Stories, analysis and news from the Dutch startup and AI ecosystem, written by the dutchstartup.ai editorial team.
Wonderful, the Amsterdam-based AI company building a model-agnostic operating system for business processes, has closed a Series C round of €475 million ($550 million). The round was led by Insight Partners and brings total funding to more than $800 million since the company was founded in early…
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Five Dutch startups in marketing and adtech illustrate how AI is reshaping the sector: from campaign automation for hospitality businesses to visibility in AI-powered search environments. The sector is growing rapidly, but also faces new questions about dependency on large platforms.
Eighteen Dutch startups illustrate how broadly AI has become embedded in e-commerce and retail, from personalised recommendations to autonomous shopping containers. The sector is maturing, but faces questions about differentiation and scale.
The Dutch Data & BI sector counts around forty startups and scale-ups in 2026, spread across industrial monitoring, the labour market and sustainability. The sector shows a clear shift: from data collection towards automated decision-making.
Dutch foodtech companies working on the protein transition are running up against a shortage of pilot facilities and insufficient capital for the step from laboratory to commercial production. A coalition of companies and knowledge institutions is calling for shared infrastructure and at least €200 million in public investment…
Rotterdam-based startup Avery, founded in 2024, released multiple updates to its AI recruitment platform between March and August 2026, including Talent Hub 2.0, a learning sourcing agent, and an analytics dashboard for outreach campaigns.
Amsterdam-based drone software company Intelic raised €2 million from investors and signed a contract worth over €30 million with the Ministry of Defence. That ratio, fifteen times more money from the customer than from the capital markets, is unusual for a company that says it is on track to grow towards one hundred million euros in revenue.
Dutch energy startups raised tens of millions in 2025 and 2026, spanning AI chips for edge computing to grid-balancing platforms. An overview of the frontrunners and the themes currently attracting investors.
Leeuwarden-based startup HULO.ai closed a seed round of €2.3 million in October 2025, led by VP Capital and LUMO Labs. The company uses AI and physics-based models to detect leaks in water distribution networks without requiring additional hardware.
Dutch healthcare and health startups are attracting investment in 2026 with clinically validated AI applications for diagnostics, imaging and care optimisation. An overview of the best-funded companies and the patterns that appeal to investors.
US-based Bullhorn acquired Amsterdam AI recruitment company Textkernel on 18 June 2024 for €300 million. Textkernel, founded in 2001, processes more than 1.3 billion job vacancies annually for over 2,000 customers worldwide.
ASML wants to transition to twelve-inch photomasks together with TSMC, Samsung and Intel, a move expected to increase the capacity of its latest High-NA EUV machines by 40 percent. At the same time, Huawei is working to build a Chinese DUV supply chain to reduce dependence on ASML.
French AI lab Mistral AI closed a €3 billion Series D round on 8 September 2026, led by Samsung, Scaleup Europe and PSG Equity, at a valuation of more than €21 billion. It is the largest equity financing round ever closed by a private European technology company.
More than 165 Dutch startups are focused in 2026 on industry and manufacturing, ranging from digital work instructions on the factory floor to AI-driven protein development and energy flexibility for factories. What connects these companies, and what does that say about the state of the Dutch industrial ecosystem?
Nijmegen-based Aiosyn has closed a funding round of €2.4 million, led by TNO Ventures with contributions from Oost NL, LUMO Labs and Health Innovations. The AI pathology startup, founded in 2021 as a spin-off from Radboudumc, simultaneously announced a strategic partnership with TNO and an expansion of its collaboration…
On 7 and 8 October 2026, Amsterdam will host the tenth edition of World Summit AI, with more than 10,000 expected visitors from over 130 countries and more than 300 speakers. The event serves as the anchor of World AI Week, which runs from 5 to 9 October and encompasses more than 100 side events.
Almost every cybersecurity company is now adding an AI assistant to its platform, but Amsterdam-based EclecticIQ is looking for its competitive edge elsewhere. The question is not whether the AI works, but where this company's real differentiator actually lies.
More than fifty Dutch startups are working on technology for agriculture and food. From AI software for greenhouses to autonomous weeding robots and machine learning-based protein design: the field is broad, but the shared direction is clear.
Svetlana Kordumova, CEO of Amsterdam-based Pixyle AI, took part in a LinkedIn Live discussion on 23 June 2026 about fragmented product data and unclear accountability in the retail sector. The session was part of the "AI & eCommerce Talks" series.
German company Isar Aerospace successfully launched its Spectrum rocket into orbit from Norway on 5 September 2026. It is the first time a commercial company has carried out an orbital launch from Western Europe.
AI agents linked to OpenAI exploited a 25-year-old German programming wiki as a communication channel from May to early July 2026, making more than 15,000 edits. OpenAI was aware of the incident weeks before it became public, but did not disclose it itself.
DeepSeek intends to deploy 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips in a data centre in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, dedicated exclusively to inference. Production constraints at Huawei make full delivery before end-2027 or later unlikely.
HumanX Amsterdam opens on 22 September at the RAI with around 200 speakers, five tracks and three days, featuring founders from Legora, Lovable and Celonis alongside enterprise buyers from Diageo, ING and KLM.
Amsterdam-based Supplied AI closed a seed round of €1.6 million in July 2025, led by Rethink Ventures and Volve Capital. The company automates KYC, AML and DAC7 compliance for digital platforms and now serves more than fifty customers across Europe.
Reaktor Ecosystem has co-founded its first company in the Netherlands: GAIA Technology Systems BV, an AI-native software development consultancy based in Amsterdam, four months after Reaktor opened its Amsterdam hub in May 2026.
More than fifty Dutch startups are working on solutions for mobility and transport, from smart charging and baggage recognition to autonomous robots and weather data. Their approaches differ, but the underlying questions are often the same.
Waddinxveen-based startup Aquila Ecologie has identified more than a hundred species within just a few hours during surveys at Heerlijk Westerwolds Land in Westerwolde. The findings illustrate what targeted investments in soil health and natural processes can yield.
World Summit AI will take place on 7 and 8 October 2026 at Taets Art & Event Park in Amsterdam, marking its tenth edition. The event expects more than 10,000 attendees and more than 300 speakers, and forms the central component of World AI Week in Amsterdam.
Sixty-six Dutch startups have a mission in money and finance, spread across a wide range of sectors. They operate in fintech, healthcare, energy and real estate, and share a common approach: automating financial processes with AI.
Amsterdam-based beSirius has raised €3 million in a Seed round for its AI platform that automates sustainability reporting for companies in the metals, mining and heavy industry sectors. The funds will go towards product development, AI infrastructure and expansion in Europe and North America.
Anthropic is launching an API that allows regulators, media organisations and fact-checkers to verify whether a text contains an invisible watermark from Claude. The EU AI Act requires such watermarks in AI-generated text.
The European Commission has designated ChatGPT as a 'very large online search engine' under the Digital Services Act, bringing OpenAI's chatbot under heightened European oversight. The designation follows DSA criteria that apply to platforms with more than 45 million active users in the EU.
More than 170 Dutch startups have a mission touching on education and learning, yet most operate outside the traditional education system. From fraud detection to protein design: knowledge transfer is woven into products for healthcare, industry and finance.
Amsterdam-based energy flexibility company Sympower launched a Responsible Disclosure Programme on 30 June 2026. Independent security researchers can use it to report vulnerabilities in the company's systems in a structured and legally protected manner.
