Startups in the Netherlands building awesome things News

TL;DR: Dutch Startup Funding in 2026, Who Raised, Why, and What It Means for You

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Startups in the Netherlands building awesome things news, November, 2026 shows you where Dutch capital went and how your business can benefit. Between May and September 2026, Dutch founders raised rounds from a €350K seed to a $550M Series C. Most of that money went into AI software, semiconductors and climate deeptech.

Biggest rounds: Wonderful (Amsterdam) raised a $550M Series C for its AI operating system for enterprise teams. EUCLYD (Eindhoven) raised €200M+ for AI inference chips. Brainport chip startups EUCLYD, Morphotonics and Invisix pulled in more than €260M in about four months. Read more about Dutch semiconductor startups.
Barbell funding: Investors place either small early bets or huge bets on category leaders. Classic €5M to €15M rounds are scarce, so you should plan to reach revenue on a small round.
Funding patterns worth copying:
- EU data hosting now works as a sales argument, as Custodea shows.
- Investors are backing the tools that AI agents run on, such as Boxd and Lleverage.
- Slow physical science companies, such as New Dawn Bio and SolarDew, need patient grant money.
- Hardware teams often find hidden IP risks during due diligence. Fix this early, as industrial founders who focus on IP tend to do.
Ecosystem numbers: About 4,500 Dutch startups operate today, with roughly 1,000 new ones each year. That means three new competitors every day. Amsterdam-Delta startups have raised $86B+ since 2000, which ranks third in Europe after London and Paris.
Openings for freelancers and small business owners: Funded startups buy outside help. Demand is growing for AI workflow audits, technical and grant writing, IP and NDA setup, and deeptech recruiting in the Brainport region.

Author Violetta Bonenkamp (Mean CEO) co-founded CADChain and founded Fe/male Switch. She adds a step-by-step plan for entering the Dutch scene, an investor list sorted by check size, and the mistakes founders repeat most.

Choose one cluster that matches your skills this week. Then run one no-code test with ten real customers and compare your results with next month's roundup to see which patterns hold.

Check out other fresh startup news and trends that you might like:

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When your Amsterdam startup finally hits product market fit and the only thing scaling faster than your revenue is the pile of bikes outside the office. Unsplash

If you follow Startups in the Netherlands building awesome things news, November 2026 is a good moment to step back and read the scoreboard. Between May and September 2026, Dutch founders closed rounds ranging from a modest €350K seed to a $550M Series C, and most of that capital went into AI software, semiconductors and climate-related deeptech. That spread tells you more about where opportunities sit for small teams than any trend report can.

I am Violetta Bonenkamp, known in the ecosystem as Mean CEO. I co-founded CADChain, a deeptech company that protects intellectual property inside CAD and 3D workflows, and I founded Fe/male Switch, a game-based startup incubator for women. I went through Dutch programs like Yes!Delft, TU/e Launch and Brightlands, so I read Dutch funding news the way a player reads a game map. Every round shows you where the paths open, where the traps are, and which skills you need to collect next.

In this article you get the biggest Dutch funding rounds of 2026, a curated list of companies worth watching, hard statistics, my personal analysis, a step-by-step guide to plugging into the Dutch scene, and the MISTAKES I see founders repeat. Let’s break it down.

What were the biggest Dutch startup funding rounds of 2026 so far?

The fastest way to see who is building what is to follow the money. The ProjectStartups tracker of recently funded Netherlands startups lists a wave of rounds that landed over the summer and early autumn of 2026. Here are the deals every founder in Europe should know about, sorted by size.

