Meet the founder
Artem Shulga is the founder and CEO of QDI Systems, which develops and manufactures quantum dot image sensors in-house in Groningen. The company builds scalable, affordable detectors for short-wave infrared (SWIR), extended SWIR (eSWIR) and X-ray applications.
His route there ran through two universities. Shulga took his bachelor’s degree in Applied Physics, specialising in solid-state electronics, at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, and graduated cum laude from the University of Groningen’s Top Master’s Programme in Nanoscience. In 2019 he defended his PhD on the engineering of quantum dot devices. The thesis, ‘Colloidal Quantum Dot Field-Effect Transistors: From Electronic Circuits to Light Emission and Detection’, received the Best GEC PhD Thesis Award.
The step from thesis to company had been forming for a while. Inspired by a trip to Japan some years earlier, Shulga founded QDI Systems in 2019, as a spin-off of the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials, to turn his academic breakthroughs into practical, high-performance imaging.
The challenge
Deep tech asks for something a breakthrough alone cannot provide. Building a company that runs from science to a scalable commercial product takes time, expertise and a great deal of hard work, and it takes investors and supporters willing to believe in the potential of a technology at a stage when there is little more than potential to see.
That timing problem is the real obstacle. A fundamentally new technology cannot always be developed on the schedule a conventional start-up is measured against, and the earliest capital is the hardest to find precisely where it matters most.
Where RUG Ventures came in
RUG Ventures was one of the early believers. It understood the vision and joined the journey at the formative stage, providing capital at the point when QDI Systems was still building the foundations of the company and developing its technology towards commercial applications.
The significance of that investment went beyond the funding itself. Having an investor connected to the University of Groningen, one that understood the scientific origins of the technology, gave the team confidence in the move from the laboratory into the commercial world. It meant a partner who knew that ambitious innovation cannot always follow a conventional start-up timeline.
RUG Ventures has stayed on the cap table as the company has grown, alongside the investors who joined in later rounds.
Where things stand
QDI Systems has since raised a Series A of 5 million euros, led by the Northern Netherlands development agency NOM and joined by existing investors including RUG Ventures, and secured up to 7.5 million euros in grant and equity funding from the European Innovation Council to scale its quantum dot technology for X-ray and SWIR applications. The customer base grew tenfold over that period.
The company now designs and manufactures its sensors in Groningen and works with imaging and semiconductor partners internationally. In 2026 it entered a strategic partnership with the machine vision company Allied Vision, aimed at accelerating the transition from established InGaAs-based SWIR sensors to quantum dot sensors that match their performance at significantly lower cost, size and weight.
That is the ambition in one line: not a better sensor for a handful of specialist users, but SWIR imaging that is affordable and deployable at scale, for every application.
Find out more about QDI Systems on their website.