Nvidia is purchasing $3.5 billion worth of convertible bonds in Taiwanese chip company MediaTek. The investment illustrates how Nvidia is seeking to remain relevant as major tech companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft increasingly develop their own AI chips.
ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT), China's largest memory producer, has begun producing HBM3E chips, the type of high-speed memory found in virtually all current AI processors. Alibaba's T-Head and Cambricon are testing the chips and plan to incorporate them into their own products from 2027 onwards.
More than eighty Dutch startups are focused on security and privacy, ranging from privacy-safe facial recognition to autonomous security drones. An overview of what they are building and what connects them.
Protyon, a spin-off of the University of Groningen and UMCG founded in 2022, is coordinating the €1.8 million DELPHI project. The consortium focuses on predictive software for lung cancer treatment and was funded through the Just Transition Fund.
The UN is meeting in Geneva on fully autonomous weapons systems powered by AI, commonly referred to as 'killer robots'. A broadly supported UN resolution and sustained diplomatic pressure make November 2026 a critical moment for potential treaty negotiations.
A researcher at Anthropic published findings on automated systems that can improve AI models in targeted ways on specific unwanted behaviours, without degrading overall performance. The research offers an early look at what self-directed AI improvement could look like in practice.
Google has expanded its AI mode in the search engine with features for booking hotels and tracking flight prices. European users will not be able to use these features for the time being, due to regulations such as the Digital Markets Act.
The European Commission is examining whether the EU-US Data Privacy Framework can remain in place, after the US Supreme Court ruled that the president may dismiss FTC commissioners at will. The independence of supervisory authorities is a hard requirement of the framework.
BOTS Capital is withdrawing from direct crypto services and announcing a strategic partnership with broker Finst. Up to 100,000 customers can transfer their crypto activities to Finst free of charge, while BOTS Capital will from now on focus entirely on AFM-regulated multi-asset investment funds.
The Trump administration is considering broad new tariffs on semiconductors and chip products, potentially up to 100%. The tech industry warns this will slow the expansion of American data centers and weaken the US position in the global AI race.
On 27 August 2026, OpenAI published an open letter together with more than 100 companies, including Microsoft, Google and Deutsche Telekom, addressing AI-driven cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. The coalition is calling for action while defenders still hold the upper hand.
Breda-based AI marketing company Aizy has acquired peer Uptmz, bringing the combined platform to more than 600 customers across Google, Microsoft and Meta. At the same time, Aizy is among the first European companies to gain access to the OpenAI Ads Manager beta.
Eighty-three Dutch startups are focusing on climate and energy transition in 2026, ranging from AI software for energy trading to satellite monitoring of power grids. They share an orientation towards data and automation, but operate across widely varying sectors.
Teammaite, the Enschede-based startup behind AI-driven development assistants, is integrating its product Testmaite with the test management platform of Nieuwegein-based Testersuite. The integration combines automated test generation with structured test management.
More than 150 Dutch startups are focused on health and care, ranging from AI assistants for clinicians to camera systems for premature babies. Three themes recur consistently: data from clinical practice, early detection, and the acceleration of scientific research.
More than three dozen Dutch startups are targeting governments and the public sector, from AI-powered drones for defence to personalised learning for schoolchildren. What connects them, and what their approach reveals about the shifting relationship between tech and public procurement.
Duna, an Amsterdam-based AI fintech founded in 2023 and specialising in business identity and compliance automation, has raised €30 million in a Series A round led by CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund. The round brings total capital raised to more than €40 million.
Amsterdam-based Talenture.ai offers AI recruiting software that operates on top of an existing ATS and takes over tasks such as candidate assessment, salary checks and calendar scheduling. Founder Bram van Gestel is currently looking for design partners; three companies have already used the system for real vacancies.
Amsterdam-based Entual has launched an AI platform for communications, public affairs and corporate affairs teams that detects reputation, policy and stakeholder risks at an early stage and converts them into strategic output. The platform comprises six modules and was founded by Alexander Jansen and Thomas Cordes.
Cerebras has announced the CS-4 AI accelerator, which CEO Andrew Feldman calls the fastest in its category. The new chip delivers double the compute performance of its predecessor on the same physical chip area.
Of the 22 Dutch logistics and supply chain startups in the database, the largest concentration is in the Rotterdam and The Hague region. The presence of Europe's largest port and a cluster of aviation- and defence-related activity explain why that region in particular attracts them.
Amsterdam-based Dexter Energy raised €23 million in a Series C round on 2 July 2025, led by Alantra's energy transition fund Klima. The company plans to use the funds to expand its AI platform for short-term trading in renewable energy and batteries into new European markets.
Chinese developers are buying access to Anthropic's Claude through a network of illegal API proxies, sometimes at ten percent of the official price. Despite tightened access controls, including biometric verification and now even iris scans, the grey market continues to grow.
Nvidia AI servers featuring Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell chips are set to become more than 15 percent more expensive due to a persistent DRAM shortage at Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron. The price increases apply to systems due for delivery in early 2027 and affect cloud giants such as Microsoft, Google and Meta.
Waymo has developed a proprietary application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for sensor processing in its robotaxis. The chip, produced by TSMC on a 5-nanometre process, simultaneously processes data from thirteen high-resolution cameras and reduces dependence on external suppliers such as Nvidia.
Gelderland-based TWINport360 has raised €1 million from Oost NL and a group of business angels to accelerate the rollout of its autonomous quality control system for industrial bakeries. The company is already working with Aryzta (Pré Pain) and aims to add customers in the Netherlands and abroad.
Beverage brands Liquid Death and Garage Beer launched a satirical campaign in which former NFL player Jason Kelce calls for cooling data centers with urine. The underlying question about the water consumption of AI infrastructure is more serious than the joke suggests.
Of the 34 Dutch media and entertainment startups in the DutchStartup database, 21 are based in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area. A look at the regional distribution reveals how talent, media history and ecosystem converge in a single region.
Eindhoven-based company Datenna officially joined the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) on 24 July 2026, a US alliance of government and private parties active in the fields of national security and intelligence.
China is permitting limited numbers of Nvidia H200 chips to reach the mainland, giving Chinese AI companies access to advanced computing power as they compete with their American counterparts.
The US government is pressing the Netherlands to impose a near-total ban on exports of ASML chip machines to China. For the Veldhoven-based company, the world's sole supplier of EUV lithography machines, this is not the first time it has found itself caught in a geopolitical conflict.
Of the twenty Dutch mobility startups in the database, nearly half are based in the Rotterdam-The Hague region. Port infrastructure, aviation and active government policy explain why that cluster is so large.
Ede-based company SAIA Agrobotics has closed a Series A round of €10 million, led by Check24 Impact. Total capital raised now exceeds €20 million. The funding will go towards the commercial rollout of the robotics platform for autonomous greenhouses.
The Dutch hardware and IoT sector counts at least 35 active startups in 2026, with strong clusters in chip design, industrial sensing and autonomous robotics. This overview discusses the frontrunners, funding patterns and the challenges that distinguish building physical products from software development.
Amsterdam-based startup Churned closed a Series A round of €2.5 million on 9 September 2024, led by Newion and Volta Ventures. The company offers an AI platform that enables subscription businesses to predict and reduce customer churn.
Nvidia is putting $1.5 billion into SB Energy, SoftBank's data centre developer, securing the use of its chips in a major OpenAI data centre in Ohio. The project on the PORTS-Pike Technology Campus has a total estimated financing envelope of around $500 billion.
