Casper is a seasoned investor across all three of BVP’s verticals and has supported multiple companies on their journey from startup to scale-up and exit, both as a shareholder and as a board member. He gets excited about smart solutions for people’s well-being and for the planet we live on. At the same time, he realizes that such solutions only make it to the market if the team is able to execute and the consortium is aligned.

Casper built his broad background at DSM (now dsm-firmenich) in international commercial roles, always with an innovation element, as well as in DSM’s corporate venturing unit. He then co-founded Brightlands Venture Partners, pioneering ecosystem investing in sustainable chemistry and health.

As an early-stage investor, he established strong relationships with entrepreneurs, with mutual trust as an essential foundation for surviving the periods of despair common in startup life. Several of his portfolio companies have achieved successful exits and have become world leaders.

In his career, Casper became interested in decision-making processes and was inspired by the work of Kahneman and others on how our brain decides, prone to biases, disturbed by noise, and happy when nudged. Outside of work, Casper co-founded a member-owned organic farm in 2022, contributing to community building, short supply chains, and food from healthy soil. He also enjoys spending time with family and friends, singing, cycling, reading, and hiking.

Although he is sometimes mistaken for an engineer, Casper studied Business Economics at Tilburg University (the Netherlands) and Indiana University (Bloomington, USA).