Dutch startups raise nearly € 80 million in first quarter 2015

The StartupJuncture quarterly investment overview shows that more than 30 Dutch startups have raised 79 million euros in the first quarter of 2015: a 60 percent increase in number of deals. Median investment amount is 1 million euros.  The biggest investment round was that of WeTransfer of 22 million euros.

 Last December, StartupJuncture made the first overview of Dutch startup investments by creating a list of all publicly announced startup investments. For the whole of 2014 this added up to 75 deals and a total amount of 500 million euros. The good news is that 2015 promises to be even better in number of deals: with 32 deals, Q1 2015 is the most active quarter so far with a 60 percent increase in deal activity.

In terms of funding amount, the median amount is exactly € 1 million. Half the startups raise less that this amount, typically from informal investors or specialized funds. An increasing number of startups are using convertible notes for their first funding (plot projects, Storecove, Ulu, Live on Demand): this avoids any premature valuation discussions.

In the top half of the list, three startups have raised more than 10 million euros: WeTransfer (22 million), AppMachine (13 million) and Bottlenose (12 million). Surprisingly these are all software startups: no life science startups or hardware startups, who typically spend more money, have raised such amounts. The common wisdom, that software startups are cheaper than hardware and life science startups, needs to be updated.

Last year De Volkskrant noted from their own research that most money seems to come from International investors. On special request by De Volkskrant we have included this information to our analysis as well. We added an extra column with the investment source. Dutch ecosystem or International investors, based on the lead investor. 44 percent of the money comes from the Dutch ecosystem. In our view this is a healthy amount. Apparently there is enough funding available in the Dutch ecosystem, but Dutch startups also have access to International investors. Note that the percentage is not exact: there is often a group on investors from different countries involved in the larger deals.

Startups that are not listed in the overview but that receive an honourable mention are:

• Quiver: this document protection startup received a lot of attention at the Startupbootcamp Demo Day, and seems to have already 10 million euro committed (unlike reports from other media – which mentioned the funding was closed) for their next funding round. A great result and we hope to include them in our next overview when this funding round is closed and the final amount is known.
• iLost: this company is running a crowdfunding campaign that has already met its target.
• All startup deals that were not announced to the press and have therefore not reached StartupJuncture. If your startup did receive funding, feel free to inform the StartupJuncture team.
• All non-startup crowdfunding campaigns: There are many successful crowdfunding campaigns, on platforms such as CrowdAboutNow, Geldforelkaar and Oneplanetcrowd and even Kickstarter. We have not included these campaigns since these campaigns are often not scalable companies.

Below is the full table of all deals, with links to source where available. In case the amount of funding is not published, we have made an educated guess based on the information available (e.g. “several millions” was estimated as 3 million for Hemics).

Image credit: Paulina101 @ Pixabay