4TU Startups

Maxairea, a deep-tech spin-off from WUR, boosts heating, ventilation and air conditioning efficiency and design flexibility with a regenerative CO₂ filter proven across 5,000+ operating hours and 3,000 regeneration cycles. The technology cuts energy use, costs and carbon footprints while improving indoor air quality; pilot deployments are under way at TU Delft’s Green Village.

Sproutfull enables the food industry to measure and manage environmental impacts through collaborative Life Cycle Assessments, currently footprinting 17,000 dairy farmers — including 45% of all UK dairy farms — to deliver precise, supply chain-wide sustainability insights to farmers and food manufacturers.

FOTONIQ’s innovative PAR+ coating boosts yield and efficiency while reducing CO2 and food loss by optimizing greenhouse performance with patented diffuse light technology. Applied to glass greenhouses, it ensures even light and heat distribution, lowers peak temperatures, and reduces the need for screening and ventilation — cutting energy use and humidity loss.

Mizusense develops an affordable and biodegradable wireless soil sensor. It uses cutting-edge printed transistor technology and a user-friendly digitalization platform to gather and analyse sensor data.

PATS is a Dutch tech company combining smart hardware and AI-driven software to automate pest insect monitoring and control in greenhouses. It helps growers cut pesticide use, reduce labour, and act precisely in time. The technology strengthens biological control, enabling a sustainable shift away from synthetic pesticides.

Ecomoni makes the work of ecologists scalable with smart sensors that automatically identify and count species. By automating time-consuming fieldwork, ecologists can monitor more locations while maintaining high quality. This ensures that the growing need for biodiversity monitoring remains efficient, continuous, and well-supported — exactly what’s needed to drive nature restoration forward.

Gravity Gardens integrates advanced space-derived technologies into agriculture to enhance early crop development. This approach builds resilience from the start, reducing vulnerability to environmental stressors, improving yields, and lowering input costs — delivering practical innovation where farmers need it most: at the beginning.

Cano-ela is a food tech company that aims to remove refined ingredients from the food supply chain by processing oil-rich seeds in a new way. A unique patented process allows extraction of innovative ingredients from seeds. This enables food companies to create the next generation of plant-based foods, which are more natural and sustainable.