--- title: "Jeroen Hoet on eyeo B.V.'s Sensor Breakthrough" date: 2026-09-29T08:20:39Z modified: 2026-09-30T08:23:11Z permalink: "https://www.htgf.de/en/jeroen-hoet-on-eyeo-b-v-s-sensor-breakthrough/" type: post status: publish excerpt: "" wpid: 133676 categories: - Story language: - English post_translations: - pll_6aba685c06e68 featured_image: "https://www.htgf.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Eyeo105257-1.jpg" timestamp: 2026-09-30T08:23:11Z tags: - Story - English - pll_6aba685c06e68 --- # “We’re Fixing the Cause, Not the Symptom” – Jeroen Hoet on eyeo B.V.’s Sensor Breakthrough ****Interview with Jeroen Hoet, Co-Founder and CEO of eyeo B.V.**** **Every camera sensor in the world shares the same decades-old limitation. Why has there been so little fundamental progress in sensor development for so long, and what made it possible for you to finally crack it?** Every camera sensor works the same way. In front of each pixel sits a tiny red, green or blue color filter that only lets through the color it is tuned for and blocks the rest. These filters let the sensor understand color, but they also absorb 70% of the light before it even reaches the pixel. Sensor makers have made real improvements around that filter over the decades: sensors got faster, smaller, more sensitive, and easier to manufacture at scale. All of that progress happened around the filter, while the filter itself stayed mostly unchanged since it was first introduced over 50 years ago. What changed for us began with research that started at imec in 2018. Their research demonstrated the successful use of vertical waveguide nanostructures to extract color information without filters and at sub-diffraction level. Essentially, instead of filtering light, we could now split it: catching all the light and separating it into its colors, guiding every photon directly to the pixel where it belongs. Imec’s prototyping capability in its own advanced facilities was a key element in getting there. Ultimately, it was the combination of expertise across photonics, imaging, and color science, combined with the ability to prototype in an in-house CMOS fab, and on top of that the ability to fundamentally rethink color imaging instead of just looking for yet another improvement to the filter, that made the difference. We are now further building on this research and converting it into products. Backed by 26 patents, the eyeo NCOS® platform triples light sensitivity and breaks resolution limits. This breakthrough approach unlocks picture quality, color accuracy, resolution, and cost efficiency, which was never-before possible. Cracking this took the right research, the right timing, and a team willing to commit fully to a new approach. ![](https://www.htgf.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Eyeo105257-1-1620x1080.jpg) Team of eyeo B.V. (Photo: eyeo B.V) **From founding the company end of 2024 to a €40 million Series A in 2026: what was the most challenging phase, and how did you navigate it?** The hardest phase was moving from a strong scientific breakthrough to a company that customers, partners, and investors could trust to deliver it at real scale. The technology had been proven in a research setting, but turning it into a manufacturable product, building manufacturing partnerships, and hiring a team with deep semiconductor and optics expertise all had to happen together, while proving our value to very different industries at the same time. We got through this first stage by staying close to our early investors, including HTGF, who understands deeply what it takes to get such an ambitious project off the ground. We also stayed disciplined about sequencing our work: proving the core technology first, then expanding step by step into new industries. In a very short timeframe, we made the transition from a research to a time-to-market-driven product company, with a strategic product roadmap and a clear company vision. That discipline is what let us walk into our Series A with real technical and commercial proof behind us. **How does the combination of continued support from existing investors and a new investor shape your ability to scale?** Having our existing investors continue to support us matters a great deal. It means the people who have watched us closely since our earliest days, who have seen the technology mature and the team grow, still believe strongly in where we are headed. Bringing in Innovation Industries as our new lead investor adds a partner with deep experience helping technology companies scale, along with a network that opens doors we could not reach on our own. Together, this gives us both stability and momentum: capital and confidence from people who know us best, and fresh expertise and connections from a partner focused exactly on this growth stage. It lets us scale manufacturing, grow our team, and move faster into our priority markets, with all of our investors sharing the same long-term view. **With the Series A closed, what are the most important things you need to get right in the next phase?** Our priority now is proving that our sensors deliver real, repeatable value at scale. We are taking a staged approach across our core markets: smart city, industrial inspection, physical AI, automotive, drones, XR, and mobile. The concrete next step is our Evaluation Kit, which we will release to a select group of Tier 1 customers that will test our sensors directly in their own systems. This will let them fully validate internally that the performance boost matches what we promised. From there, the goal is to move into the release of our first commercial sensors, so that partners who have validated the technology with the Evaluation Kit can move straight into production. Alongside that, we will keep on scaling our manufacturing partnerships so we can deliver reliably at production level, and keep growing our team across engineering, sales, and operations to match the pace our customers expect. We are also developing our next-generation sensor to accelerate the product roadmap and accommodate the demand. Getting these things right over the next year and a half sets the foundation for us to become the standard choice for next-generation imaging. **HTGF joined as a seed investor at a very early stage. What did that concretely enable?** HTGF’s seed investment came in when we were still proving that a laboratory breakthrough could become a real company. Concretely, it gave us the capital to build our first team, set up our sensor design center in Antwerp, and start the patent work that now protects twenty-six innovations built on the original research. Just as important, HTGF’s experience with deep-tech companies provided us critical guidance on governance, hiring, and investor relations. Their network also opened early conversations with partners and investors that helped position us well ahead of our Series A. HTGF took an early risk on a technology that had only just left the lab, and it contributed greatly to bringing our company to its next stage of development. ![](https://www.htgf.de/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/eyeo-color-splitter-vs-color-filter-1920x960.jpg) _eyeo B.V. color splitter vs. traditional color filter_ **Your mission is to give every device perfect vision. Looking ahead five years, what concrete milestone would tell you that you’ve truly delivered on that promise?** Five years from now, „eyeo inside“ becomes a quality badge people look for. The ultimate success is when customers choose a device because it has an eyeo sensor in it. Concretely, that means smart city systems that keep seeing clearly in the most challenging conditions, protecting life when it matters most. Inspection systems that catch defects currently missed. Physical AI and robots that finally see well enough to act autonomously on what they sense. New medical devices and life-saving procedures that are now compact enough or sensitive enough to reveal what used to be invisible. Cars that see danger in time to avoid it. And the end of missed memories: phone cameras that finally shoot perfect pictures even in the darkest conditions, in the smallest form factors, even when hidden behind the screen. When a handful of major device makers across these categories have adopted our sensors as their imaging foundation, and our technology is running in millions of units in the field, that will tell me we have genuinely delivered. The deeper milestone is what happens in engineers‘ heads: when someone designing a new camera reaches for our sensors as the obvious first choice, we will have changed how the industry thinks about vision itself. We will stand as a leading independent global image sensor company out of Europe, delivering on our vision to advance humanity with perfect visual intelligence. **Thanks for the insights**!