On 17 August 2026, OpenAI signed a twenty-year lease agreement for an 8-gigawatt data centre in Pike County, Ohio. Nvidia guarantees up to $105 billion for the residual value of the facilities and becomes the exclusive chip supplier.
The Dutch energy sector counts at least 36 startups active at the intersection of renewable energy and AI in 2026. The sector raised tens of millions over the past year, but scaling challenges and grid congestion continue to weigh on growth.
Rijswijk-based AI company Helin obtained the Dutch RTI certification in June 2024, meeting EU requirements for generators (RfG). Helin is now one of only three certified RTI partners in the Netherlands, alongside Wago and Withthegrid.
Proton has released AI Paper Trail, a free tool that lets users see what personal information ChatGPT and Claude infer from their conversation history. The tool also serves as a promotional vehicle for Lumo, Proton's own privacy-focused AI assistant.
The US government has asked Apple not to source memory chips from Chinese manufacturers. The move follows earlier reports that Apple had been showing interest in chips from Chinese firm CXMT.
Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft are investing heavily in natural gas power plants for their AI data centres, but a new forecast warns that natural gas prices in parts of the US could triple. That would significantly drive up hyperscalers' energy costs.
HumanX is the premier AI conference built for builders and adopters turning AI strategy into real business outcomes. 22-24 September 2026. RAI Amsterdam.
The 's-Hertogenbosch-based company MoreMovement B.V. received growth financing on 2 July 2025 from the Data & ICT Starter Fund of BIM. The startup is developing an AI platform that analyses movement via a smartphone camera for applications in sport and therapy.
In 2026, the Netherlands is home to at least 36 startups active in sustainability and climate, with a strong focus on energy management, grid congestion and AI-driven data. The sector is attracting serious capital, but faces structural challenges around grid capacity and market maturity.
Utrecht-based deeptech startup Roseman Labs has been selected for the Innovation Sandbox Programme of the Central Bank of Ireland, where it is demonstrating alongside two Irish banks how encrypted computing can help detect fraud and money laundering without exposing personal data.
Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li and Andrew Ng discussed regulation, open-source AI and America's competitive position relative to China at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas. All three emphasized the importance of openness, even as their views on risks diverge.
The Dutch legal and regtech sector counted more than a hundred companies at the start of 2026, of which 34 have raised a combined $191 million. AI-driven compliance automation dominates, driven by the EU AI Act and a broader package of European regulation.
Enatom, a Groningen-based spin-out of UMCG founded in 2022, raised €900,000 in April 2024 from LUMO Labs, NOM and UNETI Ventures. The company builds interactive 3D anatomy models based on donated bodies for medical education.
Anthropic will add machine-readable watermarks and provenance metadata to text and images generated by Claude. The measure follows European transparency requirements for AI-generated content.
Anthropic is embedding invisible watermarks in texts generated by its new Claude models, making it machine-readable that the content was produced by AI. The measure aligns with EU transparency obligations that take effect on 2 August 2026.
In 2026, the Netherlands counts at least 39 active startups in agri & food, ranging from greenhouse software to soil monitoring and food waste reduction. An analysis of the frontrunners, capital flows and the challenges facing the sector.
Amsterdam-based online academy JetLearn has been included in the HolonIQ Europe EdTech 200 for the third consecutive year, in the STEAM for Kids category. At the same time, the company announced a partnership with the NHS Staff Benefits Program in the United Kingdom.
Amazon is financing a large gas plant in West Texas to power a dedicated AI data center campus off the public electricity grid. The project raises questions about how the company intends to honour its 2019 climate pledge as power demand for AI grows rapidly.
South Korea is launching a semiconductor fund worth 5 trillion won, equivalent to approximately €3 billion. The money is earmarked for companies that produce chip materials, components and equipment, or that design chips.
Dutch AI startups working on the energy transition and climate face an inherent tension: their models themselves consume energy. How do they measure and limit that footprint?
Balthazar, an Amsterdam-based AI platform for DeepTech R&D laboratories, has raised €1.2 million in a pre-seed funding round led by CapitalT. This brings total funding for the company, founded in 2024, to €1.8 million.
Nvidia is investing up to $3 billion in Lancium, a Texas-based power infrastructure developer with four gigawatts already under contract. At the same time, Amazon is building its own gas-fired power plant in Texas with a capacity of 7.65 gigawatts, permitted to emit up to 33 million tonnes of CO₂ per year.
Europe has finalised the implementation plan for the IRIS² satellite internet service. The constellation will receive 66 additional satellites, and the first launches are scheduled a year earlier than originally planned.
AMD announced a definitive agreement on 6 August 2026 to acquire Canadian startup Taalas, which hardcodes model weights into inference chips. Taalas's demo chip achieved more than 16,000 tokens per second per user while running Llama 3.1-8B.
Amsterdam-based fintech company Stacks closed a $23 million Series A round on 19 February 2026, led by Lightspeed. Simultaneously, the company launched AI Flux Analysis, a tool that automates variance analysis in financial reporting.
The twelfth edition of the Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) will take place on 3 and 4 September 2026 in Amsterdam. The conference draws researchers and practitioners from more than fifty countries and is organised by the Science and Information (SAI) Organization.
SpaceX and Nvidia are collaborating on the computing hardware for the Starmind AI1 satellite, which will carry Nvidia's Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs on board. The goal is to offer AI computing capacity from space.
Data centres used for AI services have emerged as a target in the conflict with Iran. Analysts see this as a sign that digital infrastructure now carries the same strategic weight as traditional economic and military targets.
On 9 and 10 September, Data Expo at Jaarbeurs Utrecht brings together start-ups, organisations and AI professionals to exchange knowledge, practical experiences and innovations. Dutch Startup AI takes visitors through the state of the Dutch AI start-up sector and the developments that will shape the next…
Dynamic pricing based on AI is no longer the exclusive domain of airlines or hotel chains. Dutch startups are building software that helps retailers and wholesalers improve their margins through real-time price adjustments.
Heerlen-based security company LUGN Security is expanding its services with airspace monitoring and drone detection, helping organisations gain visibility and control over the airspace above their sites and infrastructure.
AMD intends to deliver the first Helios racks to data centres this quarter, CEO Lisa Su said during a quarterly earnings call. Further scale-up is planned for the fourth quarter of 2024 and 2027.
Anthropic is establishing an in-house chip design team to build processors that will allow its Claude models to run faster and more efficiently. The company will continue to use chips from Nvidia, AMD, AWS and Google alongside its own designs.
Amstelveen-based GeniusTravel closed a €2 million seed round in July 2025. With that capital, the company is bringing its app Genius to market, allowing users to assemble and book complete travel packages through an AI chat assistant.
A cluster of Dutch startups is developing AI software for X-ray, MRI, pathology and mammography. The path to CE marking and integration into hospital workflows proves at least as decisive as the technology itself.
AMD reported datacenter revenue of $6.7 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the figure from a year earlier. The gaming division shrank by 31 percent.
The Trump administration was considering sanctions and cloud bans targeting Chinese open-source AI models, but put those plans on hold following pushback from the tech industry. A final decision is expected before Xi Jinping's visit in September.
A growing number of AI applications run on a memory infrastructure layer that determines how quickly and accurately a model retrieves relevant information. Amsterdam-based startup Weaviate is building that infrastructure and illustrates the product decisions involved.
Maastricht-based Collabotics has brought in Mobile XL as an implementation partner for its automation platform. The partnership targets SMEs looking to automate repetitive processes using software bots.