Wonderful (Amsterdam): $550M Series C, 1 September 2026. Investors include Insight Partners and Salesforce. Wonderful builds an AI operating system that automates workflows for enterprise teams.
EUCLYD (Eindhoven): €200M+ Series A, 15 September 2026. Backed by Samsung and Somerset Capital Partners. EUCLYD builds AI inference chips and datacenter systems that cut energy use and cost for enterprise and hyperscale AI.
Morphotonics (Veldhoven): €40M Series B, 21 September 2026. Backed by 3M Ventures and Innovation Industries. The company makes nanoimprint lithography equipment for AR glasses displays and data center optics.
Invisix (Eindhoven): €20M Seed, 1 June 2026. Backed by Hitachi Ventures and Transition Ventures. Invisix develops soft X-ray metrology systems that measure nanoscale structures in advanced chip manufacturing.
Vangrid (Amsterdam): $9M Seed, 6 August 2026. Backed by HashKey and Borderless. Vangrid runs a decentralized spatial intelligence network using smartphone cameras and onchain verification.
Ditto: €7.6M Series A, 12 May 2026. Backed by Heal Capital and Optiverder, in the HealthTech and AI category.
New Dawn Bio (Wageningen): €2.1M Pre-Seed, 4 June 2026. Backed by CapitalT and Norrsken Evolve. The team grows cultured wood from tree stem cells in bioreactors, removing the need for logging.
Boxd (Amsterdam): $2M Pre-Seed, 16 September 2026. Backed by BlueYard Capital and OVNI Capital. Boxd provides persistent cloud virtual machines for developers and AI coding agents.
SolarDew (Utrecht): €800K, 3 June 2026. Backed by Connect the Drops and Oost NL. SolarDew develops solar-powered water purification for clean drinking water.
Custodea (Amsterdam): €350K Seed, 14 September 2026. An EU-hosted data platform for SMEs that unifies business data and lets owners analyze it with AI tools.
Eevi (Amsterdam): Pre-Seed, 22 September 2026. Backed by Rockstart. Eevi offers a voice-first AI tutor that gets language learners speaking from the first lesson.

Quick definitions for newer founders. A pre-seed round is the earliest outside money, often raised before a product has paying customers. A seed round funds the first proof that the product works in the market. Series A, B and C are later rounds that pay for scaling a business that already shows traction. Seeing a seed round of €20M (Invisix) tells you how capital-hungry chip tooling is compared to software.

Which startups in the Netherlands are building awesome things right now?

Funding rounds are only one lens. Rankings from Failory, EU-Startups, StartupBlink, LinkedIn and Vestbee add companies that are growing quietly, hiring aggressively or solving hard physical problems. I grouped them by sector so you can spot the clusters.

AI and workflow automation startups

Wonderful: the AI operating system for enterprise teams that just raised $550M.
Lleverage: maps repetitive administrative processes, builds tailored AI workflows and plugs them into back-office systems. According to EU-Startups’ list of promising Netherlands-based startups for 2026, it reports €5 million in funding.
Boxd: persistent virtual machines where AI coding agents can live and work.
Custodea: AI analytics for SMEs, with data hosted inside the EU.
Carv: agentic AI for volume hiring, ranked in LinkedIn’s Top Startups in the Netherlands list.

Semiconductor and deeptech hardware startups

EUCLYD: AI inference chips and datacenter systems.
Invisix: soft X-ray metrology for advanced chip production.
Morphotonics: nanoimprint lithography for AR displays and optics.
Quantum Delta: the Dutch public-private quantum partnership, listed by StartupBlink’s ranking of top startups in the Netherlands with $360.9M in funding.
Vangrid: spatial intelligence built from smartphone cameras with onchain verification.

Climate, food and bio-based startups

New Dawn Bio: cultured wood from tree stem cells, based in Wageningen, the Dutch agrifood research hub.
SolarDew: solar-powered drinking water purification.
CIRCLE: founded in 2024, retrofitting an existing biogas plant into a biorefinery that turns food waste into lactic acid for bioplastics.
Perpetual Next: StartupBlink lists it with $364M in funding.
Protix (insect-based protein) and SolarDuck (floating solar), both mentioned by GrowthList’s overview of funded Netherlands startups.
Carbon Equity: a climate tech fund investing platform, ranked number one on LinkedIn’s 2025 Top Startups list for the Netherlands.
Agurotech: farm data technology built with farmers and universities.

Health, fintech and consumer startups

ViCentra (Utrecht): maker of the Kaleido insulin pump, with $180.9M raised and a Series D behind it, according to Failory’s top 100 startups from the Netherlands to watch in 2026.
Mambu (€387M raised) and bunq (€366.9M raised): the heavyweights of Dutch fintech on the same Failory list.
Leyden Labs: biotech, ranked among StartupBlink’s top Dutch startups.
Cradle: AI for protein design, highlighted in Vestbee’s roundup of interesting startups from the Netherlands.
SKINIVE: smartphone-based AI detection and monitoring of skin conditions.
OpenUp (employee mental well-being) and Polsen Health (creator of the Awareable device), both on LinkedIn’s list.
Poki: an online games playground with more than 30 million monthly active users, ranked first by StartupBlink.

How big is the Dutch startup ecosystem in numbers?

