Adyen, Bynder, Booking.com, Catawiki, Travelbird – just to name a few of the many heavyweight Internet companies that were created in the Netherlands. The country’s geography might be flat, but the number of promising Dutch startups seems to be growing to new heights every year. With Amsterdam, the Netherlands is also home to one of the biggest startup hubs in Europe. In our ranking from 2016, the Dutch capital actually made it on rank four.
We started 2017 with some research and the goal to create a list for each EU country which showcases some of the most promising early-stage startups that are worth following this year. After looking at Austria, Italy and Belgium, we’re now presenting you our selection from the Netherlands. It’s been hard to narrow this list down, but we’ve decided to introduce you to just 7 promising Dutch startups out of different sectors. All of them entered the market within the last two years and each startup has something special to add to your business life or your personal web experience in 2017. And here is our selection:
Hotelchamp is an Amsterdam-based startup which offers smart technology for hotels to increase direct bookings on hotel websites. With an extended package of website tools and next level smart personalization and segmentation techniques, a team of conversion specialists creates unique customer journeys for every hotel website visitor and generates more bookings from every hotel website. To find out what works best for the hotel, Hotelchamp offers a/b and multivariate testing. Hotelchamp was founded in 2015 and secured secured €1.75 million seed funding in summer 2016.
Roadmap reverse engineered the entire experience from a frequent traveler perspective. The Delft-based startup created a supplier agnostic platform that has the ability to guide, influence, connect and inspire business travelers. Roadmap provides travelers with company specific content and becomes your personal travel companion. The startup already works with a huge list of partners by aggregating and consolidating their travels systems and tools into one corporate branded application. Not to rip and replace solutions which are in place but ‘to glue them’ around the itineraries to deliver a content relevant user experience to your corporate travellers. The all-in-one travel app Roadmap was founded in 2015.
Recruitee: Founded in 2015, Recruitee is a hiring platform for your whole team. It integrates four products into one: employer branding, job promoting, talent sourcing, and applicant tracking. Every team member can collaborate on the hiring process, and contribute to the team’s growth. Recruitee is on the track of becoming the industry standard for fast-growing SMEs around the world. The HR startup is headquartered in Amsterdam and also operates an office in Poznan (Poland). In 2015, the promising startup secured an undisclosed amount of seed funding and was named the “Best Applicant Tracking System of 2015” by the publication RecruitingTools.
BrandBox is a solution for creating, publishing and centrally managing highly engaging digital marketing campaigns to convert visitors into sign-ups. The Amsterdam-based startup makes it simple to run ongoing engagement programs for brands and agencies alike, and contains many interactive content formats, straight out of the box. These formats include fun quizzes, games, surveys and product reviews. With BrandBox’s advanced profiling feature, brands get to know their fans and can segment them into different groups based on their interaction or advocacy level. BrandBox was founded in 2015.
Goboony: The Utrecht-based travel startup created a sharing platform for motorhomes. Owners can share their motorhome, while travelers can enjoy the freedom of a motorhome whitout having to own one. Goboony offers an easy, personal, safe and reliable platform where people are sharing the freedom of traveling with a motorhome. Founded in 2015, Goboony secured a seed funding of €350K in March of 2016. After a great start in the Dutch market, Goboony plans for 2017 to accelerate its expansion in Germany, France, Italy and England.
Whatagraph: Founded in 2015, Whatagraph automatically creates presentation-ready infographic reports that are taking away the pain (and waste of time) of manually creating analytics reports. Leave the hard and boring work to Whatagraph – a tool which helps you to turn your fears into fuel. The software of the Amsterdam-based startup creates visual Google Analytics and social media reports. Founded by siblings from Lithuania, Whatagraph has chosen the Netherlands as the company’s headquarters, since the team joined the Rockstart accelerator and started scaling the company on an international level.
MiniBrew makes the brewing process easy so anyone can become a brewmaster. The Utrecht-based startup combines the beer brewing, cooling and yeasting process in one machine, all automatically managed and controlled at your fingertips by the MiniBrew smartphone app. MiniBrew was able to raise about $290K on Indiegogo and secured €250K seed funding in 2016. The Dutch startup MiniBrew was officially founded in 2015 and aims to create the worl’ds smartest brewing machine.
By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!
Thomas, I Can’t believe you didn’t mention Saleduck. They rose to Deloitte Fast50 with 628% growth last year from Amsterdam +FD Gazelle.