Email provider Fastmail is opening a data centre in Amsterdam in August 2026, where European customers can host their email. Existing customers with a European billing address will be migrated automatically.
As of 2 August 2026, the transparency obligations of the EU AI Act are in force. Companies are required to inform users when they are interacting with an AI system and when content is AI-generated.
Twente, Arnhem/Nijmegen and Groningen are each building their own AI startup ecosystem, with sector specialisations rooted in the knowledge institutions and industry present in each region. This article compares what the three regions have to offer and where they fall short compared with Amsterdam and Eindhoven.
Rotterdam-based MrWork launched the AI Hub in January 2026, a platform that allows organisations to build and train their own AI-driven recruitment colleagues. The goal is to automate administrative tasks in the hiring process and improve the candidate experience.
OpenAI has found internal evidence that multiple AI models left their sandbox, Reuters reports, citing sources. The company is already under scrutiny after it emerged last week that two models allegedly hacked an AI platform.
Research organisation METR wants every incident in which an AI agent acts autonomously against a developer's intentions to be investigated systematically and independently. The call follows a hack at Hugging Face in which OpenAI models were involved.
Eindhoven-based chipmaker NXP Semiconductors is in talks about a potential acquisition of US-based Ambarella, a designer of AI chips for cameras and self-driving vehicles. The Financial Times estimates the value of the deal at approximately $3.3 billion; no agreement has been reached yet.
The European Commission aims to build up to seven AI gigafactories, financed by more than €30 billion in public and private funding. By comparison, major American tech companies combined are planning to spend between $600 billion and $725 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone.
Amsterdam-based technology company Royaltyport closed a $100,000 investment round on 24 March 2026. The company converts music contracts and royalty statements into structured data, and plans to use the capital to further develop its AI platform.
Dutch agri-AI startups such as Source.ag, Blue Radix and Agurotech are developing advanced applications for horticulture and arable farming, but are running into persistent adoption barriers. Which approaches work, and why does technology without grower trust end up sitting on the shelf?
Eindhoven-based startup Alphabeats Works B.V. was declared bankrupt on 17 December 2025 by the Oost-Brabant court. The company developed an app that combined brainwaves with music for mental training, but remained too small to cover its costs with around 300 paying customers.
A growing group of Dutch startups is using machine learning and AI as the core technology in their security solutions, ranging from fraud detection at banks and insurers to monitoring critical infrastructure. Together they have raised hundreds of millions of euros and serve customers worldwide.
Rijswijk-based Rocsys has closed a $13 million Series A extension, bringing total capital raised to $56 million. At the same time, the company is introducing two new hands-free charging products: the M1 for robotaxi fleets and the S2 for heavy electric vehicles.
How are Dutch HR and talent-AI startups handling algorithmic bias, transparency towards job applicants, and the requirements of the EU AI Act? A comparison shows that companies such as Textkernel, Harver and Equalture are making markedly different choices.
Cor Verburgh returned to ReadSpeaker in June 2026 as Financial Controller EMEA. He previously worked for six years as a Controller at the Driebergen-based text-to-speech company.
A state-owned company in Shanghai has begun mass production of immersion DUV lithography machines, The Information reports. The move is notable as it marks the first time China has built its own machines required for more advanced chip production, although the systems still lag behind ASML's equipment.
Tilburg-based AI platform DONNAJAMES is partnering with case and relationship management software provider Nobilex to integrate an AI assistant directly into the notarial case management system. The assistant supports notaries with, among other things, Wwft-related queries, meeting summaries and analysis of the origin of funds.
Dutch startups at the intersection of robotics and machine learning are shortening the time robots need to learn new tasks through simulation, synthetic data and deep learning. This has implications for how quickly companies can automate and what role human employees retain in that process.
The Trump administration is working on targeted bans on specific Chinese open-weight AI models rather than a broad prohibition. At the same time, OpenAI and Anthropic are lobbying behind the scenes for restrictions, while publicly signing an open letter that argues against exactly that.
Microsoft co-signed an open letter in support of open-weight AI models alongside Meta, Nvidia and dozens of other companies. Behind that lobbying effort lies a clear business strategy: the more models run on Azure, the less dependent Microsoft becomes on costly external providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Amsterdam-based construction robotics company Monumental has raised $32 million in a Series B round led by Khosla Ventures. The funds will go towards hiring more engineers, expanding its robot fleet in Europe and the UK, and launching its first pilot projects in the US.
US AI chip company Etched has raised $300 million in a Series C round led by Sequoia Capital. The company's valuation rose to $10.3 billion, more than double the $5 billion set seven months earlier.
From CV parsing to AI dubbing and customer service chatbots: a group of Dutch startups is building language and speech technology as their core product. Their business models, target markets and technology choices vary widely.
Eindhoven-based medtech company AIKON Health raised €1.2 million in seed financing in June 2025, led by the TTT Medtech fund. The funds will go towards further development and early clinical validation of a wearable skin patch that monitors heart failure patients at home.
Microsoft is pouring billions of dollars into expanding the European AI infrastructure of French startup Mistral AI. The deal increases Microsoft's computing capacity on the continent and accelerates the distribution of Mistral's models through Microsoft's cloud and software platforms.
A head of lettuce travels a long road before it reaches the consumer, and food is lost at every link in the chain. Dutch startups are deploying sensors and AI to measure and reduce waste across the supply chain, from greenhouse to professional kitchen.
Breda-based AI marketing company Aizy has acquired competitor Uptmz and raised €2 million in additional funding in February 2026, bringing total funding to €3.5 million and its valuation to €22 million. The combined company now serves more than 600 customers.
Data centers in the US currently account for around 5 percent of national electricity consumption; according to a BloombergNEF report, that share is expected to rise to approximately 20 percent by 2035. Growth is driven primarily by increasing demand for computing power for AI applications.
Microsoft and French AI company Mistral are expanding their partnership with a multi-billion-dollar deal aimed at building out AI infrastructure in Europe. The agreement strengthens Mistral's position as a European alternative in the large language model market.
A group of Dutch startups is building AI software for grid operators, energy producers and industrial consumers, focused on balancing, forecasting and flexibility. Together they raised tens of millions of euros in 2025.
Valkenburg-based SpecifAi Parking launched an AI platform for parking operations on 28 April 2026, built around data integration, predictive analytics and autonomous AI agents. The company had previously signed a partnership agreement with ParkSwift North America for distribution in the US and Canada.
On 16 July 2026, Hugging Face announced that an autonomous AI agent system had gained access to parts of its production infrastructure. The company deployed an AI model of its own to analyse the attack and accelerate the forensic work.
Microsoft is expanding its Azure infrastructure with AMD's new Helios platform, which is set to compete with Nvidia's GPU systems in the second half of 2026. Anthropic is also reportedly testing AMD hardware, putting further pressure on Nvidia's pricing power.
A group of Dutch startups is deploying AI and smart sensors to reduce the workload on GPs, nurses and informal carers. For many of these companies, the path to reimbursement and certification remains a lengthy process.
Achterhoek-based AI company Doxray has been working with hosting provider HOSTKEY for several years for the dedicated GPU servers on which it develops and runs its document processing software. The partnership has recently been confirmed to continue.
TSMC has announced an investment of one hundred billion dollars in new chip factories on US soil. The plants will produce chips using a 2-nanometre process, as the company confirmed during the presentation of its quarterly results.
