Luc Starmans grew up with a nurse mother and a physics-and-chemistry-teacher father, and went on to earn an MSc and PhD in Biomedical Engineering, work at Philips Research and Johns Hopkins, and advise healthcare organizations at KPMG before joining Brightlands Venture Partners, where he looks for medtech companies that solve a real, clearly defined care problem and can realistically reach an exit on around €10–30 million in total funding. He pays close attention to how well a founding team can handle the long, unpredictable path of building medtech, points to things like Europe's regulatory and reimbursement hurdles as reasons companies often look to the US market, sees the most promise in technology addressing healthcare worker shortages through robotics and automation, and stays closely involved after investing, as seen in his work with Hy2Care on cartilage repair and Vivalyx on increasing the number of organs available for transplant.