In this video interview, we had the chance to chat with Marek Kotelnicki, Managing Partner at VIGO Ventures – an investment group focusing on early stage hardware and semiconductor investments. Marek is also a business development consultant for deep tech companies and an EIC Scaling Club mentor in the Next-Gen Computing market group.

Marek shares the “investment thesis” of VIGO Ventures – “investing in deep-tech companies at pre-seed and seed stages, helping them develop a certain viability of their product to be able to raise further rounds and bring their scientific products to the market.” To put it simply, science-based companies are very close to the hearts of these investors.

Marek has been working with Tech Tour and many other institutions across Europe as a mentor or judge in technology-focused initiatives featuring photonics or semiconductor products. In this short interview, Marek shares how his team is supporting its portfolio companies in their journey to technological and operational maturity. Investments up to 1.5M serve as a powerful springboard for finding the right partners and markets to penetrate. 

During the Ignition Forum, Marek was happy to finally meet many people in person (and on stage!). “It’s similar like with technology that can reach a certain maturity level in the lab. But then it takes the next step out of the lab to work with commercial partners in a real-life environment.” He also emphasized that the EIC Scaling Club is a great platform for tackling the challenges of European scaleups and strengthening the regional community of scientists and investors. 

Watch the full interview here or explore more expert interviews on the EIC Scaling Club’s YouTube channel.

About the EIC Scaling Club

The EIC Scaling Club is a curated community where 120+ European deep tech scale-ups with the potential to build world-class businesses and solve major global challenges come together with investors, corporate innovators and other industry stakeholders to spur growth.

The top 120+ European deep tech companies will be carefully selected from a pool of high-growth scale-ups that have benefitted from EIC financial schemes, other European and national innovation programmes, and beyond.

The EIC Scaling Club is an EIC-funded initiative run in partnership by Tech Tour, Bpifrance (EuroQuity), Hello Tomorrow, Tech.eu (Webrazzi), EurA and IESE Business School.

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