In a country where no one minces words, Prince Constantijn van Oranje had this to say on Dutch tech recently: “The overall mood, unfortunately, should be one of concern about stagnation; we are not in a position to compete.”
The prince, who alongside performing royal duties is the country’s special envoy on tech, was writing in the latest annual report from tech group TechLeap, which chronicled a choppy few years for the Netherlands. Both 2022 and 2023 saw funding drops (-52% and -26% respectively) while 2024 saw a 47% upswing.
Two new unicorns appeared last year — software companies Mews and DataSnipper — but the number of startups becoming scaleups “lags behind the European leaders, and AI activity and investments are falling behind,” the analysis, published in February, noted.
Overall performance, then, is mixed. There’s a similar feeling on the ground, with founders and investors highlighting good and the bad aspects of Dutch tech in 2025.
“It’s picking up. There’s more energy, even if funding remains cautious,” says Angelique Schouten, founder and CEO of Amsterdam-based 10X Team, which helps companies hire part-time senior staff.
“Everyone was super down in the dumps for a year or two, no one I knew was raising,” says Joris Oudejans, CEO of Bash, a platform (also based in Amsterdam) that helps event organisers drive ticket sales. “Now we’re all more bullish.” His company announced a €1.3m round in May.
According to Sifted data, €1.5bn was raised by startups in the Netherlands in the first six months of 2025, which is already near the total amount raised last year (€2.3bn).
TechLeap’s analysis bemoaned a lack of Dutch rounds above €10m last year; Sifted counts 28 so far in 2025, which is tracking well against the 45 raised last year.
Underlying challenges
“This year doesn’t look too bad on paper. But I think underlying the market is still quite tough with many internal funding rounds and bridges,” says Tom Doornik, investment associate at Amsterdam-based Doen Ventures.
For early-stage startups, “it largely depends on the sector, with stuff like AI, energy, fintech doing well, while things like food, agri, consumer and circular economy are struggling,” Doornik adds (this assessment largely holds for the wider European market).
Dutch tech recruiter Jan Bernhart says things feel “a bit meh”. He cites layoffs this year at holiday rental platform Booking — one of the biggest Dutch tech companies — and says that medium-sized players “are stabilising rather than growing.”
He adds: “Some companies decided to move and grow tech in other locations; you see Dutch fintechs like Adyen, Mollie, Bunq and [online marketplace] Catawiki opening tech hubs elsewhere in Europe.”
Another concern is that Dutch VCs are increasingly absent from big deals. TechLeap notes a sharp fall in domestic participation in €50m-€100m-sized rounds, down from 61% in 2023 to just 15% in 2024.
“Apart from a few friends who invested in Cradle with small angel tickets, we don’t have any Dutch investors,” says Jelle Prins, Cradle’s cofounder. “That’s unfortunate, because if we succeed, that money won’t flow back into the local ecosystem.” The company raised $73m last November in a round led by London VCs Index Ventures and Kindred Capital.
Several people also tell Sifted that there’s a growing focus on employee absenteeism and how it’s hurting Dutch companies. “Some companies are getting frustrated with how employees are protected in the Netherlands,” says Bernhart.
“Building high-performance cultures here is tough,” adds Schouten. “If someone underperforms and you raise it, you’re more likely to face a sick note than a turnaround. That’s a challenge for startups.”
AI catch up
TechLeap’s report highlighted underperformance in AI, but a catchup is underway, investors and founders say.
Sifted’s review of the first half of the year notes how Amsterdam was home to a higher proportion of AI-native funding rounds (16.7% of all rounds in 2025) than Paris (12.8%), London (11.9%) and Stockholm (8.8%), which are considered Europe’s three big AI hubs.
“We might have been off to a slower start, but we have always been a very relevant player in AI, thanks to fantastic technical universities and talent clusters forming around ‘hot’ companies like [materials company] Cusp AI, [AI protein design platform] Cradle and [AI construction robot developer] Monumental,” says Bas Rieter, an investor at Amsterdam-based Dutch Founders Fund.
“There’s momentum for vertically-focused AI,” says Schouten. Almost everyone Sifted spoke to trumpeted Cradle, which appeared recently on a list of startups that could change the world. AI cloud company Nebius, meanwhile, was the country’s sole IPO last year.
“Q2 was the strongest quarter we’ve had in our history,” says Mews boss Matthijs Welle. The company has added a bunch of AI features to its hospitality management software. “With most of the technology companies I speak to here in the Netherlands, the mood is positive.”
Others are celebrating a small but significant win, founders say: a new government law tweaking employee stock options. The tax due on these stocks will be shifted to a later date, namely upon sale of the shares. “Our notoriously tricky regulatory environment just became a tiny bit more startup friendly,” says Rieter.
“It’s not a short term fix but it will drive long term competitiveness,” adds Doornik.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/spotlight-on-dutch-tech-ai-catchup-or-stagnation/
