Rijen, North Brabant, Netherlands
Your tech is brilliant. Your story isn't. Let's change that. I've been doing some version of this since I was 10. That's when I built my first website. In HTML. At an HP open day my dad took me to. While everyone else was outside playing, I was at a terminal and using Photoshop. Yeah, obviously I played outside a lot too, you get the gist. I'm not a techie. I just grew up around it. What I'm actually good at is telling stories about complicated things. I figured that out as a kid: the technical people around me couldn't explain what they were building. I could. That's why I studied marketing and communications. My strength is I've been on the other side. So I understand what you want to do. Went to IT school. Graphic Lyceum. Communications studies. Did an MBA. Side gigs building websites and doing design all the way through. Never good enough to be a coder (didn't want to). Always good enough to get it. At NXP I became the digital communications guy almost by accident. Then steered comms through two of the biggest semiconductor M&A deals in the industry ($11.8bn and $47bn). Merged intranets. Owned the digital function. Built PR plans and integrated communications strategy. At Axelera AI, from pre-product to $200M+ raised and a $100M pipeline. Bloomberg, FT, Reuters, TechCrunch picked up the story. Built the marketing function from scratch. Now I run the marketing function for deep tech startups as a fractional marketing head. So what does this actually mean for you. I'm not your typical marketer. I get the tech. I understand the roadmap and ask the right questions. But I'm not a coder, so I don't get lost in a thousand iterations. I extract the narrative from the tech. I help with positioning. Then I build whatever it takes to ship it. The narrative, positioning, website, the inbound system, the hiring plan. When the work calls for a specialist, I bring in trusted people from a decade of deep-tech work. The AI part is the latest chapter of the same story. Claude Code, Skills, MCP, custom agents I've built for myself and for clients. I run my marketing ops around AI because that's how you ship at startup speed. Don't trust people selling "marketing AI frameworks" who've never actually done marketing. I have. 10+ years of it. The tools are new. The instinct for what to say, and to whom, is not. (Outside the work: audio engineering on the side. I just like making complex things land clean.) Wanna work with me? → Book a call: https://calendar.notion.so/meet/merlijnlinschooten/o4ib4o6f → Or DM me. I respond.
With over a decade of marketing, communications and M&A experience in both high-tech corporate and start-ups, I help PhD founders turn their complex technology into compelling stories that win markets and headlines.
I decided to pursue my dream of working in professional sound.
I've helped steer Axelera AI from a young edge AI venture to Europe's most-funded AI-chip challenger, backed by $200M+ in public and private capital. Leading brand narrative, digital, demand generation, PR/AR, and strategic comms, my through-line is measurable growth that fuels business results. • Orchestrated multi-channel campaigns that opened a $100M pipeline and secured early customer wins. • Positioned Axelera AI as the AI inference partner of choice, shaping a challenger narrative that resonates across Manufacturing, Retail, Security, and more. • Secured continuous Tier 1 media coverage (Bloomberg, Financial Times, Reuters, New York Times, TechCrunch), generating 100s of product requests. • Supported record-breaking capital raises, helping bring total funding to $200M+ in 3 years. • Scaled marketing from an early-stage operation to a high-output function, building a distributed expert team and agency network. • Partnered with Product/Sales to launch the Metis™ product line, driving customer demand across key countries. • Engineered a trade show engine (CES, Embedded World and many more) that consistently generated hundreds of MQLs and efficiently converted to SQLs. • Revamped the website—streamlined UX, unified brand voice, and boosted organic traffic. • Expanded the LinkedIn community 500 % in 3 years, from 5 K to 30 K followers, while sharply lifting engagement rates. • Professionalized the MarTech stack for scalable, data-driven marketing execution.