From PhD to Acquisition: What I Learned Building RadiSurf
Nine years, six patents, 30+ countries, and one very long journey from a university lab to an international exit.
In August 2015, I walked out of my Post Doc position at Aarhus University’s Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center (iNANO) and into the most uncertain period of my life. I was about to try to turn a PhD project on polymer brush coatings into a company. I had no customers, no revenue, no employees, and — if I’m honest — only a vague idea of how a business actually works.
Nearly nine years later, RadiSurf was acquired by KCK Group, an international private equity fund, in a deal that would fund the construction of the world’s first factory for polymer brush coating agents. By then we had more than 30 international B2B clients, six patents, EIC Accelerator funding from the EU, and a team spread across multiple countries.
This is what I learned along the way.
The technology was never the problem
Our technology was genuinely groundbreaking. Polymer brushes are densely packed chains of molecules anchored to a surface, creating a kind of nano-Velcro that makes incompatible materials bond. Metals to plastics. Ceramics to polymers. Things that shouldn’t stick together, sticking together — at the molecular level.
I’d spent four and a half years on my PhD and another year as a Post Doc developing the science. I had publications. I had proof of concept. I understood the chemistry better than almost anyone.
None of that mattered when I sat across from my first potential customer.
What mattered was: can you solve my problem? How much does it cost? How long does it take? Can I try it next week? And — most importantly — why should I change my current process, which works fine, to use something I’ve never heard of?
This was my first major lesson: the gap between “technically possible” and “commercially viable” is enormous, and nobody at university prepares you for it.
Year one: everything takes longer than you think
We co-founded RadiSurf with my three PhD supervisors — Kim Daasbjerg, Steen Uttrup Pedersen, and Marcel Maciejewski — who became the founding board. The university technology transfer office helped with the initial IP framework. I became CEO by default, mostly because I was the only one willing to leave my academic position.
The first year was a brutal education. I learned that raising your first grant takes months, not weeks. That potential customers are happy to talk about your technology but very slow to actually test it. That “we’re very interested” in business language means “maybe, but probably not.” That being a CEO is 80% admin, sales, and firefighting, and 20% the actual technology work you started the company to do.
I also learned that being a scientist is actually a strong foundation for entrepreneurship — you’re trained to form hypotheses, test them, and adjust based on evidence. The problem is that scientists are also trained to be thorough, cautious, and comprehensive. Business rewards speed, decisiveness, and “good enough.”
The funding journey: a crash course
Over the following years, I became deeply familiar with the Danish and European funding landscape. We raised from nearly every major soft funding programme in Denmark — InnoBooster from Innovation Fund Denmark, industrial PhD schemes, various regional and national grants. We applied for the EU’s SME Instrument (now the EIC Accelerator) and were selected — one of only 119 companies out of 2,130 applicants. That grant alone was €1.4 million.
Here’s what I learned about fundraising:
Soft funding is a double-edged sword.
Grants are non-dilutive capital, which is fantastic. But they come with reporting requirements, milestone commitments, and the subtle danger of building your company around what gets funded rather than what the market needs.
Every funding application is a sales pitch.
Evaluators don’t care about your molecule — they care about your market, your team, and your path to revenue. I reviewed too many applications from fellow scientists who spent 80% of their proposal on the technology and 20% on the business. It should be the opposite.
Raising capital is a full-time job.
I seriously underestimated how much time fundraising would consume. At various points, I was simultaneously managing grant applications, VC conversations, and customer relationships — and none of them got the attention they deserved.
Scaling: where science meets reality
The middle years of RadiSurf were about scaling — more customers, more applications, more countries, more complexity. We went from Danish customers to European ones, then global. We set up operations to serve B2B clients in over 30 countries.
Scaling a deep-tech company is different from scaling a SaaS business. You can’t just add servers. Physical products mean supply chains, quality control, regulatory compliance, and customers who want to visit your lab before they’ll commit to a pilot.
I learned that managing complexity is the real job of a CEO. Not being the smartest person in the room about the technology — but being the person who keeps all the plates spinning while the company grows.
The acquisition
In 2021, KCK Group — a major international private equity fund — acquired RadiSurf. The deal brought substantial new capital into the company for global expansion, including building a dedicated factory in Aarhus.
I want to be transparent about this: the widely reported figures for the deal included significant new investment into the company itself. It was a transformative event for RadiSurf, but I’d caution any founder against measuring success purely in terms of exit multiples. The real value of the RadiSurf journey was the decade of learning — about technology, about business, about myself.
I stayed on as CEO until early 2024, overseeing the transition and the early stages of the new chapter.
What I’d do differently
If I could go back and talk to 2015-Mikkel, here’s what I’d tell him:
Hire for the gaps, not the skills you already have. As a scientist-CEO, I was surrounded by technical excellence. What I needed earlier was commercial experience, operational expertise, and someone who actually liked doing financial modelling.
Say no more often. Deep-tech companies get pulled in a hundred directions by customers who want custom solutions. Every “yes” to a one-off project is a “no” to building a scalable product. I said yes too many times.
Build relationships with investors before you need money. The worst time to start talking to VCs is when you’re running out of cash. The best time is when things are going well and you don’t need them yet.
Take care of yourself. I’m a D-style personality — driven, results-oriented, impatient. I powered through problems that should have made me pause. Building a startup is a marathon, not a sprint, and I didn’t always treat it that way.
What comes after
Today, I run Redox-Flow (electrochemical lab equipment), co-founded Decameal (sustainable protein from invasive crabs), invest in startups through MKInvest, and advise founders through 10000 WAYS ApS. I’m also Chairman of GephionBio (cultivated meat), sit on the boards of Fauna and Rathlouskolen, and serve on the Innovation Fund Denmark InnoBooster panel — on the other side of the evaluation table now.
Every one of these roles draws on something I learned at RadiSurf. The failures more than the successes.
RadiSurf taught me that building a deep-tech company is one of the hardest and most rewarding things a scientist can do. It’s not for everyone. But if you’re a researcher with a technology that could change something in the real world, and you’re wondering whether to make the leap — I’d say do it. Just be prepared to find 10,000 ways that don’t work before you find the one that does.
Mikkel Kongsfelt is a scientist turned entrepreneur based in Odder, Denmark. He holds a PhD in Nanoscience from Aarhus University and executive education from Harvard Business School. He advises deep-tech founders on strategy, IP, and fundraising through 10000 WAYS ApS.