Student Startup Scout – HU/UU students

Are you interested in entrepreneurship and good at connecting with people? We’re looking for a student to join our Student Startup Scout team and help us find the next generation of student founders.

About UtrechtInc

UtrechtInc is a Dutch startup incubator, ranked among the top 10 university-linked incubators in the world. Over the past 10 years we’ve supported more than 450 startups, including GitLab, Channable, and Argenx. We help founders develop their entrepreneurial skills, build their networks, and grow scalable tech and science companies.

About the role

As a Student Startup Scout, you’ll help us find and support promising student entrepreneurs across Utrecht Science Park. That means reaching out to lecturers, students, and stakeholders, staying on top of opportunities to get in front of the right people, and building relationships that lead somewhere. It’s part-time, around 10 hours a week, with a schedule you set yourself.

Responsibilities

🔸 Connect with lecturers, students, and stakeholders to identify promising student startups
🔸 Follow up consistently and maintain relationships with potential candidates
🔸 Develop outreach strategies to promote our Student Validation Program
🔸 Represent UtrechtInc at networking events, career days, and student association events
🔸 Create content for social media, our website, and promotional materials

What you’ll get

🔹 Practical experience in entrepreneurship, marketing, and relationship-building
🔹 A flexible, self-scheduled 10 hrs/week role
🔹 Monthly compensation
🔹 A real impact on student startups and the local ecosystem
🔹 A growing network of entrepreneurs, professionals, and students
🔹 Access to UtrechtInc’s network of 35 in-house and 450 community startups

What we’re looking for

✔️ Currently enrolled at HU or UU and will be enrolled for at least one year
✔️ Genuine interest in entrepreneurship and innovation
✔️ Strong communication and interpersonal skills
✔️ Proactive, able to work independently and as part of a team
✔️ Good organizational skills to manage multiple tasks

How to apply

Send your CV and a short cover letter about your interest in entrepreneurship and relevant experience to Saif at saif@utrechtinc.nl

Our very own Lumox is making waves — this time on national radio 🎙️

Researcher Sebas Pronk (Utrecht University) joined BNR Beter to explain how Lumox’s light-activated cancer therapy works: a tumour-seeking nanobody — developed using antibodies from llamas — delivers the drug directly to the tumour, where harmless light then activates it exactly where it’s needed. The drug stays completely inactive everywhere else in the body.

“We deliver the medicine specifically to the tumour, thanks to antibodies from llamas.” — Sebas Pronk, Utrecht University

Surgeon and project lead Prof. dr. Remco De Bree (UMC Utrecht) also shares why this matters from the clinic: “As a surgeon, I see every day how much impact our treatments can have on the lives of patients.”

After more than ten years of research at Utrecht University — and with support from KWF Kankerbestrijding — the therapy is now ready to be tested in a first clinical patient study.

💫 Listen to the full episode on BNR Beter HERE

👉 The whole team from UtrechtInc attended and brought our startups to the biggest startup event in Utrecht, Crossroads!
Organized by Startup Utrecht Region Dotslash Utrecht Robin Lechner Nanna Victoria Rasmussen Jelle Drijver MBA Roel Franken Dimitry de Vink

👉 Moderated beautifully by Irene Rompa

Panel sessions from Panel sessions by
🔸Patrick Meutzner 💬 • Trengo
🔸Vincent Ruijter • iwell
🔸Arjan van den Born • ROM Utrecht Region
🔸Toon Overbeeke • Vitestro
🔸Maud Vermeulen • Golden Egg Check
🔸Greg De Temmerman • Techleap
🔸Maarten Stolk • Deeploy
🔸Emily Jacometti • HackShield Future Cyber Heroes
🔸Mark de Raaij • Blue Current
🔸Michelle ter Laak • Arches Capital

We organized and hosted a pitching stage for (our) startups:
🔹 SPCTR → Wido Heeman
🔹 Aspected → Rikkert Engels
🔹 TemsAI → Alexandra Podsekina
🔹 XDMD → Gastón Creci
🔹 TrustHub → Slinger Roijackers (Jansen)
🔹 ObsessLess → 🧠 Mourice Schuurmans
🔹 Paradice → Adam Ziv
🔹 UCANACT → Julia Berezutskaya
🔹 Procurement Tactics → Ralph de Groot
🔹 Bactheravax → Dinja Oosterhoff
🔹 Lazy Dynamics →  Bart van Erp
🔹 Eduface →  Jeroen van Gessel
🔹 Vedea → Daniel Jansen
🔹 Experience Fruit Quality → @Marco de Jong
🔹 Verticai → Joep Wegstapel

From First Signal to Signed Deal

Meet Tagetto

Tagetto helps corporate development teams and M&A professionals map markets, identify acquisition targets, and track opportunities.

Deal sourcing is still stuck in the past. Most teams rely on spreadsheets, trade shows, LinkedIn searches, and gut instinct to find and track acquisition targets. There’s no tracking, no shared history, and no collaboration – just version-controlled Excel files and status updates that require chasing people down.

