netherlands
(28)
Daybreak Ventures backs the space between an idea and a working business
Drones, donation campaigns and a hyperloop share room in this Dutch investor’s portfolio. The connecting thread is practical help - and the messy business of turning ambition into something people can use.
Sportinnovator’s real sport is getting ideas off the bench
A portable padel court, a shared ride to the stadium, a smarter training session. Inside the Dutch network that helps sports inventions find partners, money and a place to prove themselves.
Beround Spent a Decade Hunting Software Bugs. Now It Wants to Fix AI Adoption Before the Tools Arrive
The Dutch consultancy built its reputation on the unglamorous discipline of testing. That same habit now powers a people-first AI playbook that starts small, measures what matters and leaves room for a human to say no.
The Startup Teaching Horses to Talk Back
A horse can't tell you its left hind is off. Equestic's SaddleClip listens to the gait instead - and riders in 65 countries are now training to what the data says.
Philips Bet the Whole Company on Hospitals - Then a CPAP Recall Almost Broke It
It made light bulbs, then TVs, then the CT scanner in your local hospital. The story of how a Dutch electronics giant reinvented itself as a pure health-tech company - and nearly lost the bet.
Vestacy
Advent International carved four household cleaning icons out of Reckitt, handed them to a former Louis Vuitton chief, and told 3,000 people to act like founders. The result is Vestacy - a $4.8 billion bet that old brands can learn new speed.
Your Community Platform Is Either A Home Or A Listening Post
Open Social and CMNTY are both Dutch, both say they build community, and both are right - one hands you a network you own, the other turns a crowd's opinions into research data. Here is why the same word points at two very different businesses.
TOPdesk
TOPdesk helps busy service teams handle incoming requests, automatically assign tasks to the right people, and see who's doing what - so you can stay ahead instead of just keeping up.
Upvoty
Collect feedback with beautiful voting boards, ship features with a powerful roadmap, and let AI agents decide what to build next.
Trengo
One inbox for every channel, and AI agents built to handle the conversations nobody wants to answer twice.
ProductLift
The complete platform for gathering feedback, prioritizing features, and sharing your roadmap, powered by AI.
CMNTY Built Online Communities to Listen, Not to Sell
Long before Discourse threads and Patreon tiers, a Dutch company was turning online communities into listening posts for brands. CMNTY has spent nearly two decades using customer conversations as research nobody else could run.
Mopinion
You know what users are doing - now find out why.
Zoho won't buy Trengo - it wired into it instead
The bootstrapped giant that famously refuses to acquire found a quieter way to work with a Dutch omnichannel upstart: an open API, a shared inbox, and a customer record that finally lives in one place.
Why Trengo Keeps Picking Fights With a $1.7B Unicorn
Front raised more than $200 million and a unicorn valuation on the promise of a shared inbox. Trengo, bootstrapped out of Utrecht, decided the future was WhatsApp - and started aiming straight at it.
Axoniq
Axoniq is a Dutch-founded enterprise software company that builds the backend infrastructure for event-sourced systems and, increasingly, for enterprise AI. Born from the open-source Axon Framework created by Allard Buijze in 2009, the company provides an event-sourcing platform - Axon Framework, Axon Server, and an agent runtime - that gives applications a complete, replayable memory of every decision they make. That memory is the foundation for auditability, explainability, and observability that regulated industries need before they trust AI in production. Axoniq's tools are downloaded 70 million+ times and used by more than 65,000 organizations worldwide.
Shapeways
Shapeways is an Eindhoven-based 3D printing and digital manufacturing company that lets individuals and businesses upload 3D files and receive custom parts made through additive manufacturing, CNC machining and injection molding. Founded in 2007 inside Royal Philips, it pioneered a public 3D printing service and marketplace, went public via SPAC in 2021, filed for bankruptcy in 2024, and was relaunched in December 2024 by its original founders and the profitable Eindhoven factory team with a renewed focus on B2B customers, sustainability and operational stability.
Edwin van Rest
Edwin van Rest is the co-founder and CEO of Studyportals, the Eindhoven-based platform that helps students compare study programs across borders. He started the company in 2007 with two engineering friends after his own year abroad in Japan showed him how hard it was to find information about international study options. Today Studyportals lists hundreds of thousands of programs, reaches millions of students a month, and van Rest is a recognized voice in international education, a former EAIE Rising Star Award winner, and chair of the EAIE Marketing & Recruitment Expert Community.
Adyen
Adyen is a Dutch financial technology company that provides a single, end-to-end platform for accepting payments online, in apps, and in stores. Founded in Amsterdam in 2006, it operates as a licensed acquiring bank and connects merchants directly to card networks and local payment methods across the globe. Adyen powers checkout and embedded financial products for enterprises such as Uber, Spotify, eBay, Booking.com, McDonald's, and Microsoft, and is publicly listed on Euronext Amsterdam.
