Dutch startups raise €500 million in 2014

2014 has been an active year for Dutch startup investment: we listed 75 deals with a total investment of EUR500 million for Dutch startups: Dutch startups raise real money! Here is the complete list and overview of funding trends.

Funding is one of the most elusive aspects of the Dutch startup ecosystem: Although we have a mature financial system and low interest rates for other investments, many startups dit not get funding as a xmas present this year. Throughout the year we have tried to cover all deals that did happen. This is part of our goal to provide realistic data to all startups. Now that the year is almost over we decided to build an overview of all the deals in 2014. The result was surprising: more than one startup funding event per week, and thanks to a last-minute € 200 million contribution by Adyen, the total amount in the table is € 500,1 million (and five unknowns of at least € 100.000 each). There are some definite trends in the 2014 data that should help all startups in 2015:

The Netherlands is an open economy

Several Dutch startups have raised large amounts of funding: 10 companies raised more than € 8 million this year. International VCs do not discriminate against Dutch startups as companies like Mendix and Elastic Search show.

The Dutch funding landscape favours bootstrapping.

It is releatively easy to raise a modest amount of funding (less than € 200.000) but hard to raise more than a million at an early stage. This impacts the type of companies founded and slows down growth of some companies compared to Silicon Vally Superstars. Perhaps the StartupDelta initiative can focus on making these bigger ideas easier to fund.

Convertible notes and crowdfunding

In 2014 the convertible notes have gained in popularity, thanks in large part through the work of Leapfunder. With convertible notes it becomes more attractive for investors to make an early high risk investment in a startup, because there is no haggling over company valuation in the beginning. We noted 9 significant convertible notes funding rounds in 2014.

Crowdfunding remained popular, on the various maturing platforms we already have in The Netherlands: Symbid, Oneplanetcrowd and also Geldvoorelkaar.

Funding table

The following table shows all deals we are aware of in descending order. For most of the deals we provided a link to the original StartupJuncture article. For the 19 deals we did not cover, a link to the press release or to the crowd funding campaign page is provided. We are happy to hear about any deals missing from this overview.

One honourable mention should go to Quality Circular Polymers, an innovative chemicals company founded in april 2014 at Chemelot. They received in their first year an investment of 75 million euros from their strategy investors:  SITA, LIOF and Chemelot Ventures, next to the Province of Limburg, Limburgs Energie Fonds and the Community of Sittard-Geleen. We have not included them in the list since at the time of the list creation we believed this to be an already established company, but after reconsideration we believe this is also a deal that we as  The Netherlands can be proud of, and we are looking forward to hear more from this company and other startups like QCP. 

 
Photo by Pieter van Marion (creative commons via Flickr)