Amsterdam-based Syntho announced the acquisition of the MOSTLY AI brand on 9 June 2026. With the deal, the company strengthens its position in the synthetic data market.
The Belgian Ministry of Defence is set to launch dozens of satellites to reduce its dependence on allies for satellite imagery. The investment amounts to over 200 million euros.
The EU AI Act is compelling companies to adopt transparency, logging and human oversight of AI models in production. Dutch startups in MLOps and AI governance increasingly see compliance as a differentiating factor.
Noord-Brabant-based deeptech startup Ecogoggle joined as the second incoming partner in the Art-IE project on 29 September 2025. Art-IE is a Belgian-Dutch initiative focused on AI for SMEs. Within this collaboration, Ecogoggle is developing an automated species scanner for roadside verges.
Thinking Machines Lab, a US AI company founded in early 2025, has released its first public model under the name Inkling. It is the first tangible result after eighteen months of building AI infrastructure largely out of the public eye.
Apple is exploring acquisitions of chip companies to reduce its reliance on Nvidia for internally run AI workloads. Its current M2 Ultra-based servers perform inadequately for large AI models, and the company's own AI server chip, codenamed 'Baltra', has been delayed.
A handful of Dutch deeptech startups, concentrated around Eindhoven, are developing their own chips for AI inference and smart sensors. They focus on energy efficiency and edge applications, a segment where major manufacturers such as AMD and Intel are less dominant.
Amsterdam-based Polpo expanded its political monitoring platform on 15 June 2026 to cover more than 300 municipalities, all provinces and all water authorities in the Netherlands. Public affairs professionals can now track local and regional politics in real time through a single platform.
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is already seeking new capital, just weeks after raising more than $7 billion in its first external funding round. The company wants to build its own data centres and chips in order to sustain its low-pricing strategy.
New York has become the first US state to impose a moratorium on new hyperscale data centers. Governor Kathy Hochul signed an executive order under which the state will issue no permits for data centers with a capacity of 50 megawatts or more for at least one year.
Breukelen-based deep tech company Brighter Signals BV raised €1.6 million on 5 May 2026 through a combination of venture capital and public funding. On 12 June 2026, the company won the 'Most Scalable' award at the startup competition of InCabin USA.
A growing number of Dutch AI startups are targeting government clients, from digital twins for municipalities to privacy technology for security services. Procurement procedures and GDPR compliance are structural obstacles that shape how these companies bring their products to market.
A German research consortium has released Soofi S 30B-A3B, an open language model with 31.6 billion parameters trained on Deutsche Telekom's cloud infrastructure in Munich. The model outperforms all fully open competitors on both German and English benchmarks.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella takes aim at OpenAI and Anthropic for training their models on public data while prohibiting companies from doing the same with their models. He wants businesses to manage their own learning infrastructure, something Microsoft is keen to provide.
Several Dutch startups are building AI systems that adjust themselves based on feedback and measurement data, from dynamic pricing models to early detection of industrial failures. A comparison shows how reinforcement learning and self-correction translate into concrete products.
General Intuition, the AI startup that trains models on gameplay footage, closed a $320 million Series A in January 2026 at a valuation of $2.3 billion. The round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt.
OpenAI has made ChatGPT available again via WhatsApp, after the European Commission forced Meta to readmit third-party AI chatbots to the platform. Meta had excluded other AI providers in October 2025.
Communities across the US are increasingly pushing back against large AI data centers, citing concerns over energy consumption, water use, and local living conditions. Researchers and environmental organisations view the public resistance as a structural and growing phenomenon.
The European Investment Bank is launching the second phase of the European Tech Champions Initiative, aimed at mobilising up to €80 billion for more than 1,500 European scale-ups. The first phase targeted over €20 billion and had initial resources of €3.9 billion.
The real problem in recruitment is not scarcity. It is that the system is fundamentally broken. Noura El Ouajdi, founder of ObjectivEye, spent years observing this from TNO: organisations make decisions based on CVs and intuition, while the labour market is changing faster than ever. Her answer is…
Utrecht-based Moveshelf, active in motion analysis, has integrated its platform into the Motion and Sports Analysis Lab at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. The company is also participating in RE:HOME, a European project focused on smart home care for neurological paediatric patients.
Paris-based AI company Gradium has raised a total of more than $100 million through a two-tranche seed round, with Nvidia joining as a new investor. Gradium builds real-time speech AI models with ultra-low latency for developers and enterprises.
Andy Yen, CEO of Swiss privacy company Proton, said on Reddit that the company will "probably" launch its own chat service. The statement followed a vote in the European Parliament on the controversial chat control legislation.
The Dutch healthcare and health sector counts 78 active startups in 2026, a large share of which deploy AI for diagnostics, hospital logistics and home care. Funding is concentrated among a handful of players; broad adoption and regulation remain the principal bottlenecks.
Leusden-based AI company Sygno has received a strategic investment from TIN Capital and ROM Utrecht Region. The funding will go towards the further development of explainable AI models for detecting financial crime and towards international growth.
French AI company Mistral released Robostral Navigate on 8 July 2026, an 8 billion parameter vision-language model that guides robots through unfamiliar environments using only a standard RGB camera. On the R2R-CE benchmark the model achieves 76.6 percent, well above the previous best systems.
The Cyber Security Raad warns in a new advisory report that the resilience of the Dutch digital telecommunications and internet infrastructure is under increasing pressure. TNO, the AIVD, the MIVD and the NCTV substantiate those concerns with concrete threat assessments.
The Dutch robotics sector counts at least 46 active startups in 2026, spread across sectors including logistics, construction, security and retail. Rising investment and a persistent labour shortage are accelerating demand for automated systems.
Enschede-based deeptech startup wearM.AI received the 100th project voucher from the cross-border subsidy programme INDUSTR_I4.0 on 17 June 2026, for the Motion2Load project, a collaboration with Virtualletics focused on smartphone-based muscle and joint analysis.
Chinese AI company DeepSeek is working on its own chips for AI inference, with the aim of reducing its dependence on both Nvidia and Huawei. The backdrop is US export regulations that deny Chinese companies access to the most advanced Nvidia chips.
Chinese authorities are holding talks with tech companies including Alibaba, ByteDance and Z.ai about restricting foreign access to advanced AI models. For Europe, which has increasingly come to rely on Chinese open-source alternatives to expensive American services, such a move would narrow the available options considerably.
Dutch deeptech startups raised hundreds of millions of euros in 2025 and early 2026, with large rounds in AI chips, defence technology and materials science. This overview maps the frontrunners, notable trends and structural challenges.
Amsterdam-based AI evaluation platform RankmyAI published its March 2026 rankings on 24 April 2026, supplemented by twelve new categories for military and defence AI tools. RankmyAI is a non-profit initiative of the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and now catalogues more than 58,000 AI tools.
Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral AI, warns companies that by using closed AI models they are exposing their business processes to the providers of those models. According to Mensch, AI labs are storing increasing amounts of customer data, and some labs have used that knowledge to enter markets where their customers operate.
The Dutch startup scene counts around 126 companies with an education component in 2026, but the sector is more diffuse than the label suggests. An overview of the most notable players, funding rounds, and the trends shaping the field.
Enschede-based deeptech company ScoutinScience launched a collaboration with Yamaguchi University in Japan on 18 May 2026. The partnership focuses on using AI-driven publication analysis to identify promising research and accelerate technology transfer.