Numbers kill hype, so here they are. These stats come from the Included VC analysis of the Netherlands as a modern tech powerhouse, the Seedblink guide to building and growing a tech startup in the Netherlands (citing McKinsey) and GrowthList.

$86 BILLION+: total raised by startups in the Amsterdam-Delta area since 2000, up from $12 billion in 2015 (Startup Genome data). That makes it the third most valuable ecosystem in Europe, after London and Paris.
53% vs 8%: Amsterdam’s average annual ecosystem growth rate since 2011, compared with London’s 8%.
$2.2 billion across 414 deals: what Dutch VC-backed startups raised in 2023, up from 393 deals in 2022.
256,000 jobs globally created by these startups, including 151,000 in the Netherlands.
7th place on the Global Innovation Index.
About 4,500 startups operate in the country, with roughly 1,000 new ones launched every year.
€250B to €400B: McKinsey’s estimate of the potential market capitalization Dutch startups could reach by 2030.
4th in Europe for startup value creation, according to the same McKinsey report.
€4 billion: what Dutch green tech startups raised in 2024 across renewable energy, circular economy and sustainable agriculture.
€7.1 billion: Adyen’s valuation at its 2018 IPO, still the reference exit for Dutch founders.

Here is the shocking part. Roughly 1,000 new startups a year means about three new Dutch startups every single day. If you are pitching the same investors, applying to the same accelerators and hiring from the same talent pool, you compete with that flow. Sitting still for six months means hundreds of new competitors entered your space.

Why are Eindhoven and Veldhoven stealing the spotlight from Amsterdam?

Amsterdam still produces the most deals, and that is no surprise. The quieter story of 2026 sits in the south, in the Brainport region around Eindhoven and Veldhoven, home of ASML. EUCLYD (€200M+), Morphotonics (€40M) and Invisix (€20M) together pulled in more than €260 million in about four months, all in chip-related hardware.

Here is why this matters for you even if you never touch a wafer. Hardware clusters create demand for software, compliance tooling, recruitment services, technical writing, CAD workflows and IP management. When I built CADChain, our best conversations happened with engineering teams who had brilliant designs and almost zero control over who copied their files. Every new chip startup in Eindhoven is a potential customer for a dozen smaller service businesses.

The investor list also tells a story. Samsung, Hitachi Ventures and 3M Ventures are corporate investors, meaning they buy strategic access to technology. When corporates show up at seed and Series A stage, the founders usually have something that a global supply chain needs. That is a strong signal for anyone thinking about B2B deeptech in Europe.

What does Mean CEO see in this news that others miss?

Most news roundups stop at “company X raised Y.” I care about the pattern behind the deals, because patterns are what you can copy. Here are the six I see in the 2026 Dutch funding data.

1. Funding looks like a barbell, and the middle is thin

On one side you see Custodea at €350K and Eevi at pre-seed. On the other you see Wonderful at $550M and EUCLYD at €200M+. Between them, fewer companies raise the classic €5M to €15M round. My read: investors either place small, cheap bets or go all-in on category leaders. If you are a founder, plan to reach real revenue on a small round, because the “comfortable middle” round is harder to find than your pitch deck assumes.

2. “EU-hosted” has become a sales argument

Custodea puts EU hosting right in its one-line description. That is smart positioning. European SMEs worry about where their data goes, and they do not want to read privacy law to feel safe. This matches one of my operating principles: “Protection and compliance should be invisible.” When compliance lives inside the product, customers automatically do the right thing, and the founder gets a sales story that US competitors cannot copy easily.

3. Money is flowing into the plumbing for AI agents

Boxd builds persistent machines for AI coding agents. Lleverage builds AI workflows inside back offices. Wonderful sells an AI operating system to enterprises. Investors bet that companies will run with small human teams plus fleets of AI agents. I already work this way. I treat AI as a “force multiplier for small teams and solo founders”, with humans owning judgment, ethics and narrative while agents handle research, drafting and process scaffolding. If you are a solo founder still doing every task by hand, this news is your wake-up call.

4. Physical science is back, and it needs patient money

Cultured wood in Wageningen, water purification in Utrecht, biorefineries from food waste. These are slow, lab-heavy companies. They tend to stack grants, regional funds like Oost NL and specialist investors before they reach classic VC. CADChain grew from about 4 people to around 25 FTEs between 2021 and 2022 with a mix of grants, programs and private money, so I know how much paperwork patience this route requires. Deeptech founders who treat grant writing as a real skill, with a system and a calendar, win more often.

