The Netherlands' startups and scaleups to watch in 2021

The supermarket app, which doesn't charge customers for 100% electric delivery, is close to household-name status in the Netherlands. Indeed, it was largely responsible for Amsterdam's record funding year in 2019 when it raised €250m in a round led by the Dutch bank ABN AMRO and NPM Capital.

In November 2020, Dutch supermarket chain Edeka announced its intention to double its stake in Picnic to get a better grip on its international strategy.

Cloud communications company MessageBird wasn't always heading down the venture capital route: it was bootstrapped for six years, although now has some of the biggest names in VC, including Accel, Atomico and Y Combinator, on its cap table.

Read more: MessageBird raises $200m at unicorn valuation for fresh acquisition spree

Though it’s not the only payments unicorn on this list, Amsterdam's Mollie is focusing on small and medium-sized business customers.

It's also hoping to win customers from the likes of Stripe by being better tailored to the needs of European businesses, with local language customer service and payment methods.

In March 2021, it announced a new hire in Shane Happach, who joins as CEO after more than a decade at Worldpay. Happach told Sifted he has been in discussions to join Mollie since the summer of last year – roughly the same time that the company secured a €90m Series B investment.

Gaston Aussems, who had served as Mollie’s CEO since 2013, surprised observers last year by leaving the company shortly before the announcement of its Series B raise – which had conferred a ‘unicorn’ valuation on the firm.

Mollie has expanded into the UK market in recent weeks. In a crowded and heavily capitalised merchant payments market, Happach thinks his new employer’s European roots to be a key differentiator. He said that while the likes of Stripe and PayPal are trying to “cover the whole world”, Mollie is focused on hyper-localisation.

Lab-grown meats all started with Mosa Meat, which unveiled the first ever lab-grown burger in 2012. Since, they’ve brought production costs down from a whopping €250k per burger to €9 — and this is the year they’ve been waiting for. Back in 2019, they revealed that their plans were to have affordable beef products on the market by 2021.

But now they’ve got competition — including in fellow Dutch startup Meatable, and UK-based Higher Steaks. Read all about it: What’s cooking in Europe’s lab-grown meat startups?

The VanMoof bike is a thing of beauty. To see one is to want one. The only drawback, as far as the Sifted team are concerned, is that they cost around €3,000 at least.

Still, biking enthusiasts are seemingly willing to pay for quality and a range of gadgets that come with it.

The bike makes a range of sounds to communicate with you, from powering up to a growl if you try to move it when it’s locked. You can control power, check its charge and even the bike’s location all from your phone. It's also hard to steal, with stealth locking features and inbuilt GPS.

Two bike frames are offered – the S and the X – and these can be bought as regular bikes or as ebikes.

VanMoof (pronounced VanMoaf) is the brainchild of two Dutch brothers, Taco and Ties Carlier. The pair founded the company in 2009. Both came from outside the bike industry, which has helped them (they say) come to the world of bike design with fresh eyes. They see Tesla and BMW as competitors, not other bikes.

The 10-year-old company had had success with raising money from crowdfunding. One campaign in 2017 raised €2m in a week. In April 2019, the company raised €2.5m in just 12 hours.

At the same time, VanMoof announced it had sold 11,000 of its electric S2 and X2 city bikes. The company added that the sales –worth nearly €30m – were generated through its website and its eight standalone stores.

The broader trend is that ebike sales are booming. One million e-bikes were sold in Germany in 2018, a year-on-year increase of 36%. And in The Netherlands, e-bike sales have overtaken non-electric bike sales.

When WeTransfer launched in 2009 the Dutch startup did something seemingly impossible — it made file sharing cool.

The team created a striking aesthetic for its site, in part by giving away advertisement space to artists, and allowed users to send files for free without any irritating registration.

The result was that, even if the service was technically no better than rivals such as Box or Dropbox, creatives flocked to the site, which has since seen rapid growth. Today, WeTransfer has more than 50m users sending 1.5bn files every month.

In 2019 the company announced a €35m secondary funding (meaning no new money was raised by WeTransfer but existing shareholders sold) in a round led by the European growth equity firm, HPE Growth. It would not release the valuation but said it was "significantly" higher than in 2015.

This is believable as the company is not only growing but has been profitable for six years. It makes money through a premium subscription service called WeTransfer Plus and selling advertising in the form of full-screen ads called wallpapers on Wetransfer.com.

It also has other services include content-sharing app Collect (claiming 4 million monthly users), sketching tool Paper (which has had 25 million downloads) and collaborative presentation tool Paste (which claims 40,000 active teams).

WeTransfer also makes a lot of its quasi-social mission. It says it allocates up to 30% of its advertising inventory and “billions of impressions” to support and spotlight up-and-coming creatives, and causes, such as spearheading campaigns for social issues.

At a recent event hosted with Sifted and Second Home in London, Damian Bradfield, cofounder and chief creative officer of WeTransfer, said that the decision to show one big and good-looking advert rather than many banner ads went against the grain back in 2009, but has been key to the company’s success.

“This is central to our image,” said Bradfield.

Although it’s falling just behind escooter startups Tier and Voi in the UK, Dott procured the coveted Paris licence last year. In these times, it's still all to play for.

Read more: Uber-backed Lime and Europe’s Dott and Tier win coveted Paris scooter licence

The online fashion marketplace is making a real name for itself in tackling fast fashion’s huge clothing waste problem. It helps clothing brands sell end-of-season collections otherwise unsold, which account for around 10% of seasonal production on average. So far, it’s won over 200 brands, from Reiss to Pepe Jeans — and 1m registered customers.

In May 2020, it raised €24m in a round led by Eight Roads Ventures — which it will use to fuel its international expansion, including a launch in the UK last year.

Read our coverage below:

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Welcome to the decade of purpose, says new Index Ventures partner

Otrium takes on fashion’s excess stock problem

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BUX is the largest neobroker in all of Europe — a milestone it reached in July 2020 when it reached 300k users after launching the app in Belgium and France.

It has two core products: BUX Zero for stocks and ETFs, and BUX Crypto for cryptocurrency trading. In 2020, its user base grew to 350k. It’s certainly benefited from the recent crypto boom, with a 50% increase in new users since December 1 2020, and a 500% increase in average daily trades during the same period. BUX Zero is available in the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, France and Belgium and BUX Crypto is available in another four European countries.

Its latest funding round was in 2019, when it raised €11.4m from firms including Velocity and Koltzbrinck Ventures. In total, it’s raised €35m at a valuation of €76m post money.