Wageningen Entrepreneurship Grant

A new application round will start up in January 2026. Please keep an eye on this webpage for more information.

Make sure that you meet the criteria before applying.

Here are the key dates and deadlines for 2025:

Registration deadline: February 24, 2025 (midnight)

Announcement semi-finalists: February 26, 2025

If you have been selected for the semi-finals, the following dates are important:

Preparation session: t.b.a.

Semi final: March 5, 2025

Final: May 21, 2025

Investor: Heleen van Poecke

Non-executive director: Jacqueline Pieters

AgTech investor: Peter Arensman

Food innovation expert: Marian Geluk

The instigators of the Wageningen Entrepreneurship Grant are Marcel van Poecke and his daughter Heleen. Marcel van Poecke graduated in 1985 from Wageningen University & Research with a masters in Forestry. "My education at WUR has laid the foundation for entrepreneurship, a creative mind and a broad, international view on society", says Van Poecke; Ingredients that contributed to his succesful entrepreneurship, among which his company AtlasInvest. According to his daughter Heleen, who studied Business Administration at Harvard, you do not only owe your success to yourself, but also to the support of the people around you and the education you received. Van Poecke therefore wanted to give back to his alma mater, and currently does so as a member of the Wageningen Ambassadors, a group of successful alumni who support education and research at WUR.

Besides supporting a variety of projects, a new priority of WUR caught his attention: stimulating entrepreneurship among students and young researchers. In the US, Heleen saw that the link between American universities and businesses is more developed than in The Netherlands, and that investments in start-ups are much more common. In The Nederlands, most universities focus almost completely on the academic side, and offer less extracurricular opportunities to prepare students for a career in business; reason enough for father and daughter to contribute to this priority of WUR.

Together with University Fund Wageningen and Starthub Wageningen, Marcel and Heleen developed a grant for student entrepreneurs: the AtlasInvest Entrepreneurship Grant. Through a pitch competition, student entrepreneurs can pitch their creative ideas to a jury and win start-up capital to get their enterprise off the ground. According to Heleen, the start-up capital is the hardest to obtain. "This platform should give students the feeling that they can be bold and just go for it. The basis of entrepreneurship, furthermore, is using your network. Dare to ask!", says Heleen. That is why networking with other participants, the audience, panel members and the jury is central in the grant programme. Even if participants cannot obtain that start-up capital, this grant can thus really offer them important experiences. In 2025, the grant was renamed into the Wageningen Entrepreneurship Grant.