Delmic Brand Guidelines: A 2010 Delft Spin-Off Automating Electron Microscopy

Physicists from Delft and Amsterdam.

Delmic is a microscopy company in Delft, in the Netherlands. A TU Delft news article of April 2021 places it in the city’s long association with microscopy — Antonie van Leeuwenhoek built his own microscopes there in the 17th century — and says the company has carried that tradition on since 2010, the year the idea of setting it up arose. Silicon Canals, reporting in April 2023, also gives 2010 and names five founders: Albert Polman, Christiaan Zonnevylle, Jacob Hoogenboom, Sander den Hoedt and Pieter Kruit.

The founders came from research. Hoogenboom, an associate professor in TU Delft’s Faculty of Applied Sciences, told the university that the Netherlands had a strong reputation in microscopy that until then had rarely turned into new businesses, and that a large manufacturer would often see no commercial case for small, innovative products. Delmic was set up to serve niche audiences within microscopy. The university was not convinced at first that a market existed, he said: “Because TU Delft was initially also sceptical, we founded Delmic ourselves.” The founders took over a first patent application, support from the Dutch research council NWO followed, and the company grew steadily.

Its early work came out of two laboratories. In the company’s words, quoted by Silicon Canals, its first successes grew from collaborations with the Charged Particle Optics group at Delft University of Technology and with AMOLF, the NWO physics institute in Amsterdam. The Dutch technology weekly Bits&Chips still described Delmic as a TU Delft spin-off in August 2026.

Light and electrons in one instrument.

The first product, TU Delft said, combined an electron microscope with a fluorescence light microscope. Hoogenboom explained the idea: an electron microscope resolves much finer detail than an ordinary light microscope, while fluorescent dyes attached to specific proteins let researchers light up where those proteins sit; with both, tissue can be examined in fine detail while chosen molecules are made visible. The market for such instruments, he added, was small and made up mainly of universities and teaching hospitals.

That line of work became SECOM, a correlative light and electron microscopy system, and the partnership with AMOLF produced the SPARC Spectral cathodoluminescence detector, according to the company statement quoted by Silicon Canals. Cathodoluminescence, as Bits&Chips explained in 2026, means bombarding a material with electrons and analysing the light it gives off — a way to examine materials at the nanoscale and look for defects in semiconductors and chips.

Delmic lists awards for most of its main products. The company says SECOM won a Microscopy Today Innovation Award in 2013, SPARC an MRS award for innovation in materials characterisation in 2014, and its Delphi, METEOR and FAST-EM systems further Microscopy Today Innovation Awards in 2015, 2021 and 2022.

On the company’s website the range is split between life sciences and material sciences. On the life-science side, METEOR is a cryo fluorescence microscope built into a cryo-FIB/SEM system, used to guide the milling of thin lamellae for cryo-electron tomography, and FAST-EM is a scanning electron microscope for biological samples that works with 64 parallel electron beams. On the materials side sit the SPARC Spectral and SPARC Compact cathodoluminescence detectors, the JOLT detector that fits an existing detector port, and the Lab Cube for time-resolved measurements. The control software is called Odemis.

How microscope makers present themselves.

Microscopy makers sell instruments that most people never see, so their visual language is built from the lab itself. The typical product photograph shows a tall grey or white electron column rising from a chamber, set on a desk beside one or two monitors, often in a clean, evenly lit room with no clutter. The instrument is rarely shown working; instead, the screen beside it carries the result, and that result does much of the branding work.

Those results are the field’s most distinctive images. A scanning electron microscope produces greyscale pictures, and makers and their customers often add false colour afterwards to separate grains, cells or layers. Atomic-force and other scanning-probe instruments render a surface as a height map, frequently shown as a coloured relief or a three-dimensional landscape of nanoscale bumps and pits. Cathodoluminescence and Raman maps add another layer, turning light emitted or scattered by a sample into colour-coded images. Many makers credit these images to the university or institute that made them, which lets the customer’s science stand in for the company’s claims.

People appear mostly as scientists at workstations: a researcher seated at a monitor, a hand loading a sample holder, a small team gathered around a screen. Product names tend to be short and are often set in capitals, while technical sans-serif type and restrained blues, greys and blacks dominate websites and brochures.

Much of the presentation happens in person. Trade-show booths at meetings such as Microscopy & Microanalysis, the European Microscopy Congress (EMC) and the International Microscopy Congress are where new instruments are launched, demonstrated and photographed, and where application notes, webinars and customer publications carry the story the rest of the year.

Automation as the message.

Delmic’s own description of itself is about automation. Its website calls it an “integrated nanoscale imaging company” built on a “sample in, data out” philosophy, and says its mission is to make electron microscopy as accessible as DNA sequencing is today. The same page says the company works a six-hour day of focused work, calls its staff “Delmicians” and says it is present on five continents.

The company has been backed by venture investors. In April 2023 Silicon Canals reported a funding round from Value Creation Capital and the European Innovation Council Fund, with chief executive Sander den Hoedt calling them two very strong partners; the company said the money would help it advance the development and worldwide sales of its light and electron microscopy products.

Its most recent launch came at the International Microscopy Congress in Liverpool. On 31 August 2026 Delmic unveiled SPARC 3.0, Bits&Chips and SelectScience reported: the system automates the alignment and calibration of the parts that collect and analyse light from a sample, lets users save and reuse settings, and can measure several chosen areas of a sample in sequence. An upgrade lets laser light into the electron microscope so that cathodoluminescence and photoluminescence can be compared at exactly the same spot, SelectScience reported. Den Hoedt told the Dutch site IO+ that SPARC is an add-on installed on a customer’s existing electron microscope, and told SelectScience that automating these steps lets researchers measure larger series in a consistent way.

For a design guide, Delmic shows a small Dutch maker presenting itself through workflows added to other makers’ microscopes, with product names in capitals and its Delft origins at the centre of its story. Compare the Thermo Fisher and Phenom-World guides. For this guide we use Delft blue, a cathodoluminescence violet and a warm amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Delmic’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.