On March 4, 2015, Finn Hansen became the first recipient of the Dutch Startup Visa. Introduced on January 1, 2015, the Dutch Startup Visa is a ticket for non-European startup founders to set up their businesses in the Netherlands and put an end to the arduous process that startup founders had to go through to procure the Self-Employed Visa to start on their own in the Netherlands.
“With the introduction of the Dutch Startup Visa on January 1st, 2015, Holland now appears a much more attractive option for non-European entrepreneurs to set up shop,” Hansen wrote after receiving the visa.
Since its inception, the Dutch Startup Visa has been awarded to around 1,300 founders from outside the EU, EEA or Switzerland. Interestingly, 40 per cent of them are still in business and a decade after the first Dutch Startup Visa was granted, one can say that this visa has proved foundational to the success of the Netherlands as a leading ecosystem in Europe.
Every country aspires to be the hotbed of innovation, but bureaucratic red tape often makes it difficult to realise that dream. With the Dutch Startup Visa, the Netherlands showed its seriousness in making its borders open to innovators, creators, entrepreneurs, and extraordinary minds from non-European countries and a decade later, it is preparing to celebrate that success.
Start in the Netherlands
It is hard to miss the allure of starting in the Netherlands. From world-famous museums, canals, architecture, and bicycles to tulips, cheese, stroopwafel, soccer, and four-time F1 World Champion, the Netherlands has it all. For Denis Chernobaev, recipient of the Dutch Startup Visa in 2022, it wasn’t this allure that attracted him to the Netherlands but the sheer quest to start on his own.
Born in Russia, Chernobaev spent his entire adulthood there. “Practically all my life I lived there, except for a couple of years I spent working for a business in China,” he says.
In 2022, when the war started, Chernobaev saw the difficulty to continue his international business and decided to move to a more peaceful place. He chose the Netherlands, a place where his father had taught statistics and economics in the 2000s, to build an international business that will be less dependent on geopolitics. It also helped that Chernobaev’s brother, Eugene Kruglov, had built a startup called AppFollow in Helsinki, Finland but decided to move to the Netherlands with his family.
Despite the decision to move to the Netherlands, Chernobaev admits that it wasn’t easy. He found the procedure to be daunting and even considered moving to another place. However, he soon found help from an acquaintance participating in the Antler program in 2021. “He told me his story at Antler and how they could help with a visa in the Netherlands, fund the startup, connect with a co-founder, et cetera,” Chernobaev remembers.
At first, he moved only for the program, but when Antler decided to invest in Getplace.io, the startup co-founded by Chernobaev with Sergey Scherbak, he saw the opportunity to set up his startup in the Netherlands. He got the Startup Visa, and even became a resident.
Meet the facilitator
The facilitators like Antler play a major role in the success of the Dutch Startup Visa. Chernobaev says when he applied to Antler, they replied quickly and he had his first interview with them within a day or two. This speed and Antler’s invitation to join their Residency program, Chernobaev says, was a major draw for him.
“And from that moment, our journey to the Netherlands began,” he tells me, reliving that day, before adding that he came to Amsterdam only two months later.
In 2015, when the Dutch Startup Visa was introduced, there were only eight active facilitators and fast-forward to 2024, the number is 48, and it includes the likes of Rockstart, TNW, LUMO Labs, Startup Bootcamp, Erasmus Centre for Entrepreneurship, among others.
Unlike the Self-Employed Visa, the Startup Visa sees the ability of the founder and requires a facilitator to back their idea. For Chernobaev, that facilitator was Antler, a venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage investments. He says applying for the Dutch Startup Visa became “super easy” after he joined Antler’s residency program.
“I just collected a couple of documents, put them on Google Drive, sent them, and then I gave my biometrics, and in three months, I got the visa,” he adds.
While Antler made it easy for Chernobaev to get the Startup Visa, he says it would have been harder without a facilitator. He argues that Antler was more than a facilitator, since it also backed Getplace.io and helped with early-stage funding, a key challenge facing Dutch startups.
A hyper-location analytics platform
When he joined Dodo Pizza in 2016, the pizza chain only had 80 stores in Russia, a small number for the expanse of the country. Chernobaev was tasked with building an internal system that helped the pizza chain choose the best location for their next pizzeria. While there were readily available solutions in the market for such analytics, they weren’t good enough. At that time, he saw the opportunity to build a product that factors in the right data to use, how to use that data, and even make all the calculations. This helps leaders find the right location for their brick-and-mortar businesses.
This data-based software solution became Getplace.io and with Amsterdam as its hub, the startup is helping businesses in markets like the UK, Qatar, Dubai, Bulgaria, Poland, Spain, and even the United States. He says they see their solution being used in three areas: studying how to enter a new market, business analytics on how a store will perform in an existing location, and analytics to study how they are performing in their market against competitors.
As a B2B SaaS company, Chernobaev says they have more than 300 clients in 10 different countries and has seen the revenues grow from around €10,000 in 2023 to €100,000 in 2024. The startup is projected to report revenue of around €400,000 in 2025 and the ambitions are clear. The startup aims to grow the business in Turkey, the UK, and Europe and in 2026, they plan to start their expansion in the US, where Chernobaev sees an opportunity 10 times bigger than all the European market.
With a solid foundation in the US, he says they can grow their revenue two or three times and once they reach that growth, he wants to go for their next funding round.
Dutch Startup Visa
“The Dutch Startup Visa is the easiest visa and one of the straightforward ways to get here,” says Chernobaev.
There is no denying that the Dutch Startup Visa and Antler’s role as a facilitator has played a key role in the growth and success of Chernobaev in the Netherlands. However, this success has not come without its fair share of challenges. While the rent in Amsterdam is high, like many other established tech ecosystems, he argues the tax is also very high. “You have to pay very high taxes in the Netherlands, but since you are a startup, it becomes difficult to pay yourself a couple of thousand euros just to cover the cost.”
The visa has morphed from its earlier beginning as a means to bring founders from the EU to a platform that turns innovative ideas into full-fledged businesses. While the first ten years of the Dutch Startup Visa is a moment to celebrate in the Dutch tech ecosystem, skyrocketing rent and higher taxes are likely to dominate the conversation.
However, as every company envisions being an AI company, the stakes are much higher. The next 10 years of the Dutch Startup Visa will have to evolve beyond offering entry into the country, and the integration of these startups and their founders could be the key to making the visa even more lucrative.
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