FOAK Ecosystem Day 2025

This is the first edition of FOAK Ecosystem Day, building on years of Founder & CEO Dinners and Funding the Future evenings. Until now, those events happened separately – founders on one night, investors on another. With the FOAK Ecosystem Day, we’re finally bringing everyone into the same room: a full day where the whole community can compare notes, learn from each other and ask the questions that never fit in a panel.

The day combines keynotes, small-group sessions and founder-only conversations on the topics that make or break FOAK projects, such as Financing, Offtake, Regulation, Mental health and Engineering & operations. Between sessions, there’s time to connect, work or quietly catch your breath. We close with the second edition of FuckUp Nights: What the FOAK?!, where founders and investors share what they learned the hard way.

FOAK Ecosystem Day is invite-only during the day. If you’d like to attend or request an invitation, you can do so via Eventbrite. Please note that daytime participation is curated to ensure the right mix of founders, investors and ecosystem partners. Registrations outside the target group may not be accepted. Questions? Feel free to send an email to William Vuijk, Circular Factory community lead, via w.vuijk@bluecity.nl.

Please note, when reserving a ticket:

• register for one session per break-out round.
• indicate whether you will be staying for dinner.
• indicate whether you will need a place to work.
• keep in mind registration for Fuckup Nights must be done separately via this link

Program

13:00 – 13:30 — Arrival & coffee

13:30 – 14:30 — Opening & keynotes by Invest-NL and Unilever

1. The Need for First-of-a-Kind: Investing beyond the valley of death Rinke Zonneveld (InvestNL)
Why FOAK projects are essential — and why they’re tough to fund. What systemic steps can improve the investment climate, and what Draghi’s recommendations mean for Dutch and European circular manufacturing.

2. How to Collaborate with Corporates Thor Tummers (Unilever)
What real collaboration between startups and corporates takes — around pace, expectations and the realities of co-developing FOAK plants.

14:45 – 16:00 — Breakout sessions

1.1 Scaling Green Chemistry… Rethinking the Approach
What three years of data and practice tell us about scale-up patterns in green chemistry - and how looking differently opens new pathways.

With Gijs van de Molengraft (GRITD) and Anieke Wierenga (Scale-up Practitioners).

1.2 Mental health under pressure
A safe space for founders to talk openly about the emotional, financial and personal load of FOAK scale-up, and share real strategies for staying balanced. Circular entrepreneurship is tough; emotionally, financially, and physically. Yet conversations about the mental load of building and leading a first-of-a-kind company are still rare. This session breaks that taboo by focusing on the founder as a person, not just as a business leader. Through shared stories and honest dialogue, we’ll explore what it takes to sustain motivation and wellbeing while driving the circular transition forward.

1.3 Fastlane to First-of-a-Kind: How Regulation Can Enable Innovation
Regulation as an enabler, not a bottleneck - with a hands-on exercise to design your own “fastlane” for FOAK innovation. Scaling a cleantech innovation from prototype to demonstration scale is often described as the “valley of death.” The challenges are rarely technical, they’re regulatory.

This session explores how the Benelux region can become a “fastlane for first-of-a-kind” innovations by aligning business, finance, and policy actors. We’ll discuss examples of regulatory sandboxes, smart permitting, and collaborative frameworks from other regions, and participants will design their own fastlane solution for a real-world innovation challenge.

With Sacha Muller en Willem van Dommelen (Cleantech for Benelux)

16:00 – 16:30 — Networking carousel

Meet experts on public funding, legal, tax and IP - or simply grab a coffee and connect.

16:30 – 17:45 — Breakout sessions

2.1 Scaling Green Chemistry… Rethinking Your Own Case
A practical follow-up to session 1.1, applying the new lens to your own project. Please note: you’ll be working with the methods and perspectives introduced in the first session, so 2.1 is only available to participants who join 1.1.

2.2 Offtake Unlocked: Strengthening Market Commitment Together
A founder-only session on what actually works in offtake negotiations - and what makes them fall apart. Securing offtake agreements remains one of the toughest challenges for circular and biobased startups. Without market certainty, financing a first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plant becomes nearly impossible.

In this founder-focused session, we create a safe space to openly discuss the realities of building trust and securing demand. What makes offtake negotiations so complex? How have others approached it? And how can we, as a community, develop shared strategies or formats to make the process easier? Together, we’ll explore how founders can strengthen market commitment and what’s needed to move from promising conversations to concrete contracts.

With: Lindy Hensen (Tekkoo) and InvestNL

2.3 AI in FOAKs
Practical applications of AI in first-of-a-kind projects - from process optimisation to predictive maintenance. In this interactive breakout, we will explore how AI can support every stage of the circular journey: from early ideas to pioneering efforts, from pilots to full-scale implementation. Through practical examples, we’ll discuss how AI can help address shared challenges and uncover opportunities to learn from each other and move the circular transition forward.

With: Ewald Euser (Maatkwadraat)

18:00 – 19:00 — Dinner & informal networking

19:00 – 20:30 — FuckUp Night: What the FOAK?! edition 2

Fuckup Nights is back! During this second edition of FuckUp Nights, four members of the circular ecosystem will take the stage to share their story about an epic fuckup encountered while building a First-of-a-Kind factory. No slides. Just real stories about what went wrong, and what they’d do differently next time. (registration for this event needs to be done seperately, via this link: https://www.eventbrite.nl/e/fuckup-nights-vol-20-what-the-foak-tickets-1857366656669