“Amsterdam is a metropolis – with less than 1 million inhabitants,” said Ferdinand Goetzen, CEO of Amsterdam-based digital customer insight company Reveall. That, in a nutshell, is how Amsterdam has become a tech powerhouse, with unicorns like Booking.com and Adyen, and an impressive crop of sustainability-focused startups. The city has the advantages of being a medium-sized city – efficient public services, cycleability and a close-knit business community – but in the same breath it is instinctively outward-looking, dynamic and business-friendly.
The inhabitants of Amsterdam speak impeccable English, Schiphol airport is the third busiest in the EU and from 2020 the city will have a direct Eurostar connection with London. As part of a business cluster known as the Randstad – which also includes Utrecht, The Hague and Rotterdam and ranks third in Europe in terms of productivity – it’s not surprising that Amsterdam’s startup scene is thriving; its tech companies are worth a total of $230 billion as of July 2022, according to Dealroom. It doesn’t hurt that some of Europe’s top rainmakers — including conference-cum-coworking space brand The Next Web — are calling the city home. Meet the Amsterdam movers and shakers.
Jorn Eiting van Liempt and Joost Kamermans, co-founders of recycling platform Senons.Thanks to Senons
TestGorilla
TestGorilla thinks resumes are dead, or at least they should be. Founded in 2019 by former Bain & Company consultants Wouter Durville and Otto Verhage, the company runs a platform that provides companies with skills tests designed to streamline hiring by showing the cream of the crop to job applicants. “We have a full test development team in-house and we also rely on subject matter experts,” explains Claudia Baijens, head of international development at TestGorilla. “But we think you should not only look at job-specific skills, but also test cognitive skills, such as logic and math. The outcome of that combination of testing is the best prediction of whether someone will be successful on the job.” The company has 70 employees (100 new people are in the pipeline — all to be hired through TestGorilla’s own testing, Baijens says), and it serves 5,000 customers in 120 countries. Investors have also shown interest; in June, TestGorilla raised $70 million in a Series A round led by Atomico and Balderton Capital, bringing total funding to $81.2 million, according to Crunchbase. testgorilla.com
senons
Founded in 2019 by Joost Kamermans and Jorn Eiting van Liempt, Senons is a platform that connects companies that want to dispose of waste with people who can use it – i.e. the circular economy – which is much better in these times of trade disruptions and climate crisis. than landfills or incinerators. “Companies open our app and tell us: ‘I have this kind of waste,’” Kamermans explains. “Depending on location, volume and type of waste, we select the best solution for transport. Then we match them with who can use their waste as input for their production process.” Users pay Seenons a subscription fee, but for certain materials they can earn money back from buyers. Seenons’ 50-person team is constantly looking for companies that can use niche junk: orange peels are used to make liqueurs and avocado seeds can dye fabrics. The biggest unresolved challenge? The human waste from hospitals. “So we cut off your leg, right? That leg is currently being burned,” says Kamermans. “But there must be better things to do with it.” seenus.com
story
Overstory, funded at the end of 2018 by Indra den Bakker and Anniek Schouten, monitors trees by combining satellite imagery and machine learning to monitor deforestation, prevent forest fires and prevent damage to infrastructures and electricity grids from falling trees. To teach its AI to recognize and assess a wide range of tree species in different growth and health states, Overstory initially relied on its own customers’ data. “The forest industry has a lot of data on trees that they have been collecting for years, even centuries. And we got it from them to train our algorithms,” says den Bakker. “Over time, we also started collecting our own data. Now we have our own arborists who do field work, we even have customers who do field work.” Overstory’s team has grown to 34 employees across Europe and North America, and the company has raised $5.9 million in funding to date. overstory.com
the manufacturer