Unlike static databases, Tagetto lets you describe your strategy in natural language and generates a ranked shortlist of the most relevant targets, grouped into a dynamic market map that continuously enriches itself. From there, teams can move targets from lead to opportunity to active project, track outreach, assign owners, and maintain a full interaction history, with dashboards that surface what’s stalled, what’s moving, and where attention is needed most.

Built by Pieter Snelder, who combines engineering rigor with hands-on experience in high-stakes strategy, M&A, and corporate development, Tagetto turns the acquisition target list every dealmaker maintains in Excel into a living, always up-to-date system.

Tagetto is based at UtrechtInc and has been part of the Spring ’26 Tech Validation cohort.
We can’t wait to see where this journey takes them.

Check out Tagetto for more information.

🧡 The clinical countdown has started. Are you in?
Lumox, one of our startups, just secured €4.5M+ from KWF Kankerbestrijding to fund the first clinical study of their light-activated precision cancer therapy. The roadmap to patients is now a timeline.

Here’s what that means for investors:
🔸 The Netherlands’ leading cancer charity KWF just put €4.5 million behind Lumox’s science. That’s peer validation at the highest level, from an organisation that has funded cancer breakthroughs for over 70 years.

🔸 A tumour-seeking nanobody delivers the drug. Harmless light activates it, only where and when it’s needed. The drug stays completely inactive everywhere else in the body. This isn’t incremental improvement. It’s a new category of precision medicine.

🔸 Hundreds of thousands of head and neck cancer patients per year. For many, radical surgery is still the only curative option. No one has solved this yet.

Safety studies and regulatory preparation are next, and within reach. The remaining steps are defined, funded in part, and now moving.

The investors who come in now will enter at a pivotal moment: clinical-stage credibility, a world-class UMC Utrecht clinical partner, and a KWF-backed roadmap, before the next valuation step.

Lumox is looking for investors and industry partners who share their vision.
Interested? Reach out directly. www.lumoxbiotech.com/

🎉 Huge congratulations to ObsessLess, Runner-up at the NN Social Innovation Startup Award at Hello Tomorrow! Founded by Mourice Schuurmans and Adrian Pavel.

Winning a €35,000 grant to expand access to OCD care: for the many people still waiting months to get the right support, this recognition matters.

We’re proud to see one of our startups making waves, turning a real gap in mental healthcare into a solution that’s gaining the attention and funding it deserves.

Well done to the entire ObsessLess team, and to all the finalists: Floow.ai, eFrontiers, WUK, Annie Advisor and winner grandmama.

For more information visit ObsessLess.com

Developing AI for medical imaging 

In the rapidly evolving world of healthcare, the primary bottleneck isn’t a lack of scientific discovery, it’s the engineering gap. While academic research consistently produces groundbreaking AI methodologies for medical imaging, a vast majority of these innovations never leave the whiteboard. Transforming a theoretical model into a robust, scalable tool that functions within the high-stakes environment of a clinic requires a fusion of rigorous engineering discipline and deep clinical context.

XDMD was founded to solve this translation problem. They are an engineering company focused on medical imaging. They build custom-made AI solutions in close collaboration with clinical and industrial partners for radiology, pathology or any other domain where medical images are used. The company combines strong engineering discipline with deep domain understanding, helping their clients to achieve state-of-the-art performance and faster time-to-market.

Meet the team

Dr.ir. Rashindra Manniesing is the founder of XDMD. He previously spent his career as an academic researcher in medical imaging, authoring over 70 publications in the field.

Dr. Gastón Creci is the AI engineer of XDMD. With a background in theoretical physics, he approaches medical imaging from first principles.

XDMD is supported by an advisory board of leading scientists in medical imaging and AI, including Prof. Chris de Korte (Radboudumc), Prof. Jonas Teuwen (Netherlands Cancer Institute), Prof. Marcel van Gerven (Radboud/Donders), , and Prof. Thijs Vande Vyvere (Antwerp University Hospital).

What inspired you to start XDMD?

I have always been an engineer at heart. Building things and understanding how they work is what drives me. After years of research in medical imaging, I watched the field change fundamentally with the rise of AI. For many problems in medical imaging the question is no longer which methodology to publish, because we know what works. The question is whether it actually gets built and deployed. Can we get it to work in clinical practice and at scale? That combination, a drive to build and a field ready to be built, is what led me to start XDMD. It is highly motivating to know that what often starts at the whiteboard eventually ends up in products that improve the lives of patients.

How does XDMD approach challenges like data quality, regulation, and clinical integration?

Data is the hardest one. Collecting enough representative data and producing high quality reference standards is a real challenge. It also depends on what the client needs. For a proof of concept, a few datasets may be sufficient. For a product that needs to work globally at scale, it is a different problem entirely. In practice, clients often bring their own data, and there are publicly available datasets for many domains.

There are also commercial data brokers such as Segmed.ai that act as intermediaries between hospitals and companies.

