Investors
Investing in industrial electrification
Industrial heat is one of the largest and least-addressed sources of emissions. The barrier is not willingness — it is efficiency.
The thesis
Heat pumps can replace gas-fired industrial heat, but only where the electricity bill and the grid connection make the business case close. Every point of COP moves that line. The expansion valve is the one component in every vapour-compression cycle that produces nothing, and the work it destroys grows with the temperature lift — exactly where industrial heat pumps operate. Recovering it is a component-level upgrade to an installed base, not a new kind of plant.
Expantec sells that component to heat pump OEMs and to owners of existing installations, as a retrofit. The device is designed for industrial heat pumps from roughly 100 kW thermal capacity.
Traction
- Sept 2024
Company founded in Delft by Sake Smits and Ryan Dillmann.
- Mar 2025
Proof-of-concept of the Multiphase Pressure Exchanger built and successfully tested.
- June 2025
Winner of the TU Delft Impact Contest (€10,000).
- Sept 2025
Selected for the YES!Delft Validation Batch; co-founders full-time.
- Oct 2025
Patent application filed with Arnold & Siedsma.
- Nov 2025
€240,000 raised from ASIF Ventures and TN Ventures.
- July 2026
Seven-month pilot on a retrofitted office heat pump at The Green Village completed with partners IBK and Warmtebouw. Case.
Backers and supporters
Expantec is backed by ASIF Ventures and TN Ventures, and supported by YES!Delft, Delft Enterprises (Student Entrepreneurship Voucher), the TU Delft Impact Contest and the Philips Innovation Award, where the team reached the Rough Diamond League semi-finals in 2025.
The team
Two co-founders, a control engineer and a physicist, all in Delft. Meet them.
Request the investor deck
E-mail us with your fund and focus and we will send the current deck and a data-room invitation.