5. Learning products that force action are getting funded

Eevi’s pitch is simple: get learners speaking from the first lesson. As a linguist with degrees in linguistics and education, I love this. Language learners usually consume grammar for months and freeze in real conversations. Founders do the same with startup courses. My rule is “Education must be experiential and slightly uncomfortable.” At Fe/male Switch we built our startup game around quests that push players to talk to real customers early. Eevi applies the same logic to language, and Rockstart backing it tells me investors see demand for learning that changes behaviour.

6. Hardware startups carry a hidden IP risk

Chip tooling, AR optics and metrology companies share thousands of design files with suppliers, partners and corporate investors. Every file shared is a possible leak. From my CADChain experience, most young hardware teams discover their IP exposure during due diligence, which is the worst possible moment. If you build anything physical, set up file traceability and sharing rules before your first corporate pilot.

How can founders plug into the Dutch startup scene in 2026?

Reading about other people’s rounds feels good for about five minutes. Then you need a plan. Here is the step-by-step guide I would give a founder moving to, or starting in, the Netherlands today.

Pick your cluster city on purpose. Amsterdam for software, fintech and AI. Eindhoven and Veldhoven for chips and hardware. Delft for engineering spin-offs. Wageningen for food and bio. Utrecht for health and medtech. Rotterdam for logistics and e-commerce, home to Coolblue and Mendix. Location decides which investors and customers you bump into.
Validate with no-code first. My rule: “Default to no-code until you hit a hard wall.” I built the entire Fe/male Switch game and incubator with no-code tools. Build a landing page, a clickable prototype and an AI-assisted workflow before you hire a single developer.
Register properly. Set up your company with the KvK (Dutch Chamber of Commerce) and talk to the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) about subsidies and R&D tax schemes such as WBSO. Many founders lose months by ignoring this paperwork.
Join a program that fits your stage. Startup Amsterdam connects founders with talent and investors. Rockstart has backed 300+ startups in energy, agrifood and climate. Yes!Delft and TU/e Launch suit engineering teams. Apply to two or three, then commit to the one with the best investor access.
Build a pitch deck that fits Dutch directness. A pitch deck is the short slide presentation you use to raise funding. Dutch investors value plain numbers and honest risks. Put your traction, your unit economics and your biggest unknown on the first five slides.
Map investors by check size before you email anyone. Rockstart writes €100K to €5M checks. Finch Capital writes €5M to €15M for fintech and insurtech. Peak Capital backs B2B SaaS at Series A and B. Forbion manages over €2.3 billion for life sciences. Pitching the wrong stage wastes everyone’s time.
Lock down your IP early. File trademarks, document who owns code and designs, and add traceability to shared CAD or 3D files. Investors ask about this during due diligence, and missing answers kill deals.
Turn EU trust into your selling point. Host data in the EU, write a clear one-page privacy explanation for customers, and mention it on your homepage. Custodea shows that this message can carry a whole brand.

Which investors are writing checks to Dutch startups?

Based on the 2026 rounds and the investor profiles published by GrowthList, here is a cheat sheet of active names. Use it to build your target list.

Pre-seed and seed: Rockstart, BlueYard Capital, OVNI Capital, CapitalT, Norrsken Evolve, Connect the Drops, Oost NL.
Deeptech seed and Series A: Hitachi Ventures, Transition Ventures, Samsung, Somerset Capital Partners, HashKey, Borderless.
Growth and later stage: Insight Partners, Salesforce, 3M Ventures, Innovation Industries, Invest-NL, EQT Life Sciences.
Health and life sciences: Forbion, Heal Capital, Kreos Capital, Inkef.
Fintech and B2B SaaS: Finch Capital, Peak Capital.

One tip from my own fundraising: corporate investors move slowly, and they often ask for exclusivity or rights of first refusal. Read every term sheet with a lawyer who has seen VC deals before. The Venture Deals program I joined years ago taught me that the scariest clauses usually sit in the boring sections.

What are the most common mistakes founders make in the Netherlands?

I have watched hundreds of founders, both in accelerators and inside the Fe/male Switch game. These are the mistakes that cost the most time and money.

