I’m Merlijn. I make deep tech sound human.

In 2015 I joined NXP as an intern. A few weeks later the CEO announced an $11.8bn merger with Freescale and I was on a plane to Austin. I stayed five years and ended up in coordinating global communications through two of the biggest deals the chip industry has seen. The second was Qualcomm’s $47bn takeover of NXP, two years of headlines for a deal that in the end never closed.

Later I joined Axelera AI. A young edge AI chip company with brilliant engineers and no story. I built the marketing function and narrative from scratch. Got it into Bloomberg, the FT, Reuters, the New York Times and TechCrunch. Opened a $100M+ pipeline. Supported $200M+ in funding. Pretty cool, even though I say so myself.

Wherever I worked, the norm seemed to be “revolutionary architecture with heterogeneous capabilities”. It just seems hard-wired in deep tech. Yes, your technology is brilliant and extremely complex. Yes, most of the time you have 10+ years before your product goes to market. But NO. Your customers shouldn’t need a PhD to understand what you do.

So the past years I went looking for whether this is really the case. And yes. Hundreds of deep tech websites and flyers later, it’s all the same.

The technology is brilliant. But the story isn’t.

I started in late 2025 as a freelancer under the brand “Merlijn Consultancy”. Because at the same time I had the idea to work as a sound engineer under “Merlijn Audio”, and that was just the easy name to go for.

Now, a year later, I’m convinced the world needs to get to know the best technology. And deep tech needs help explaining it.

Every marketing pitch I’ve ever received promised more. More reach. More content. More leads. More slides. I wanted a name that promised less. Yes. A marketing expert selling less. Like a restaurant promising smaller portions. Hear me out.

Deep tech rarely has too little information. I’m sure you know. It has too much. Years of engineering, patents, benchmarks, roadmaps. A team that understands every atom of it.

But then, someone asks: “So what do you actually do?”

And the answer takes forty-five minutes, with slides and a whiteboard.

This should be compressed. Just like information is, in bits. A bit is the smallest unit of digital information. One yes or no. Since Claude Shannon wrote the maths in 1948, engineers have chased the same thing: say it with fewer bits, lose nothing that matters.

They call it compression. And that is exactly what marketing needs.

Anyone can add. Another channel, another campaign, another fifty-slide strategy deck. The hard part is knowing which detail your customer needs, which proof makes it believable, and what you can safely leave on the floor.

Get that right and the story gets shorter. And bigger. At the same time.

FewerBits. Bigger Story. Nothing Lost.

Right now I’m privileged enough to work with the smartest minds in the deep tech scene. I’ve got experience across semiconductors, AI, energy and quantum. Since October 2026 I’m renting an office at High Tech Campus Eindhoven, surrounded by the smart people I get excited working with and learning from.

Outside work, you’ll find me with my fiancée Ingrid and my son Chase. Usually outdoors. Mountain biking (as far as you can call the Dutch hills mountains), hiking, anything that gets me outside. I get my creative juices flowing making music, and I’m enrolled in a Sound Engineering and Music Production course until 2027.

Want to learn more about me professionally? My LinkedIn has all the details.

Wanna go for a walk around campus? Hit me up!

Don’t be a stranger. Speak soon,
Merlijn