Regulation depends on the TRL level and target market, but we account for it early in the process. We support clients in preparing technical documentation and software files, and where needed we bring in specialized partners. Clinical integration is the client’s responsibility. Our role is to develop the AI for the medical imaging component in their product. Getting that product to market is their domain.

How do you see AI transforming radiology and pathology in the next 5–10 years?

AI will continue to take over tasks in radiology and pathology. The market is already consolidating around platform-based solutions. And yet AI development in this domain never stops. New scanners and new and more imaging data, new clinical insights, new patient populations – a deployed model needs to be monitored, updated, and sometimes rebuilt from scratch. That means there will always be demand for people who know how to develop these systems. That is exactly what XDMD is here for.

What if your sensor could heal itself, bend around your body and feel the world the way human skin does?

That’s exactly what Paula Montes Jiménez, biomedical engineer with a Master´s in Medical Device Design, is working on at Cybosense.

Current biosensors are rigid, toxic, expensive and can only detect a handful of parameters at a time; a fundamental bottleneck for the future of security, defence and precision agriculture.

Cybosense, a deep-tech spin-out from the DTU – Technical University of Denmark and with an office here at UtrechtInc, is flipping the script with AI-enabled, skin-inspired living electronic materials. Their sensors are:

🧬 Self-healing & adaptive
📍 Printable directly on skin
🌊 Wearable in motion & underwater
⚡ Multi-modal – sensing pressure, temperature, pH, and biomolecules simultaneously

This is what the next generation of sensing looks like; a material that lives with you.

👀 Watch the video, where Paula breaks this down for you!

Cybosense

Lumox won the NL Startup Competition. ✨

The competition was held last week at Upstream Festival in Rotterdam, organized by Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship, one of the biggest startup competitions in the Netherlands, bringing together early-stage ventures from across the country. They will head to the Silicon Valley to visit Draper University.

Lumox is developing a cancer treatment that uses llama-derived nanobodies to deliver light-activatable drugs directly to tumor cells, then activates them with harmless light. Cancer cells destroyed. Healthy tissue spared. No disfiguring surgery. They are starting with head and neck cancer, where patients often face devastating treatment options or none at all.

This is the work of Irati Beltrán Hernández and Sebas Pronk. Years of research, preclinical validation, and real results in the veterinary clinic.

Lumox has been part of UtrechtInc´s community for a couple of years already.

Thank you Erasmus Entreprise and everyone at Upstream Festival for creating a space where science like this gets seen.

ObsessLess – Building the Digital Support Layer for OCD

The Problem

OCD is one of the most disabling mental health conditions in the world, and one of the most misunderstood. In Europe alone, around 9 million adults live with active OCD each year. For many of them, it affects work, relationships, sleep, and confidence through intrusive thoughts, compulsions, avoidance, rumination, reassurance-seeking, checking, and the constant need to feel certain. The cost is enormous, estimated at €45 to €60 billion annually across Europe, but most of that burden doesn’t land inside healthcare systems. It falls on people, their families, employers, and caregivers.

People are already trying to get help. Out-of-pocket OCD support in Europe is estimated at €9 to €13 billion per year. Yet around 60% of people with active OCD received no mental health treatment in the past year. OCD care is too slow, too expensive, and too far removed from daily life.

The Solution

ObsessLess is building the digital support layer for OCD, not to replace therapy, but to make support available in the moments the current system can’t reach: before a first appointment, between sessions, after a trigger hits and the next session is still two weeks away.

Why Now?

Many people start searching for answers long before they ever reach a therapist. They look things up late at night, find communities, try to figure out quietly what is happening to them. Meanwhile healthcare systems are under more pressure than ever, specialist OCD care is hard to access, and many people never reach the right support at all. New technology makes it possible to reach people earlier and more continuously, at home, on waiting lists, between sessions, and in daily life.

What Makes ObsessLess Unique?

For many people with OCD, the first barrier is shame. Intrusive thoughts can feel confusing, embarrassing, or impossible to explain, and many people stay silent for months or years before asking for help. ObsessLess starts there, meeting people where they actually are: searching online, sitting on waiting lists, managing triggers alone. When someone finally understands what they’re dealing with, useful support should not be months/years away.

Meet the Team

Mourice Schuurmans is Co-Founder and CEO. He has 8+ years of experience building digital products, has lived with severe OCD himself, and built a 20K+ OCD advocacy community from scratch. He is also a member of the IOCDF AI Special Interest Group.

Adrian Pavel is Co-Founder and CTO, with 12+ years of experience in enterprise and consumer software, including previous roles at Shell and SoftVision.

Dr. Marina Gershkovich, PhD, ABPP, is Founding Clinical Advisor, a board-certified clinical psychologist and OCD researcher, formerly at Columbia University Medical Center’s Center for OCD and Related Disorders, with 15+ publications spanning OCD, telehealth, and mobile-app-supported care.

Follow ObsessLess on LinkedIn or visit obsessless.com to learn more.