A Decade of Advancement: Honoring Our Early Customers

I have never made a habit of posting on LinkedIn. However, as Delmic has grown and the company is developing in new directions, I wanted to break that habit. Before we look forward, I want to look back on our journey - particularly the role the microscopy community has played in our development.

Over a few posts, I want to share some of our learnings and insights as well as some of our highs and lows over the more than ten years that we have been in the business.

Looking back, it's clear that Delmic's approach to product development has always been unique. Instead of the traditional in-house development, we've always co-developed with our customers. This approach is in our DNA - Delmic is an academic spin-off, and the prototype of our first product, the SECOM, was a collaboration with 荷兰代尔夫特理工大学 . This approach has been key to getting our business started, and would not have been possible without a community of users willing to take a chance on something new.?

We rarely mention it, but what we do is incredibly difficult. The systems we make are highly complex—they combine vacuum technology with nanoscale positioning and advanced optics. While they should deliver cutting-edge results, they should also be robust enough to ensure our users can reliably get data out. It's no surprise there are so few startup companies in electron microscopy—almost all our competitors are multi-billion-dollar companies.

We've come far on our journey - though we want to travel much farther still! - but our journey wouldn't have been possible without our early customers. For the SECOM, the group of Johan Hofkens at 比利时荷语天主教鲁汶大学 , Lucy Collinson at CRUK ( now at the Crick) and Ben Giepmans at the UMCG helped us define the first products. They all had the opportunity to go with more established competitors, but trusted us to to get the job done.

When we started making the SPARC, Mikael K?ll and Ruggero Verre at Gothenburg took a huge chance on us. Joanne Etheridge and Amelia Liu bought one of the first SPARC systems ever made, trusting us to get the system right and service it in Australia.

Our valued customers, to whom I dedicate Delmic's success, had unique traits for which we are grateful to this day—they had unique ideas, a willingness to take a chance on a new company, and openness about their needs. They provided invaluable feedback, trusting us to execute it. Over time, they taught us to think broadly—not only about our product on its own, but as part of a bigger picture - taking into account the impact on their SEMs, the scalability of their workflows, and software integration. Their insights have been crucial in shaping our products.

As I’ll explain later, we have used the same co-development approach again for our Cryo and FAST EM products. Doing development this way is risky - both for us and our customers. Early products never work as intended, software is unstable, and sometimes products don't even run at all in the early days. The journey has not always been smooth, and I've often worried that we asked too much of these early customers who took such a huge risk. Over time, however, I believe we have shown that we always follow through. Our systems became stable and robust over time and started delivering real value. This has always been a two-way street. Delmic has benefited from early customer contact, but those early customers benefited too - they were able to steer our product roadmap and have often used our system to be the first to publish on a key topic. In the end, they also did the community a huge service by making sure that customers who were later to adopt received great products that were field-tested.

Today, as Delmic’s customer base is approaching two hundred sites, I can’t help but appreciate the patience and perseverance of these early adopters. Though all our customers have been crucial in shaping and growing the business, our first customer really set us on our journey. Johan Hofkens and Maarten Roeffaers took a chance on Delmic when the concept of the SECOM was not much more than one (badly working) prototype at TU Delft and a (long) PowerPoint explaining what we thought we could do. Together with their expertise in optical microscopy, we built a unique, single-molecule detection SECOM. They also provided key insights into designing a better stage and a more robust optical design - with thanks to Kris Janssen in particular - which ultimately led to the launch of the SECOM V2, the platform that is still in use today. Despite the initial frustrations with the SECOM, the group always supported us, not only upgrading their SECOM V1 to a V2 but also buying a second SECOM, which we made into a confocal microscope.?

Electron microscopy is an interesting field - the average person on the street has no idea what an electron microscope looks like or what it does. Yet the results from electron microscopy touch all of our daily lives - from medicine to our smartphones' components. I have always felt proud and lucky to be a part of this field, but more than anything I am grateful for all the people who took a chance on us throughout the years.? I’ll share more of our journey in later posts, as well as giving some glimpses into the future. I look forward to keeping you informed and involved in our exciting developments!