Looking at the funding numbers, the Dutch startup ecosystem is in excellent health! Every year we make a list of all publicly announced startup deals in The Netherlands, and for 2018 we were able to find more than 130 deals, with a median investment amount of 1 million euros.

Why this funding list

The goal of the Startupjuncture funding overview is to provide transparency into the Dutch ecosystem. The list shows that there are many startups that receive funding. We explicitly provide a full list rather than just a total number, to help other people do additional research. We hope the list shows startups what type of startups receive funding in The Netherlands, who the most active investors are, what the typical amount of funding is and at what stage startups can ge funding. We are grateful that many investors and startups make this data available, since this data is important for other startups. In our view, having such data helps startups plan their investment strategy.

How the funding list is created

Searching: The list was created by searching the leading Dutch startup blogs for data about investments. Since startupjuncture is less active, we are relying on our colleagues. We would like to thank startup news sites Sprout, Emerce, EU startups and Silicon Canals for   and public databases dealroom (via startupdelta) and Crunchbase.

Selecting: We have used a liberal definition of ‘startup’: we include any investment in an innovative companies that intend to scale. If you have a more stricter definition of a startup, feel free to download the list and apply a filter on the data. The top 15 companies of the list are probably more scale-ups than startups: they have already found a business model. We believe however that any good research into startup funding should include these scale-ups as well. It would be very unfair to first exclude the major successes, and then conclude that there are few successful startups.

Estimation: In some cases, the amount of funding is undisclosed. We made an estimation of the funding amount in order to estimate total funding. We do this depending on what funding round it is and the type of investors. Our typical estimate is 500.000 euros since this is a typical seed/first round for a Dutch startup.

Validation: We have only included deals where there is an external source. Nevertheless: mistakes and omissions are possible. If you discover a mistake, please let us know.

Top startups

There are 11 startups that have received more than 15 million in funding. They are the startups/scale-ups that were most successful in raising funds. This is of course not the same as overall success: some of the most successful business do not need to raise funds.

Comparison to previous years

Comparing the total amount of funding is dangerous: one or two outliers have a huge impact on the total. Nevertheless it makes for interesting headlines so in the chart above we have included the totals. 2018 is a normal, good year for funding. There is no sign of a slowdown in startup funding. for more details on the previous years, check the following overviews:

The full 2018 Dutch startup investment list

This list provides for each startup the amount of funding received, the investors, and a link to the source of the investment information. The list is sorted on (estimated) funding amount.