Innovation is not a department here. It is a way of working that we deliberately take outside — to universities and colleges, and into the ecosystems where these questions come together.
We maintain good relationships with universities and colleges across the Netherlands. From our office in Enschede we work with the University of Twente and Saxion University of Applied Sciences — engineering and IT. Beyond that, with Wageningen, Eindhoven and Delft.
Every year we supervise groups of students, as well as students doing their graduation project or internship with us individually.
Why we keep doing it: someone who spends six months on a single question gets further than a team doing it on the side. And it brings us people — a number of our colleagues started here as interns.
We keep an office at Earth Valley, the innovation ecosystem run by ROM Utrecht Region on the Amersfoort–Utrecht axis.
Earth Valley focuses on the sustainable built environment, climate adaptation, mobility and smart energy systems — with technology and data as the common thread, which they call earth tech.
That overlaps almost exactly with our own four transitions. Which is why we are there: sitting next to the people working on the same questions is faster than calling them.
With Yeshugo — then still called GreenStar Statistics — we completed the full accelerator programme of Climate-KIC, Europe's climate innovation initiative.
That was in 2017. Years before there was any positioning story around our companies, the climate side was already in there.
Sensoterra has two investors alongside us. Future Food Fund is a specialist venture capital fund for food and agritech in North-West Europe, focused on supply chains, novel food and sustainable agriculture. ROM Utrecht Region invested through its participation fund in August 2022, where Sensoterra sits under Earth Ventures.
That is not a detail. It means we are not the only party that believes in these ventures — and that two investors who know the market, each coming from a different angle, reached the same conclusion.
With ROM Utrecht Region the connection runs both ways: the same organisation is behind Earth Valley in Amersfoort, where we hold office.
Curious Inc is not an investor who drops by for the quarterly numbers. We have started, grown, acquired and integrated companies ourselves — and we know where it hurts.
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