“With the 1.1 billion National Growth Fund Program on the horizon, we are very excited about the addition of Lex Kerssemakers to our supervisory board. His strong automotive expertise fits perfectly with our goal to understand the dynamics of the automotive industry with the aim to develop world-class application technology,” states René Penning de Vries, chairman of the supervisory board of PhotonDelta, the Dutch community of investors, tech companies, and end-users innovating next generation solutions in integrated photonics.

Lex’s experience in the automotive industry, alongside his track record in building up an ecosystem, made him an ideal member of the supervisory board for PhotonDelta. A key piece of his strategy is to ensure a value chain behind the product so that it does not simply become a commodity. From a European perspective, Lex sees it as vital that the region not only asserts its position as a high-tech developer – but also as a manufacturer.

A veteran of the automotive industry for over 35 years, Lex Kerssemakers joined Volvo early on – starting out in the Netherlands before moving to a variety of countries such as Germany, Belgium, Sweden, the UK, and the US where he was CEO for the Americas. In fact, this is the first time he’s been back in the Netherlands in more than thirty years.

During his time at Volvo the company had to reinvent itself multiple times from both engineering and commercial perspectives. With Volvo’s reputation for safety in a relatively conservative industry, he quickly learned the importance of investment in emerging technologies. That is continued forward to this day, where the focus is now on autonomous driving vehicles.

“At Volvo, we started to work with lidar systems in cars, and the potential of autonomous driving vehicles. The key question was how is that transformation going to happen? That’s when I started reading about integrated photonics,” Kerssemakers explains.