Launched in 2018 by Kerry Murphy, Amber Slooten and Adriana Hoppenbrouwer-Pereira, The Fabricant attended the metaverse party early on. The company profiles itself as a fashion house that designs ‘digital clothing’ for online avatars. In 2021, the company made its meta pivot clear with the launch of The Fabricant Studio, a platform where users can customize virtual garments and store them as NFTs on the gaming blockchain Flow. The goal is to help people build their ‘wardrobe for the metaverse’. The company has raised $14 million in funding to date, the majority in an April 2022 Series A round led by actor-turned-VC Ashton Kutcher. thefabricant.com
Terraform
Founded in 2021 by Salar al Khafaji and Sebastiaan Visser, both from a stint at Palantir after it acquired their previous startup Silk, Terraform aims to disrupt construction through robotics and software. The idea is to create smart machines that can fully automate construction on site and thus reduce costs. This should usher in an era of affordable housing without sacrificing aesthetics (robots would produce intricate designs at no extra cost), while improving efficiency, safety (no human workers would be injured) and durability. Amid a flood of remote-first startups, Terraform makes it a point to let its employees work full-time from its central office in Amsterdam. terraform.ai
Test Gorillas Otto Verhage and Wouter Durville.Thanks to TestGorilla
optical fiber
Fiberplane founder Micha Hernandez van Leuffen has a successful track record in the tech industry, having sold his previous startup to Oracle in 2017. Three years later, he launched a new company focused on creating remote, collaborative work tools aimed at IT professionals solving technical incidents, such as online failures or application bugs. At the end of 2021, the company employed 13 people from its Amsterdam office and from the UK, Germany, Denmark and the United States. In September 2021, Fiberplane raised an $8.8 million seed round co-led by Crane Venture Partners and Notion Capital. fiberplane.dev
SingularityNET
SingularityNET, a notable survivor of the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) craze of 2017, aims to use crypto’s decentralized structure to democratize artificial intelligence and ensure the AI singularity takes place on a network of people, not in the lab from a technology giant. Created by AI developer and thinker Ben Goertzel and robotics entrepreneur David Hanson, the company has created an “AI marketplace” where developers can build AI apps that leverage decentralized blockchain technology. In addition to the funds raised in its ICO — $36 million in the airborne cryptocurrency — SingularityNET and its sister organization SingularityDAO also secured $25 million from alternative investment firm LDA Capital in May 2022. singularitynet.io
Hadrian
Launched in 2021 by a quartet of cybersecurity experts – Roger Fischer, Olivier Beg, Tijl Van Vliet and Maurice Clin – Hadrian is a security firm that has taken a “hacker’s eye” approach to helping clients detect and address vulnerabilities in their IT systems. Instead of focusing on what a client company thinks its weak spots are, Hadrian’s six-person hacking team starts looking for outside entry points, as a real attacker would. The company raised a $2.6 million pre-seed round from early-stage venture capital outfit Village Global in 2021, and a $10 million seed round from Germany’s HV Capital in June 2022. hadrian.io
point
One of the most successful European micromobility companies, Dott was founded in 2018 by French-born entrepreneurs Maxim Romain and Henri Moissinac, both formerly of Chinese bike-sharing giant Ofo. Today, Dott has a fleet of 40,000 scooters and 10,000 electric bicycles in 17 cities across Europe and has offices in 12 countries. The company prides itself on both sustainability (it powers all of its vehicles with renewable energy) and its ability to win over regulators, having obtained hard-to-obtain licenses to operate in London and Paris. It has also raised $210.8 million in funding to date. ridedott.com
crunchy
Crisp, an online supermarket focused on high-quality, seasonal fresh products, was launched in 2018 by Eric Klaassen, Michiel Roodenburg and Tom Peeters. Available in the Netherlands and Belgium, the company’s business model is based on a marriage of quality and convenience, supported by partnerships with local food producers (over 600 in the Netherlands alone, but closing deals across Europe is the bigger plan). ). Crisp is also committed to sustainability, strives for zero food waste and uses an electric fleet for its deliveries. To date, the company has raised $46 million in four funding rounds. crisp.nl
