Here’s what happened over the last few days, and what’s coming up.
Funding
The European Investment Fund (EIF) invests in Carduso Capital (undisclosed amount), a fund aimed to support the technology transfer in the Groningen area. With EIF, the total fund volume is now 31 million euro.
The Canadian VC Chrysalix Venture Capital together with RoboValley (a business and research network in robotics from technical university TU Delft) and the TU Delft Robotics Institute have created a 100 million euro fund to accelerate startups in robotics.
Freelance platform Jellow raised 500.000 euro in seed funding from NOM.
Peer-to-peer deliveries can be quite a hassle. The “carpooling for stuff” startup PickThisUp has a solution: it lets drivers nearby drive for you to send or receive your order. Currently incubated at UtrechtInc, the startup has secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding from an angel investor and three other informals.
Updates
With Prodock, the harbour of Amsterdam opens a new space for harbour-related startups and SME’s on Tuesday. The facility includes 4,000 m2 of space, including a port pilot for the development of products and techniques.
Media concern Sanoma Netherlands has bought cashback platform, or discount company Scoupy as well as the similar platform Kortingisleuk.nl. Both will continue under the name Scoupy.
Thomas Mensink (Golden Egg Check) has been on a quest to find a way to measure and monitor the performance of startups, resulting in the Amsterdam Startup Index; an index with the 25 ‘hottest’ startups of Amsterdam.
LOEY, an initiative of VC firms Endeit Capital and Peak Capital are looking for talented online entrepreneurs for their Talent Award (Link in Dutch). Read our report of last year.
Sprout last week presented its tenth annual list of 25 promising Dutch entrepreneurs under the age of 25. Earlier winners include Jitse Groen (Thuisbezorgd), Pieter Zwart (Coolblue) and Vivienne van Eijkelenborg (Difrax).
There is a little beanbag fight goin on, Dutch startup Kaisr was recently told by a judge that its beanbag looked too much like that of competitor Lamzac / Fatboy. Now the same is true for Laybag, says Bright. (article in Dutch)
Monday reads
These are the 13 cities with the highest startup growth in the last year. – Business Insider
Elon Musk must have taken the red pill. The eccentric tech mogul made plenty of bold claims during Recode’s annual Code Conference on Wednesday — including that we’ll put humans on Mars by 2025 — but this one takes the cake: Musk believes that our very existence is quite possibly an elaborate computer simulation with great graphics. — Huffington Post
Image: Flickr