What happens in the startup scene in The Netherlands right now? Find out in another Dutch startup news update!
News & Updates
Number of startups that grow into million-euro- scale-ups increases
Justin Jansen, professor of corporate entrepreneurship at the University of Rotterdam announced last week that the number of startups that manage to advance into a fast growing scale-up has increased over the last years. According to 2016 numbers of Jansen The Netherlands counted 331 startups that can now call them scale-ups, while in 2014 just 98 startups would pass the criteria (in Dutch).
Investor Ton van ’t Noordende launches network for emerging deep tech
Ton van ’t Noordende, investor at Keadyn, founder of Angel Island has launched the foundation e/d/t global. EDT stands for Emerging Deep Tech. The thesis and genesis of the foundation is to enable everybody that is at the forefront of emerging technologies to more easily get in touch with their peers, the right people and leverage the knowledge and know that is otherwise confided to a close circle of people. Van ‘t Noordende aims to advance our understanding of ‘the next big thing’ and ‘ground-breaking technologies.’ “With e/d/t we like to create a community where pioneers will have early access to new innovations, knowledge and the people behind those revolutionary technologies. My main goal with the foundation is to bring the right people together so that we can skip the hurdles that are typically there”, says Van ’t Noordende.
Three Dutch startups among WDCD winners
The program that puts ‘Design’ at the heart of solutions that most successfully will address societal challenges announced last week the winners of its climate challenge. Twenty, Powerplant en ‘Keepers: Rainforest lab & kitchen’ were among the Dutch winners of What Design Can Do Climate Action Challenge. The 13 winners in total were announced at WDCD Live in São Paulo and selected out of 384 entries from 70 countries.
DSM and startup Niaga help Auping to recycle
The Dutch chemicals company DSM and startup Niaga join forces to develop a matras that is fully recyclable. Josse Kunst, director of the joint venture DSM-Niaga: “‘Mattresses are complex products. The are made out of different materials, which make it’s a difficult product to recycle.” DSM and Niaga are planning to deliver the fully recyclable matras in 2019 (in Dutch).
Maester, Tinkr and stagefinder.nl win Present Your Startup 2017
Overall winner of the competition was the e-learning platform for corporates Maester, while the Public Choice award whent to stagefinder.nl. The online platform for connecting IT students with tech corporates, didn’t win a prize, but dit receive the largest amount of investment on stage after Maester, 40.000 euro.
ARmazing brings heart to life in biology book
In 2010 the once-upon-time hot Dutch AR startup Layar raised 10 million euro in a Series B round from Intel. But though the company was one of the most sexy Dutch startups in 2010 it never succeeded to achieve product market fit, being eventually sold for an undisclosed amount to Blippar. Now 8 years later the young entrepreneur Sem Broere (23) has launched his own Layar-esk startup ARmazing. In contrast to its predecessor ARmazing focuses on bringing children books to live. Adding for instance an AR-powerd 3D beating heart in a biology book. Though more relevant than products in a magazine (Layar) the problem remains that a smartphone or tablet is needed the augmented reality (in Dutch).
Funding
Health tech startup Xeltis raises €45M for polymer heart vale
Dutch-Swiss health biotech startup Xeltis has raised €45 million euro in an over subscribed C round to further the development of its polymer-based heart valve replacement technology. The startup will use the capital raised to further clinical activities, as well as ramp up product and market development for Xeltis’ aortic and pulmonary valve programs.
500 investors put €657.000 renewable energy company Bluerise
Bluerise that uses the temperature difference between the surface water and deep ocean (20 to 25 degrees in the tropics at 1000 meter depth difference) to create renewable energy has raised €657.200 through crowdfunding platform Symbid. The capital raised will be used to further grow the Bluerise team and speed up the preparations for the first two projects in the Caribbean.
Monday Read
Everybody want’s to build a platform
Airbnb, Uber, PayPal. All very successful platform companies, the so-much admired end-state of any startup. But as Jean-Pierre Pequito wonderfully points out in this article and the story of the aforementioned companies attest: building platforms take time. And being cognisant of the semantics used in team meetings is critical to the success of a startup. I see it all the time going wrong, the team being totally unaware of the influence language has on the progress they want to make. In some instances, derailing them completely off track. ‘We are building a platform for X.” Okay, what does this mean for your customers? What does it really mean for the actual usage of your product for your end-customer? Pequito: “At Intercom, we’re trying hard to avoid using the term “platform” during product discussions, so that we can be more precise with what we truly want to achieve. If you focus on giving value to customers, platform will naturally follow.”
Photo Credit: Nivara