-test-learn loops measured in weeks, which means putting something real in front of a customer before raising serious money, not after.

Quick example: pulling drinking water out of the air is well-understood chemistry, but nobody has packaged it into something rugged enough for a forward operating base. Build something that works first, improve later.

I'm looking for cofounders who have shipped a physical product and still remember how painful it was. Technical enough to be dangerous, commercially curious enough to call twenty customers before drawing a single part, and ambitious to the point of being slightly unreasonable.

I'm spending my time on defense, energy, climate and AI infrastructure.

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