Technology Fast 2025 winner: A record-breaking leap in tech
In 2025, the tech world turned its eyes to Delft as Zander Labs was crowned the winner of the Technology Fast 50. With an extraordinary growth trajectory and a vision that bridges the gap between neuroscience and AI, they are no longer just a startup to watch. They are the architects of a new era.
Winning the Technology Fast 50 with visionary growth, Zander Labs has officially been named the fastest-growing technology company in the Netherlands for 2025. This prestigious recognition highlights their journey from a deep-tech visionary to a market leader. They are moving beyond traditional AI that relies solely on static data and proving that the market is hungry for human-compatible systems. Their success marks a shift in the industry: we are no longer just training machines; we are teaching them to understand the human mind.
How Zander Labs is bridging the gap between brainwaves and AI
The science of success: Passive BCI & mental state decoding
Bridging the gap between brainwaves and digital systems
What sets this 2025 Fast 50 winner apart is their groundbreaking use of passive brain-computer interfaces (pBCIs). Unlike traditional interfaces that require a user's active command, Zander Labs’ technology works seamlessly in the background.
- The Zypher suite: A wearable EEG hardware system that records brainwaves in real time.
- Mental state decoders: Proprietary algorithms that translate brain activity into cognitive insights such as workload, surprise, and error.
- The SAMANAI® platform: An enabling infrastructure that feeds this human modality into AI models, allowing them to learn from and adapt instantly to the user's internal state.
"Our dream is for our technology to be the platform used across all industries to make machines more human-aligned."
- Zander Labs Team
Beyond the lab: Transforming global industries
Neuroadaptive solutions in the real world
The spotlight on Zander Labs at the Fast 50 awards was driven by their massive scalability. By turning human cognition into digital input, they are revolutionizing high-stakes industries:
- Physical AI/Robotics: Training autonomous systems to collaborate intuitively with humans by learning from continuous cognitive signals that implicitly encode human intent, perception, and error recognition.
- Mobility & transportation: Enabling hyperpersonalized travel experiences and effective human oversight of increasingly automated vehicles by integrating real-time cognitive signals from drivers, pilots, and operators into human–vehicle interaction.
- Defense & security: Improving mission performance by enabling critical systems to adapt their behavior and interfaces to the real-time cognitive signals of their operators.
Engineering an empathic future
The dream of global human-AI alignment
Following their Fast 50 victory, the company is scaling its infrastructure to move from the lab into the real world. By collaborating with global partners across various domains and a large contract with German federal agency Agentur für Innovation in der Cybersicherheit - “Innovation for Cybersecurity", Zander Labs is ensuring that the next generation of AI, from Large Language Models to surgical robots, is not just intelligent, but truly compatible with the human experience.
A trip to Google DeepMind
"Zander Labs is an incredibly exciting company. As the first-place winner of the 2025 Deloitte Fast 50, Google invited them to meet with Google DeepMind. We recently visited the DeepMind HQ in London and had a fantastic session with both teams. We look forward to an exciting future ahead."
- Team Google
The people featured
Jonathan Zwaan
Teodoro Solis Escalante
Ivanna Vinnicsuk
Tom Pudil