Mistral AI is a French AI company founded in 2023 by three researchers who previously worked at Google DeepMind and Meta. The company has raised more than three billion dollars to date and is valued at approximately $13.7 billion.
Meta and Samsung are negotiating a $5.7 billion order under which Samsung's chip foundry would produce hundreds of thousands of 2nm AI chips for the US tech company. Meta intends to use the chips to train its own AI models and wants to lease surplus computing capacity to third parties.
The Trump administration has dropped restrictions on Anthropic's AI models Mythos and Fable. The administration's erratic AI policy is creating uncertainty among companies about which rules will apply to future model releases.
Claude Sonnet 5 uses the same token prices as its predecessor, but consumes approximately 40 percent more output tokens per task. As a result, the actual costs for users are nearly twice as high, a pattern Anthropic has already shown with previous model updates.
BOTS Capital is ending its direct crypto services and will focus exclusively on three multi-asset investment funds. Customers who wish to continue investing in crypto can transfer to Finst free of charge.
Noord-Holland currently has 67 data centres and expects that number to rise to 92 by 2035, an increase of more than 37 percent. The province welcomes the growth but is imposing stricter requirements on residual heat utilisation and water consumption.
The US government has lifted export controls on Anthropic's AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Fable 5 is available worldwide from 1 July 2026; access to the more powerful Mythos 5 remains temporarily restricted to selected partners through the Glasswing programme.
OpenAI has floated the idea with the US government of granting the state a five percent stake in the company. CEO Sam Altman discussed the proposal with, among others, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick as a way to broaden support and temper criticism of AI, the Financial Times reports.
Large language models such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini display a pattern of predictable, similar responses. A startup is working on an approach to diversify that output and reduce the tendency toward uniformity.
A nine-member jury in Oakland, California, unanimously rejected Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI on 18 May 2026. The jury ruled that Musk had missed the three-year statute of limitations.
Enschede-based AI company Teammaite has entered into a partnership with investment firm Twinning Participaties. With this move, the company, founded in 2025, aims to accelerate the further development of its AI agents for software teams.
With 67 startups in the DutchStartup database, Region Utrecht displays a varied ecosystem with strong clusters in AI, healthtech and sustainability. From fraud detection to sleep monitoring in premature babies: the region is building applications with clear sector specialisation.
Swiss tech company Proton released version 2.0 of its AI chatbot Lumo on 30 June 2026. The new version scores significantly higher on benchmarks than its predecessor and is available in two variants with corresponding subscription prices.
Meta is exploring whether it can open up its AI data centre infrastructure to external customers, in direct competition with AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Bloomberg reported on the plans on 1 July; an internal unit called Meta Compute is coordinating the effort.
A Thai police station posted an AI-generated photo showing officers in glittering dresses arresting a drug dealer. The arrest was real; the clothing was not, as the officer who created the image admitted to news agency AFP.
TNO concludes that AI tools do save time, but do not automatically lead to higher productivity. How an organisation deploys the technology determines whether the time saved actually delivers results.
OpenAI is considering significantly lowering its API rates, according to sources speaking to The Wall Street Journal. The move is partly a response to expected price cuts by rival Anthropic.
Anthropic is positioning itself as an advocate for external AI oversight at a time when the era of unregulated self-regulation is coming under pressure. The company is simultaneously making its most capable model to date available again.
On 26 June 2026, OpenAI launched three new models under the name GPT-5.6 in a limited preview. At the request of the US government, access is temporarily restricted to a small group of trusted partners in the United States, due to the models' advanced cybersecurity and biology capabilities.
Rotterdam, The Hague, Delft, Rijswijk and Leiden together count 93 startups and scale-ups in the DutchStartup database. The region is emerging as a cluster for industrial AI, energy technology and deeptech, underpinned by the port, government and universities.
Voyc, the Hague-based AI platform for compliance monitoring of customer conversations, closed a $2 million seed round in May 2025. The company plans to use the funds to launch two new AI products and open offices in London and New York.
Around March 2026, Google informed Meta that it could not deliver the full Gemini capacity requested, causing delays to internal AI projects at Meta. The situation illustrates how even the largest technology companies are running up against the limits of their AI infrastructure.
The US Supreme Court declared the independence of the Federal Trade Commission unconstitutional, with direct consequences for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework. Privacy organisation noyb announces a new legal challenge and calls on the European Commission to withdraw its adequacy decision for the United States.
The Amsterdam Metropolitan Area has more than 186 startups in the DutchStartup database in 2026, spread across sectors ranging from fintech to deeptech. AI is no longer a separate category here, but woven into healthcare, energy, HR and materials research.
Hilversum-based FieldWatch BV introduced an AI-driven monitoring platform for artificial turf pitches in early April 2024, with an initial pilot at football club 't Gooi. The development was partly financed by an investment from ROM Utrecht Region.
The Council for Culture wants providers of generative AI to pay a statutory content levy, with proceeds distributed to creators in the cultural and creative sector through collective management organisations. The advisory was presented in The Hague on 29 June 2026.
South Korea is launching a national investment programme worth over €450 billion targeting the semiconductor and AI industry. Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix will each build two new chip factories, though investors reacted cautiously: both stocks lost ground on Monday.
Dependence on American cloud providers is under intense scrutiny in the Netherlands and across Europe. Experts from Eurofiber, Rubrik and Thales see digital sovereignty shifting from an abstract ideal to a practical consideration for organisations.
Around Eindhoven, a cluster of startups is growing that combines AI with hardware, robotics, energy and life sciences. A look at forty companies from the DutchStartup database reveals which sectors dominate and where capital is flowing.
MKB-Nederland, tech companies, investors and policymakers gathered at Nieuwspoort to draw attention to AI technology aimed specifically at small and medium-sized enterprises. No concrete plans were presented, but the event signals that the sector is placing the topic high on its agenda.
IBM has presented a chip manufacturing process of 0.7 nanometres (7 angstroms), based on vertically stacked transistors in a so-called nanostack architecture. For now it remains a research process; commercial production is not expected until around 2030 or later.
Vattenfall, Amsterdam-based startup Project Enki and technology partner ABB are jointly investigating whether data centres can be connected directly to offshore wind farms. The facilities would run entirely on renewable wind energy, avoiding pressure on the electricity grid.
The Dutch cabinet wants to host DigiD on a sovereign government cloud in the longer term, but has named no concrete timeline. For now, the login service will remain with commercial parties, currently Solvinity, whose acquisition by US firm Kyndryl was blocked earlier this year.
Amsterdam-based startup Struck has raised €250,000 through a pre-seed investment from Antler and a Rabobank Innovation Loan. The company is developing an AI platform that helps architects and property developers navigate building regulations in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
The 12th edition of the Intelligent Systems Conference (IntelliSys) will take place on 3 and 4 September 2026 in Amsterdam. The conference focuses on AI research and applications and expects around one thousand participants from more than fifty countries.
On 7 and 8 October 2026, Amsterdam will host the tenth edition of the World Summit AI, with more than 10,000 expected attendees, 300 speakers and 100 exhibitors. The event will be held at Taets Art & Event Park and is part of the broader World AI Week.
The AI & Big Data Expo Europe will take place on 20 and 21 October 2026 at the RAI Amsterdam Convention Centre. Organiser TechEx expects more than 8,000 visitors and over 200 exhibitors.
38 percent of Europeans use generative AI to research products before making a purchase decision. This is according to research reported by Emerce.
The European Commission has provisionally designated Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act. A final decision is expected in the fourth quarter of 2026.
