About us

About SandGrain

To work on our goals at SandGrain, we brought together a team consisting of members who have different qualities, but all have many years of experience in the various parts of the SAAS, cloud, cyber security, and chip manufacturing. Our team fully combines the competencies in the key technical areas and pares that with many years of experience in the semiconductor business, including the startup of new technologies and organizations. If you want more information about us, or SandGrain, please contact us.

Pieter Hooijmans

Co-founder and CTO

Pieter obtained his MSc and PhD (cum laude) in Electrical Engineering at the TU Delft in The Netherlands. From 1985 to 2014 he had a 30-year career within Philips and NXP Semiconductors, working in Research, as head of development in Germany and Singapore and as RF Program Manager in Philips Semiconductors. From 2008 to 2014 he was the CTO of the biggest business unit of NXP, covering a wide variety of high-performance RF, analogue and mixed-signal businesses, for which he had the ultimate technology strategy responsibility.

Pieter is an independent consultant with his company Maximus-R&D, consulting leading semiconductor players on R&D processes and IC technology strategy. He served as supervisory board member with Effect Photonics in Eindhoven and was president of the Supervisory Board of Mapper Lithography in Delft.

Pieter is happily married for 35 years, has three adult children, a dog and two cats. He has many hobbies, of which the main ones are aviation (private pilot) and classical oil painting.

Casper Juffermans

Co-founder and Chief Process Technology

Chip design and manufacturing, with lithography as special area within manufacturing.

Casper received his M.Sc. degree in Physics (with honors) from TU Delft in The Netherlands.

Next he joined Philips Research Laboratories in 1984, where his research has covered topics as submicron CMOS devices, CMOS technology and lithography.

Casper has headed several project teams and was as a team leader for lithography research at Philips. From 2001 till 2011 he was a department head for advanced CMOS technology. Until 2015 Casper was responsible for all process technology research in NXP semiconductors.

He joined Tu Delft in 2015 as director of the Else Kooi Laboratory and from 2020 on he combines the directorship of both Else Kooi and Kavli laboratories, happily supporting the TU-Delft research and helping with the first steps to be made into the market and applications.

Casper is married and the proud father of 3 adults and enjoying their selection of beers and music whenever he can.

Jeroen Doumen

Co-founder and Security Architect

Jeroen obtained his M.Sc. degrees in both Mathematics and Physics from Universiteit Leiden, and then a PhD in cryptography from the TU Eindhoven. He then went on to become assistant professor at Universiteit Twente before moving to industry. Jeroen has 35+ scientific publications and over 20 patent applications.

At Irdeto, he worked from 2008 until 2019 as Technology Manager and Senior Researcher on security concepts like traitor tracing, whitebox cryptography, secure unique ICs and software security. He also fueled the productization of collusion-resistant codes at Irdeto and led projects on watermarking delivery and traitor tracing. Jeroen was part of the Advanced Technology and Innovations team at Irdeto that spawned UniqIC, the predecessor of SandGrain.

In his free time, Jeroen enjoys playing and designing board games. Most of his favorite games are long, economic strategy games, like the 18xx series.

Hans Kersting

Product Development Manager

Hans has a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. Initially, he held a third line position as product specialist in medical diagnostic X-ray equipment for 4 years before moving to ASML where he started in the Backoffice supporting account teams in the USA. After 4 years he got a position as (major) Account Manager. First in Portland Oregon and later in Europe. The majority of his accounts where US based or had US headquarters.

Having done this for 10 years he decided he needed a new challenge and moved to the startup Simax Lithography where he had multiple positions. In a later state a part of Simax was rebranded to Liteq where a new backend scanner was designed and developed. Hans also worked for 4,5 years for Mapper Lithography in the sales department in a technical sales position.

Rolf van Gent

VP of Sales

Rolf obtained his bachelor in computer sciences from the Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Eindhoven. Starting of as a real-time embedded systems software engineer at Philips he relatively quickly changed to sales engineer and trainer in the area of software development tools. Then moving to various sales and sales management positions in the domains of software analysis & development, data warehousing and system management solutions to finally specialize in cybersecurity spending almost 10 years with a French daughter company of Airbus Defense & Space, Stormshield SAS where he headed the international sales team.

Born in Australia and having lived in the Netherlands, France and Germany. He speaks 4 languages.

Rolf is happily married and has 3 children and enjoys sailing, playing guitar & double-bass and old timers.

Jack Gijrath

VP of Business Development & Strategy

Jack studied both "Mechanical Engineering" and "Commercial Technology" in Eindhoven (NL). This combination resulted in taking on various assignments focused on the development of new markets for technical products. During his career he worked 20 years in NXP Semiconductors (former Philips Semiconductors) where he was responsible for the Business Development activities first in EMEA and later for Business Development and Marketing & Sales in SAPAC, in the “Identification” domain. Since 2018 he joined NedCard Netherlands (chip packaging) as CEO, which was acquired by Linxens Group (high-tech micro-connectors assembly) in the course of 2019. From end 2019 he served as VP Business Development for the Government sector in Linxens Group.

Rene Claessen

VP of Technology & Marketing

Rene obtained his MSc on semiconductor physics from the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands and started in the semiconductor industry in 1983 with the Philips Research Laboratories. Thereafter, his career has been developing from technology research (Philips Research Laboratories) to development & manufacturing (Philips Semiconductors/NXP) to business planning & strategy and general management within Philips Healthcare and Stork/Fokker Aerospace. Previously he worked with ASML to develop long-term strategic scenarios in close cooperation with the board. He has played several roles on executive level, focusing on general management, driving new technologies to a successful business, developing strategic scenarios, and leading M&A processes.