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Having held onto a strong fintech reputation, Amsterdam has been expanding its start-up success in other arenas.
Amsterdam is a hyper-connected centre for European tech start-ups. With a multilingual population and a strong cohort of universities in the city, it is primed with a strong talent pool.
Home to the world’s oldest stock exchange still in use (Euronext Amsterdam), the city has always been a strong player in the fintech arena, with some of its biggest success stories coming from the digital finance and payments sector.
Founded in 2006, Adyen has been referred to as a poster child for European fintech. The company has been backed by Iconiq Capital, the wealth management firm that handles investments for the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey, and in 2018 Adyen had a blockbuster IPO.
Meanwhile, well-known neobank Bunq also highlights Amsterdam’s success. Founded in 2012, the company has been going from strength to strength, raising €44.5m in a 2023 funding round, giving it a €1.65bn valuation.
However, the city also has a growing health, transportation and education start-up scene. So, who will be the next European darling to come out of the bicycle capital of the world? Here are a few to keep your eye on.
Crisp
Supermarket app Crisp was founded in 2018 by Tom Peeters, Michiel Roodenburg and Eric Klaassen.
The app allows country-wide customers to shop from more than 900 small-scale suppliers, to encourage a circular economy with less food waste. Its operating system aims to get food from farm to fork in the shortest possible time.
In 2022, the company raised €75m and a year later, it raised a further €35m in a Series C round to build a better food system. The latest funding even received backing from Adyen co-founder John Caspers.
Fastned
Founded in 2012 by Michiel Langezaal and Bart Lubbers, Fastned develops fast charging infrastructure for electric vehicles.
The company specialises in developing charging stations that allow drivers to charge their EV with up to 300km of range in 15 minutes.
Capitalising on the growing EV market, Fastnet has seen strong investment over the last number of years, having raised €150m in 2021, €75m in 2022 and more than €21.9m in 2023.
Framer
Framer is a no-code website builder founded by ex-Facebook employees Koen Bok and Jorn van Dijk approximately 10 years ago.
No-code and low-code platforms have been gaining steady traction in recent years, with Hamburg-based Heyflow and Irish start-up Imvizar just two examples riding the wave. Amsterdam-based Framer is also enjoying this success, aiming to tackle the divide between design and build when it comes to web design.
In 2023, the company raised €27m in Series C funding – bringing its total to $87m, which it put towards scaling its commercial teams across Europe and the US.
Recharge
Holding onto the fintech baton, Recharge is a prepaid payments business founded in 2010 by Dirk Ueberbach and Robin Weesie.
Most recently, the digital payments platform secured a €45m debt facility via a partnership with Dutch bank ABN AMRO to advance its mergers and acquisitions strategy.
Recharge raised €22m in 2019 and a further $35m funding round in 2021. In 2023, Recharge acquired Startselect, a Dutch digital gift and gaming cards company, in an effort to strengthen its digital voucher services.
Roboat
An ideal start-up for the city known as the ‘Venice of the North’, Roboat is an autonomous boat start-up that spun out of MIT and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS) in 2023.
In six years of research, the project focused on developing autonomous navigation technology for boats for urban and inland waterways. The company has developed AI software to navigate the traffic-heavy inland Dutch waterways and can be integrated into new vehicles or retrofitted into commercial ships.
In 2021, Roboat’s technology reached the full-scale prototype stage and last summer, the company raised €550,000 in funding from Netherlands-based Lumo Labs and Shift Invest.
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