Johan Feenstra

Johan joined SMART Photonics as CEO in 2019, after having served on their Advisory Board for about 3 years. At SMART, he raised close to € 50M in 2020/21 to build a small-scale production line for next generation photonics chips with his team and in 2023 another €75M was secured from the National Growth Fund.

Before SMART, Johan co-founded Liquavista in 2006 and is co-inventor of electrowetting displays. At Liquavista, he had a broad set of roles, ranging from CEO, to CTO and Program Management. Together with his team, he raised four rounds of venture capital for Liquavista and sold the company twice, in both cases to Fortune 500 companies (Samsung Electronics and Amazon.com).

Johan received his PhD in Solid State Physics from the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen in the Netherlands in 1997.