Marleen Vogelaar
Marleen Vogelaar is a Dutch entrepreneur who co-founded Shapeways in 2007, helped build it into the world's largest 3D printing marketplace, left in 2014 to start the on-demand apparel company Ziel, and then returned to Shapeways as CEO in December 2024 after the company went bankrupt - buying back the brand and rebuilding it around a leaner, B2B, profit-first model. A former competitive heptathlete and industrial engineer, she is known for pairing operational discipline with an insistence that a company's mission should not be hostage to its investors, an idea she put into practice by converting Ziel to steward-ownership.
Muhammad Asad Tanwir
Muhammad Asad Tanwir is a Netherlands-based technical project manager and software architect with more than a decade building and shipping enterprise software. He moves fluently between the whiteboard and the codebase: ecosystem architecture, cloud transformation, DevOps and pre-sales on one side, hands-on Angular, .NET, C#, Azure and SQL on the other. After roughly six years at Wiseman Innovations he has been working on AI-driven projects, including a recent stretch in Riyadh tied to Saudi technology firm Azm Development, where a colleague publicly called him the company's biggest gem.
Hidde de Vries
Hidde de Vries is a Dutch front-end, design systems and web accessibility specialist who works on web standards for the Dutch government and sits on the W3C's Advisory Board. A co-editor of WCAG and WCAG-EM and a former Mozilla, W3C and Sanity contributor, he writes prolifically at hidde.blog about making technology work for humans, and is a regular conference speaker across Europe.
At Home (WelcomeAtHome)
WelcomeAtHome is a residential property management company based in Eindhoven that maintains and manages hundreds of high-quality homes for short- and long-term rental across the south of the Netherlands. It handles the full lifecycle of letting a home - tenant screening, key handovers, inspections, maintenance coordination, and administration - so that, in its own words, both tenant and landlord benefit when real estate is really well arranged.
Kees Hertogh
Kees Hertogh is Vice President of Public Sector & Healthcare Marketing at Microsoft, based in Redmond, Washington. A Netherlands-born executive who joined Microsoft via the 2002 Navision acquisition, he has spent over two decades at the company rising from product management on Microsoft Dynamics AX through to VP-level leadership over the global marketing strategy for Microsoft's healthcare, life sciences, education, and government verticals. He is the primary public face of Microsoft Dragon Copilot - the AI clinical workflow assistant reaching 100,000+ clinicians - and a prolific industry blogger and conference speaker on responsible AI in healthcare.
Kim Kelderman
Kim Kelderman is the President and CEO of Bio-Techne Corporation, a global life science tools and diagnostics company headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota. With over 30 years of healthcare and life sciences experience, Kelderman rose through the ranks at Bio-Techne after joining in 2018 to lead the Diagnostics and Genomics segment, where he doubled the spatial biology business and commercialized the ExoDx Prostate test. A native of the Netherlands educated at Hogeschool Heerlen and Columbia Business School, he previously held executive roles at Thermo Fisher Scientific and Becton Dickinson. He became CEO on February 1, 2024, succeeding Chuck Kummeth.
Rohan Marfatia
Rohan Marfatia is the CEO of DataCRaiM, Inc. (formerly Beround), a technology consulting firm specializing in Data, AI, and CRM solutions for equipment leasing, finance, and MedTech/healthcare sectors. With over 20 years of experience across India, the UK, the Netherlands, and the United States, he has built a career at the intersection of enterprise technology and human-centered leadership. A TEDx and keynote speaker, President of IAMCP Northern California, and a 2024 Fremont mayoral candidate, Marfatia is also running for Alameda County Supervisor in 2026. He holds an MBA from Washington University in St. Louis and an engineering degree from Sardar Patel University.
Maarten Grootendorst
Maarten Grootendorst is a psychologist-turned-ML engineer at Google DeepMind, best known for creating BERTopic, KeyBERT, and PolyFuzz - open-source NLP tools with over 15 million combined downloads. Co-author of the Amazon #1 bestseller 'Hands-On Large Language Models' (O'Reilly, 2024) with Jay Alammar, he runs the 'Exploring Language Models' newsletter with 2M+ views and has taught 50,000+ students on DeepLearning.AI. His work bridges the worlds of psychology and AI, making complex language model internals accessible through strikingly visual guides.
Abdul Ahad
Abdul Ahad is a data consultant and TEDx speaker based in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, with over seven years of experience building data infrastructures for small and medium organisations across e-commerce, insurance, energy, and finance. He is the founder behind KYD Analytics and holds the philosophy of 'Bringing Data and Humans Together' - believing the human element matters more than the tool. In November 2024, he delivered a TEDxEindhoven talk titled 'Why aren't people voting anymore?' exploring how community bonds and incentivisation could revitalise democratic participation. A lifelong learner who codes, consults, and speaks on the stage.