The tech startup ecosystem in the Netherlands is in excellent health and is becoming home to a considerable number of unicorns. As per a recent report by NRC along with Dealroom, there are twelve unicorns in the Netherlands.
Well, this puts the country in the fourth position in Europe trailing behind France with 13 unicorns, Germany with 30 unicorns, and the United Kingdom with a whopping 74 unicorns. Adding to this, the startup ambassador Prince Constantijn stated that the Netherlands should produce two more unicorns from this year onwards. If you are wondering about the 12 unicorns in the Netherlands, then here we detail them.
Interxion
Founder: Bart van den Dries
Founded year: 1998
Why its hot: Interxion is a leading provider of carrier and cloud-neutral colocation data centre services in Europe. The company services a wide range of customers with its 52 data centres across 11 European countries. Its uniformly designed and energy efficient data centres provide customers high levels of security and uptime for their mission-critical applications. Interxion has created connectivity, content, cloud, and finance hubs that foster growing customer communities of interest.
Adyen
Founders: Pieter van der Does, Arnout Schuijff
Funding: €293 million
Founded year: 2006
Why its hot: Adyen is a fintech unicorn that was built with the intention to simplify and accelerate global payments. While the existing payments technology comprises a patchwork of systems built on dated infrastructure, Adyen helps businesses grow and meet the changing requirements of the global businesses with its payment platform based on modern infrastructure. This infrastructure is connected to local payment methods and provides a unified experience as well as shopper data insights to merchants.
Crucell
Founder: Dinko Valerio
Founded year: 1993
Why its hot: Crucell is a global biopharmaceutical company aimed at brings meaningful innovation to healthcare. The company discovers, develops, manufactures, and markets products that combat major healthcare threats across the world. Crucell specialises in combating infectious diseases, which is a growing healthcare challenge. In 2011, vaccine developer Crucell was acquired by Johnson & Johnson, which takes the latter into this vaccine development and merged with Janssen Vaccines in 2014.
GlobalCollect
Founder: Jan Manten
Founded year: 1994
Why its hot: GlobalCollect was acquired by Ingenico Group, a French ATM machine maker in 2014. Ingenico Group leads the payment market for over three decades and provides smart, trusted, and secure payment solutions to empower commerce across in-store, on-mobile, and online channels. With its products and services, merchants can accept payments of any means from credit cards to any other alternative options so that consumers enjoy a seamless payment experience.
Flow Traders
Founders: Roger Hodenius, Jan van Kuijk
Founded year: 2004
Why its hot: Flow Traders is a leading global tech-enabled liquidity provider, which is specialised in Exchange Traded Products. The fintech company focuses on providing liquidity in financial products both on- and off-exchange across the world. It designs strategies publicly using available information and non-controversial, simple, and transparent order types.
Takeaway
Founder: Jitse Groen
Founded year: 2000
Why its hot: Takeaway is a leading online food delivery marketplace, which focuses on connecting consumers and restaurants via its platform. Its online marketplace matches both the supply and demand. Takeaway lets restaurant partners deliver food using its platform and applications. Furthermore, the food delivery marketplace also facilitates online payment process.
Coolblue
Founders: Pieter Zwart, Paul de Jong, Bart Kuijpers,
Funding: €140 million
Founded year: 1999
Why its hot: Coolblue is one of the largest e-commerce company in the Netherlands and Belgium with nine physical stores. It was once started as a student company and is now one of the fastest growing e-commerce companies. Coolblue provides expert advice and is focused on customer satisfaction. Recently, this Dutch e-commerce company included Augmented Reality within its app to let customers place a TV in their room before making a choice and ordering the same.
Acerta Pharma
Founders: Allard Kaptein, Tjeerd Barf
Funding: €11.8 million
Founded year: 2012
Why its hot: Acerta Pharma develops anti-cancer drugs. It achieved the unicorn status back in 2015. This company operates with the vision to combine unique covalent technology, cutting-edge science, and an experienced team to deliver novel targeted therapies for patients suffering from cancer. Acerta Pharma works in close collaboration with research groups in Astra Zeneca, and takes an approach to discover, develop and deliver targeted novel 1 transformational medicines for patients suffering from hematological malignancies.
Elastic
Founders: Shay Banon, Simon Willnauer, Steven Schuurman, Uri Boness
Funding: €147 million
Founded year: 2012
Why its hot: Elastic is a search company, which builds self-managed and SaaS offerings that make data usable in real-time and scalable for use cases such as site search, application search, logging, enterprise search, APM, security, metrics, business analytics, and more. Elastic is used by several global organisations include eBay, Cisco, Microsoft, etc. to power mission-critical systems.
GitLab
Founders: Sid Sijbrandij, Dmitriy Zaporozhets
Funding: €394 million
Founded year: 2014
Why its hot: GitLab is a complete DevOps platform, which is delivered as a single application that fundamentally changes the way development, security, and ops teams collaborate and develop software. GitLab helps teams improve the cycle time, reduce the development time and costs, and increase developer productivity. It is a fast-growing all-remote company with a team that works from anywhere across the world.
TomTom
Founders: Corinne Vigreux, Peter Frans Pauwels
Founded year: 1991
Why its hot: TomTom has grown into a leading global brand that attained the unicorn status after its IPO in 2005. Now, TomTom is synonymous with navigation cabinets in the car and it predominantly focuses on card and software development. It is one of the most extensive digital map databases and processes billions of data points on an everyday basis to maintain and scale numerous products and services.
Booking.com
Founder: Geert-Jan Bruinsma
Founded year: 1996
Why its hot: Booking.com is a booking site owned by Booking Holdings. It is one of the leading global e-commerce companies, which lets users book any type of accommodation. Booking.com operates with the one-stop solution to encourage people across the world to use it as a prime destination to book accommodation. It is available in 43 languages and provides over 28 million accommodation listings.
Main image picture credits: Takeaway.com
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