CEO – Paul Hedges brings wide experience in the commercialisation of new technologies. Paul started his career in ITT research (STL) developing new technologies for optics and semiconductor processing and in general management roles (Perkin Elmer, Ericsson);since he has taken many high technology companies from conception through to market. Paul is an experienced business leader with deep insight into building new technology companies from the ground up and has managed global concerns in communications and semiconductors. Paul co-founded ANL in 2012 together with Joost and Richard.

CTO – Dr Richard van Rijn obtained his PhD (2012) and cum laude MSc (2007) in physics from Leiden University. He performed PhD research at Leiden and at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. He is (co-)author of many peer reviewed scientific articles in applied physics and physical chemistry and has an h-index of 13. After his PhD, he returned to Leiden to work on scaling up graphene growth and shortly after co-founded ANL.

CFO – Sjoerd van Balen MSc ACMA CGMA has worked for over 30 years in various financial roles across several industries. Sjoerd worked 11 years for AT&T-Lucent as financial controller, project controller and financial planning manager in UK-Ireland, The Netherlands and Saudi Arabia. He was the CFO for a Saudi Arabian-based system integrator (a Lucent customer) and became the CFO of Cavendish Kinetics, a high-tech start up in Cambridge/Den Bosch from 2002 until 2006. From there he joined Oracle in Ireland as FP&A manager and worked as FD for American-based company Checkpoint Systems and as a regional FD for Bilfinger & Dussmann in the UAE.

Prof. Dr. Joost Frenken serves as an advisor and is a co-founder together with Paul and Richard. Joost is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Science and Engineering of the University of Groningen and was previously Director of the Advanced Research Centre for Nanolithography in Amsterdam.