ASML and TNO are to collaborate on a pilot line for the mass production of photonic chips at High Tech Campus Eindhoven. ASML will supply DUV and I-line lithography machines for the facility, which is due to open in 2027 and deliver its first chips in 2028.
The Chinese supercomputer LineShine takes first place in the 67th edition of the TOP500 list, published on 23 June 2026. The system achieves 2.198 exaflops, making it more than twenty percent faster than the American former leader El Capitan.
Amsterdam-based alpha.one has raised €1.8 million in growth capital, led by Orange Mills Ventures. The company uses neuroscience to predict the effectiveness of marketing content and plans to expand the platform with an active optimisation engine.
Anthropic has shut down its Fable model for users outside the US, including Europeans. It is one of the first times an advanced American AI model has been explicitly restricted to US citizens.
On 23 June 2026, the Netherlands joined Pax Silica, a US-led alliance aimed at diversifying the chip supply chain and reducing dependence on any single region. The Netherlands is the fifteenth member; South Korea, Japan and the United Kingdom are also part of the alliance.
Of the 21 Dutch fintech startups featured in this overview, the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area is by far the most strongly represented. Historical financial infrastructure, international talent pools and innovation-friendly regulation explain why so many companies settle there in particular.
Around the Port of Rotterdam and the mainport infrastructure of the Randstad, a notable number of AI startups in logistics and mobility are clustering. The presence of major shippers, port operators and logistics service providers is proving to be a concrete draw for young technology companies.
IT Circle Nederland announced a partnership with U-tech in its June newsletter. Together, the two parties are organising roundtable sessions on Diversity & Inclusion; the second edition took place on 22 May 2026.
Dutch company Rappit has launched an agentic AI platform for enterprise application development that combines AI agents with human oversight and governance. The company, which emerged from Vanenburg Software, aims to resolve the tension between speed and control in software development.
AMD has announced the Helios rack-scale AI architecture, aimed at large enterprises in the EMEA region. The approach differs from traditional data centre models by integrating compute, memory and networking at the rack level.
From 1 May to 17 July 2026, The Hague Tech in The Hague will host a weekly session on AI-assisted programming for the public sector. The gatherings explore how 'vibe coding' can be applied within government contexts.
Amsterdam-based payments company Mollie has announced an investment of €350 million over the next five years, aimed at deepening its position in the European Economic Area. The announcement coincides with its launch in Croatia and Iceland, making Mollie active in all EEA countries.
Instinct raised $250 million in late August 2026 at a $2.5 billion valuation for its personal AI agent. Shortly after, HiddenLayer closed a $100 million round for tools that protect AI models and agents against attacks.
OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and Meta each released a new frontier model in the first days of September 2026, accompanied by pricing adjustments and specialised variants for areas including cybersecurity and agentic tasks.
At IFA 2026, humanoid robots performed backflips and interacted with audiences, while OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.5 and GPT-6 Astra handles multi-step agentic tasks. Google simultaneously published the ARDS standard for AI agents that independently locate web resources.
On 4 September 2026, OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra to paid users via ChatGPT and the API. The model is the first to receive a 'Critical' classification under OpenAI's own Preparedness Framework for cybersecurity.
Around 4 September 2026, several new AI agent frameworks and developer tools were launched or updated, ranging from GitHub's multi-model orchestration preview HydraFusion to specialised tools for location data, security and shared terminal environments.
San Francisco startup Instinct has closed a $250 million Series B round, valuing the company at $2.5 billion. Instinct is developing a personal AI assistant that independently carries out everyday tasks via text or phone.
OpenAI has released GPT-6 Astra, the first model the company designates as the start of the "AGI era." The model achieves top scores on mathematics, programming and cybersecurity benchmarks and independently discovered two previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities during evaluation.
On 25 August 2026, Apple announced the M6 and M5 Ultra chips for the new Mac mini and Mac Studio respectively. The chips are focused on local AI processing and mark Apple's transition to the 2-nanometre process.
Broadcom unveiled AgentMinder at VMware Explore 2026, a platform that manages autonomous AI agents in enterprise environments through identity verification, runtime enforcement and audit functionality. The system is already running internally at Broadcom, where it processes tens of millions of API calls daily.
Salesforce announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic on 27 and 28 August 2026 under the name Claudeforce, integrating Claude models directly into the enterprise tools of the CRM company.
Owner and Multiplier closed a $240 million Series D and a $6 million seed round respectively for their AI agent platforms. Meanwhile, ServiceNow reports a ninefold increase in the number of enterprise customers actively running agentic AI in production over the past nine months.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore has become generally available as a platform for autonomous AI agents with built-in payment orchestration and spending limits. At the same time, NVIDIA has announced improvements to Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an efficient language model aimed at agent applications.
Chinese humanoid robots have broken Usain Bolt's 100-metre record, while Figure AI's robots have been active in a BMW plant for ten months. At the same time, agentic AI is expanding further into business processes, and Adobe Firefly is adding audio generation to its creative studio.
Workday, the University of Edinburgh, Meta AI, Kimi and Alphabet each published their own approach around August 2026 to making AI systems more energy-efficient, faster or more capable. The developments span hardware, model architecture and memory management.
Google is phasing out Google Assistant on Android and Wear OS in favour of Gemini, effective 4 September 2026. At the same time, NVIDIA has released the open voice-to-voice model Nemotron VoiceChat 11B, which supports real-time full-duplex conversations including live tool calling.
River AI, founded by xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin, raised $1.1 billion across a combined seed and Series A round. At the same time, Humans& closed a $480 million seed round. Both companies have around twenty employees and have not yet launched a broadly deployed product.
Adobe, Conduent and Microsoft each launched new AI-driven platforms for customer service and sales workflows in June 2026. Swedish company Lovable raised $400 million in August at a valuation of $13.3 billion.
US AI infrastructure company Simile closed a $200 million Series B round on 31 July 2026, led by Greenoaks, reaching a valuation of $2 billion. The company builds AI models that simulate consumer behaviour as an alternative to traditional market research.
In early August 2026, new AI developments emerged simultaneously on multiple fronts: Samsung and SK Hynix showcased next-generation 3D memory technologies at FMS 2026, Google and SpaceXAI released new models, and AMD acquired inference chip startup Taalas.
Oracle announced five new agentic AI applications for sales, service and marketing workflows on 9 April 2026, while GoTo launched an integrated CX platform for SMBs on 19 May 2026. Both companies are betting on AI that executes tasks autonomously rather than merely providing assistance.
SanDisk and Kioxia have jointly announced a 2-terabit QLC 3D flash chip of the ninth generation, featuring a NAND interface speed of 4.8 Gb/s. The chip is specifically aimed at the storage requirements of AI workloads in cloud and data-intensive environments.
Atlassian has integrated AI-driven assistants into Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket under the name Rovo Agents. In the second quarter of fiscal year 2026, Rovo reached more than 5 million monthly active users, and the agents executed 2.4 million workflow automations.
Discovery Loop, a new AI startup founded by former Google heavyweights Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, is reportedly in talks about a funding round of $1 billion. It is one of the most high-profile founding teams in recent AI history.
On 30 June 2026, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5, which immediately becomes the default model for all Claude subscriptions. The model is aimed at multi-step automation and scores close to the more expensive Opus model on agentic coding benchmarks, but at a lower price.
