Building a deep-tech company in Europe is not the same as building a software startup
By Lars Langhout, Co-founder & CEO, NoPalm Ingredients · July 2026 · 5 min read
Here's what the past year actually taught me, and why the period that demanded the most work and conviction turned out to be the most important one of NoPalm Ingredients' journey.
When people ask me what it's like to build a deep-tech company, I usually give the honest answer: it's harder than you think, more demanding than you planned, but more rewarding than you imagined possible.
What I rarely get into is the specific shape of that challenge. Because it's not random. It follows a pattern, and understanding that pattern is, I think, one of the most underrated things a founder in this space can do.
The feedback loop problem
In software, you ship, you iterate, you get feedback in days. The cycle between trying something and learning whether it worked is short enough that you can run dozens of experiments in a single quarter. That speed is the superpower that makes software companies scale the way they do.
In deep-tech food ingredients, your feedback loop is measured in months. A customer trial takes time to set up, time to run, and more time to navigate their internal approval process, before anyone has bought a single kilogram. The ingredient has to pass food safety assessments, application testing, sensory evaluation, and in some cases regulatory review. All of that takes time that cannot be compressed, no matter how good your technology is.
I knew this intellectually when we started NoPalm Ingredients. Living it is a different experience entirely.
“The hard work stopped being about proving the concept. It became about building the infrastructure that lets a food manufacturer actually put your ingredient in their product and ship it to consumers.”
The moment things shifted
From the start, we had enormous traction. Almost immediately, food companies were asking us for samples, and the requests only kept coming. Interest was never the hard part. The hard part was answering that demand: scaling up to provide relevant industrial volumes takes time, no matter how strong the early pull is.
What changed over the past year, then, wasn't the appetite. It was us. We finally built enough capacity to answer "when can we get more" with a real "here it is."
That shift is subtle from the outside. From the inside, it changes everything.
It means the question is no longer whether REVÓLEO™, our first generation fat ingredients, works. It works. The fermentation science is proven, the application data is solid, and customers who've run trials have come back for more. The question now is entirely about scale, supply reliability, and regulatory pathway, the infrastructure questions that determine whether a promising ingredient becomes a market-defining one.
What "commercial scale" actually means for deep-tech
This is where I think the European deep-tech conversation often gets stuck. We are very good at funding early-stage science. We are getting better at funding growth. The middle, the transition from proven technology to commercial infrastructure, is still the hardest part to fund and the least well-understood from outside the industry. It is also exactly the valley we have spent this year working through, and the part that now sets up our next step.
For NoPalm Ingredients, that middle phase has meant: building application data across food, cosmetics, and personal care; establishing feedstock supply agreements with dairy industry partners; running production campaigns at CMOs; preparing regulatory dossiers for multiple markets; and building the team and systems that can support a commercial launch.
None of that is glamorous. Very little of it is the kind of thing that generates press coverage. All of it is what makes the difference between a company that raised money and a company that builds something lasting.
Why this year mattered more than any other
Looking back, the period that demanded the most from us, when the milestones were hard to communicate and the progress was real but not yet visible from the outside, was also the period that built the foundation everything else now rests on.
We now have pre-industrial application trials running with customers across food and cosmetics. We have a feedstock supply model that works at scale. We have a production programme that has run several campaigns. We have regulatory pathways mapped and underway for Europe and the United States.
That is the work. That is what it looks like to build a real deep-tech company, not just a compelling pitch deck.
There's something we're working toward for this autumn that I'll be sharing more about soon. It's connected to everything above: the infrastructure we've built, the customers we've validated with, and the next step of financing that scale.
If you want to follow that story, the best place to start is our newsletter. Jeroen and I write about the real work of building this company together, once a month.
Lars Langhout
Co-founder & CEO, NoPalm Ingredients Working on sustainable, circular and local palm oil's replacement since 2021.