Christian Rood

Christian Rood is the co-founder and CEO of LeydenJar Technologies, a Dutch deep-tech company he started with Gabriel de Scheemaker in April 2016. LeydenJar is a spin-out built around a silane PECVD process—originally developed at the Dutch research institute ECN/TNO—for manufacturing a battery anode made of 100% pure silicon. The technology is aimed at lithium-ion batteries with materially higher energy density (LeydenJar cites figures of up to ~50–70% more), faster charging (under ~12 minutes), and significantly lower CO₂ emissions in production. Rood has described achieving an early critical milestone within 18 months on roughly €300,000 of initial funding: demonstrating a large silicon-anode cell surviving over 100 cycles, which attracted interest from major consumer-electronics and automotive players.

Before founding LeydenJar, Rood built a career in venture investing and corporate finance. He worked as an investment banker at ABN AMRO covering the healthcare industry (medical technology and healthcare services), where he originated and executed M&A transactions and related financings, and earlier served as an investment manager at KRC Capital, a private equity fund active in fashion, leisure, and real estate. He also founded Road to Value B.V. in January 2009, reflecting his background in high-tech venturing and investments.

On the education side, Rood holds an MSc in Business from Erasmus University (Rotterdam) and an executive MBA from IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland.

As an angel investor, Rood is best documented for backing OrgaNext Research, a company in the drug-discovery space (his earliest recorded angel investment, dating to around 2009). His investor profile is tightly linked to his own operator experience: he has raised well over €40 million into LeydenJar across equity, grants, loans, and customer funding, welcoming institutional shareholders including YARD ENERGY, Invest-NL, and Dutch pension fund ABP.

• Invests at the seed / early stage, consistent with the "Seed Round" classification, and comes at deals with an operator's eye for deep-tech and hard-science ventures.
• Strong personal domain in energy storage/batteries and materials science (via LeydenJar), plus early-stage life sciences exposure (OrgaNext Research, drug discovery).
• Believes founders must think like investors: "approach this creation from an investor point of view," stressing that you must show an investor you've built "something they need," rather than leading with technology for its own sake. In his words on deep tech, bluntly, "a company needs money."
• Values diverse, cross-disciplinary teams—he credits LeydenJar's progress to assembling people from many fields rather than only the battery industry, which helped them "crack some of the problems."