Copying Silicon Valley pitch style. Dutch investors dislike hype. Overpromising sounds unprofessional here. Show evidence and say plainly what you do not know yet.
Waiting for the “perfect” round size. The barbell pattern above shows that mid-size rounds are scarce. Plan your burn for a small round and treat bigger money as a bonus.
Hiring developers before testing demand. Expensive engineering teams built on untested assumptions are the fastest way to burn runway. Prove demand with no-code and AI first.
Ignoring IP until due diligence. Unclear ownership of code, designs or brand names can freeze a deal for months.
Treating grants as free money with no strings. Subsidies come with reporting duties and timelines. Track them in a system, or they become a hidden second job.
Staying in the Amsterdam bubble. Some of the biggest 2026 rounds happened in Eindhoven, Veldhoven and Wageningen. Travel. The country is small, and trains are fast.
Collecting badges instead of assets. Founders love accelerator logos. I say “Gamification without skin in the game is useless.” A program only matters if it leaves you with customers, contacts, prototypes or investor introductions.
Waiting for inspiration instead of building systems. Especially for women founders, my view is firm: “Women do not need more inspiration; they need infrastructure.” Playbooks, templates, AI agents and legal hygiene beat motivational events every time.

What does this news mean for freelancers and small business owners?

You do not need to raise millions to profit from this wave. Every funded startup spends money, and a large share goes to outside specialists. Here is where I see openings right now.

AI workflow consultants: SMEs see Lleverage and Custodea in the news and want similar automation at a smaller price. Package a fixed-price AI workflow audit for local businesses.
Technical writers and translators: chip and deeptech startups need English documentation, grant applications and investor materials. Hardware founders rarely enjoy writing.
IP and compliance helpers: help hardware teams set up file-sharing rules, trademark filings and NDAs before their corporate pilots.
Recruiters for deeptech: EUCLYD, Morphotonics and Invisix will hire engineers fast after big rounds. Specialist recruiters with Brainport networks win here.
Climate and agrifood service providers: lab space, regulatory paperwork and pilot customers matter to companies like New Dawn Bio, SolarDew and CIRCLE.

I run my ventures as parallel entrepreneurship, reusing knowledge, tools and networks between CADChain, Fe/male Switch and my AI tools. Freelancers can do the same. Build one service, then reuse the templates, contacts and AI agents for a second offer aimed at a neighbouring cluster.

Frequently asked questions about Dutch startups in 2026

How many startups are there in the Netherlands?

There are approximately 4,500 startups in the Netherlands, with about 1,000 new ones launched each year, according to figures cited by Seedblink from the McKinsey report on building a world-class Dutch startup ecosystem.

What was the largest Dutch startup round in 2026?

Among the rounds tracked by ProjectStartups, Wonderful’s $550M Series C in September 2026, backed by Insight Partners and Salesforce, is the largest. EUCLYD’s €200M+ Series A in Eindhoven follows.

Which Dutch startups became unicorns recently?

A unicorn is a privately held startup valued at $1 billion or more. DataSnipper reached unicorn status in 2024. Earlier Dutch success stories include Adyen, Booking.com, Mollie and bunq, with TomTom as one of the first big Dutch tech companies, founded in 1991.

Which sectors attract the most startup funding in the Netherlands?

In 2026 the largest rounds went to AI software and semiconductors. Climate tech remains strong, with Dutch green tech startups raising €4 billion in 2024. Fintech and health tech also hold heavyweights like Mambu, bunq and ViCentra.

Is Amsterdam a good place to start a startup?

Yes, for software, fintech and AI. Amsterdam-Delta startups have raised more than $86 billion since 2000, ranking third in Europe after London and Paris. Hardware founders should look closely at Eindhoven and Delft, while food and bio founders often do better in Wageningen.

What should you do before 2026 ends?

The Dutch startup scene in late 2026 rewards founders who move fast, stay honest about their numbers and treat AI as their first team. The money is concentrated in AI infrastructure, chips and climate deeptech, and small rounds are still available for founders who can show proof quickly. Everyone else risks getting lost among the three new startups launched every day.

I treat my startups like a strategic game. The goal is to collect information, assets and relationships faster than competitors, and failure is part of the data. Use this news the same way. Next steps:

Pick one cluster from this article that matches your skills and list five companies in it you could sell to or partner with.
Build one no-code test this month, a landing page or an AI workflow, and put it in front of ten real customers.
Write your investor list by check size, using the cheat sheet above.
Fix your IP and data hygiene before your next pitch or pilot.
Bookmark this roundup and compare it with next month’s Dutch funding news to spot which patterns hold.

The founders in this article did not wait for permission. They picked a hard problem, built proof and asked for money with clear numbers. You can start the same process this week, with a laptop, a few AI agents and the courage to talk to customers who might say no.

FAQ on Startups in the Netherlands Building Awesome Things in 2026

Why do Dutch startups win in regulated and workflow-heavy markets?

Dutch teams combine strong universities, English-speaking talent, compact networks and demanding customers. That mix pushes them to build products tied to daily work and technical bottlenecks. Start from one painful workflow, remove a costly step, simplify hard tech and sell internationally early. Read the July 2026 Dutch startup roundup.

Which Dutch biotech and sustainability startups raised money earlier in 2026?

Spring 2026 brought three notable rounds:

Laigo Bio: a €17M seed for SureTACs, which targets "undruggable" proteins behind cancer and autoimmune disease.
SOUS: €4M for AI tools that help independent restaurants compete with chains.
Enkei: €3M for waste-based alternatives to concrete, which causes roughly 8% of global CO₂ emissions.

See April 2026 Dutch funding news.

Where are the fintech opportunities in the Netherlands beyond neobanks?

Consumer banking is crowded with players like bunq, but gaps remain in compliance tooling, embedded finance, B2B payments, fraud detection and treasury software. Dutch founders understand regulated software well, so pick one compliance-heavy back-office task and automate it for SMEs. Explore Dutch fintech and deeptech strengths.

How should agritech founders design software for Dutch farmers?

Farming software fails when it ignores seasonal workloads, existing equipment, weather uncertainty and farmer trust. Co-design with growers, as Agurotech does with farmers and universities. Keep interfaces simple and offline-friendly, and pilot through a full growing season before scaling. Learn from agrifood data startups like Agurotech.

Are there funds focused on industrial and manufacturing startups in Europe?

Yes. Kompas VC launched a €160 million fund for regional manufacturing startups, a sign of growing European appetite for industrial ventures. Investors often underestimate founders who build IP protection, compliance and traceability into hardware. Yet these founders tend to survive funding winters better than hype-driven software. Read about industrial startup funding.

How can Dutch startups tap European grants and expand across the EU?

Treat the Netherlands as a launchpad, not a ceiling. Combine national schemes with EU programs like Horizon Europe and the EIC Accelerator, and register early on the funding portals. Test a second market such as Germany or Belgium within 18 months. Use the European Startup Playbook.

Which Dutch startups became unicorns alongside DataSnipper?

Hospitality tech platform Mews joined DataSnipper as a new unicorn at the start of 2024. Both serve professional, workflow-heavy niches: audit automation and hotel operations. Founders aiming for billion-dollar outcomes should study how both companies dominated one vertical before expanding internationally. Read Included VC's Dutch tech powerhouse analysis.

How does the Netherlands rank in Europe for new startup creation?

The Netherlands ranks fifth in the EU for founding pace, alongside Estonia, Ireland, Luxembourg and Denmark, and eighth across Europe. McKinsey projects around 900 startups per million residents by 2030. Expect denser competition and more acquisition opportunities, so differentiate early. Check Seedblink's guide to building a Dutch tech startup.

Which government initiatives support startups in Amsterdam?

StartupDelta and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency anchor public support. Amsterdam also runs its Circular Strategy, Climate Neutral 2050 plan and Amsterdam Smart City program. Founders with circular, energy or mobility solutions should pitch the city as a pilot customer, since these programs seek testbeds. See Seedblink's overview of Dutch innovation hubs.

Which Dutch startups are the best places to work in 2025-2026?

LinkedIn's Top Startups list ranks companies on talent investment and career growth. Besides Carbon Equity, it includes hard seltzer pioneer STËLZ, Workwize and Monday Merch. Job seekers and freelancers should target these teams, because hiring momentum usually signals fresh budgets for outside specialists. Browse LinkedIn's Top Startups in the Netherlands.

Violetta Bonenkamp

Violetta Bonenkamp, also known as Mean CEO, is a female entrepreneur and an experienced startup founder, bootstrapping her startups. She has an impressive educational background including an MBA and four other higher education degrees. She has over 20 years of work experience across multiple countries, including 10 years as a solopreneur and serial entrepreneur. Throughout her startup experience she has applied for multiple startup grants at the EU level, in the Netherlands and Malta, and her startups received quite a few of those. She’s been living, studying and working in many countries around the globe and her extensive multicultural experience has influenced her immensely. Constantly learning new things, like AI, SEO, zero code, code, etc. and scaling her businesses through smart systems.

Startups in the Netherlands building awesome things News | November, 2026 (STARTUP EDITION)