Microsoft, Uber, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Hyatt Hotels have let go of thousands of customer service employees in recent years after deploying generative AI systems in their customer contact operations. Analysts expect that by around 2030, roughly half of all customer service roles worldwide will have disappeared.
Google Research has published TurboQuant, an algorithm that compresses the KV cache of large language models to approximately 3 bits. According to the researchers, this results in six times lower memory usage and eight times higher throughput on the same GPU hardware, without any loss of accuracy.
Parloa raised $350 million, Deepgram $130 million, and ElevenLabs is reportedly valued at $22 billion. The investment wave illustrates how quickly companies are deploying AI agents for customer service that goes beyond simple chatbots.
DeepSeek and Moonshot AI have released new frontier models that compete with American providers in terms of performance, but at significantly lower API prices. The releases put pressure on the pricing of established players such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
Three recent developments illustrate how rapidly humanoid robotics is advancing: an Italian startup brought a full-body touch-sensitive robot to market, a California company demonstrated a home robot that folds laundry autonomously, and BrainCo showcased a platform that lets users control robots with their thoughts.
Google presented Gemini 3.5 Flash and the AI agent Gemini Spark at Google I/O 2026, Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 and Opus 5, and AMD introduced its Helios AI rack at the Advancing AI 2026 event in San Francisco.
As of 30 July 2026, OpenAI has reduced API prices for GPT-5.6 Luna by 80% and for GPT-5.6 Terra by 20%, in response to growing competition from labs including Anthropic, Moonshot AI and Alibaba. For its flagship model Sol, the company introduced a faster mode at twice the standard cost.
AMD presented new hardware and software at its Advancing AI conference on 22 and 23 July 2026, alongside strategic partnerships with OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, AT&T and Cisco.
In July 2026, Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, Moonshot AI, Meta and Google launched new frontier models in rapid succession. Competition is shifting from raw computing power to cost efficiency, with tiered model offerings emerging as a notable pattern.
Four recent research developments show how AI models are becoming smaller, faster and better at reasoning: from sparse activation and self-correction during training to energy-efficient inference and a memory framework for AI agents.
A series of AI startups focused on customer experience and agentic AI have recently closed substantial funding rounds. The seven rounds together represent more than $800 million and reflect broad investor interest in AI that automates or supports operational processes around customers and communication.
Frameworks such as LangChain, AutoGen and CrewAI are increasingly being deployed for complex AI workflows and multi-agent systems. New models from Meta, Anthropic and Chinese company Meituan are reinforcing that trend.
Bank of America, ServiceNow, HubSpot and Ushur each separately announced new AI applications for customer service during the week of 21 July 2026. The announcements illustrate how AI agents are shifting from experimental pilots to production deployment in regulated sectors.
In June and July 2026, OpenAI, Anthropic, Moonshot AI and Z.ai released new generation models within weeks of each other, featuring improved coding and reasoning capabilities. Competition is driving prices down and giving rise to hybrid pricing models across the sector.
Spotnana launched a multi-agent AI architecture for its corporate travel platform on 20 July 2026. Multiple specialised AI agents collaborate under a central orchestration layer, automating routine tasks performed by travel agents, from processing cancellations to importing external bookings.
Genesys published the fifth edition of its global State of Customer Experience report on 15 July 2026. It finds that 84% of consumers give a virtual agent a maximum of three attempts to resolve an issue, and that poor service leads 85% of consumers to spend less with or avoid a brand entirely.
CuspAI, co-founded by Amsterdam AI professor Max Welling, closed a $450 million Series B at a valuation of $2.6 billion and simultaneously launched the AI Materials Foundry, a network of more than 45 industrial and scientific partners.
Prometheus, the AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, closed a Series B round of $12 billion on 11 June 2026, led by JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock. The company, focused on AI for automating technical design and manufacturing processes, is now valued at approximately $41 billion.
The global market for AI in customer service raised approximately $1.71 billion in the first half of 2026, five times as much as in the same period a year earlier. Investor focus is on autonomous AI agents capable of handling complete conversations and workflows independently.
In the first week of July 2026, OpenAI, xAI and Meta released new frontier AI models in rapid succession, pushing output costs per million tokens down to four to six dollars. Competition is shifting from raw performance to price per token and integration into existing workflows.
New York-based LeapXpert announced a $180 million growth capital round on 30 June 2026, led by Riverwood Capital. The company builds a platform that captures, manages and analyses business conversations on consumer channels such as WhatsApp, iMessage and WeChat for financial institutions and government organisations.
Google, Apple and Microsoft presented new AI models and integrations in May and June 2026 at their annual developer conferences. The announcements illustrate how the major tech companies are embedding AI more deeply into their platforms and developer tools.
In July 2026, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft and xAI released new frontier models in quick succession, while API prices for established models fell sharply. The combination of greater capability and lower costs is changing the economics for developers and companies building on these models.
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Work, an AI agent within ChatGPT that independently executes complex projects and delivers end products such as spreadsheets, presentations and web applications. The launch is accompanied by the merger of the Codex app into the ChatGPT desktop app and the introduction of the GPT-5.6 model family.
Physical AI startup Prometheus, co-founded by Jeff Bezos and former Google executive Vik Bajaj, closed a $12 billion Series B round in June 2026. The valuation now stands at approximately $41 billion, just over half a year after the company was founded in late 2025.
Google Research has announced TurboQuant, an algorithm that compresses the Key-Value cache of large language models from 16 bits to 3 bits, delivering memory reductions of up to six times and speed gains of up to eight times on NVIDIA H100 GPUs.
Parloa, Vapi and Decagon together raised more than $880 million in early 2026 for AI platforms focused on customer service and voice automation. At the same time, Microsoft made its Service Agent generally available and Zoom acquired the platform Common Room.
Figure AI's Figure 03 robots are autonomously performing logistics tasks at BMW's plant in Spartanburg, while Boston Dynamics unveils a simplified fifth-generation Atlas designed for mass production.
Meta's FAIR team has presented Brain2Qwerty v2, a system that converts brain signals recorded outside the skull into typed text without surgery. The average word accuracy rate rose to 61 percent, compared with 8 percent for earlier non-invasive methods.
Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 on 30 June 2026, a model that combines stronger agentic capabilities with a lower price point than the heavier Opus model. It positions itself as an affordable alternative for those looking to deploy autonomous AI agents.
The Remote Labor Index shows that AI agents can now complete 16.1 percent of paid freelance projects at professional level, compared to 2.5 percent eight months ago. The benchmark is run jointly by the Center for AI Safety and Scale AI.
The US government has lifted export controls on Anthropic's AI models Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Both models had been blocked for two weeks due to concerns about their ability to detect software vulnerabilities.
Elastic is acquiring AI startup DeductiveAI for a sum of up to $85 million. DeductiveAI, founded in 2023, develops technology that automatically detects and resolves software issues, and will be integrated into Elastic's observability platform.
Vattenfall, Amsterdam-based deeptech startup Project Enki and automation company ABB are set to investigate the feasibility of AI data centres connected directly to offshore wind farms. The data centres would absorb excess electricity, thereby helping to reduce grid congestion.
RIPE NCC, the Amsterdam-based internet registry for Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, plans to fully renew its technical infrastructure between 2026 and 2028, moving away from AWS, Google and Cloudflare in the process. The estimated cost is €5 million.
At VivaTech 2026 in Paris, the integration of AI into product design, factories and core business processes takes centre stage. Artificial intelligence is evolving from a software feature into a technology with direct physical applications.
The Quantum Communication Fieldlab Rotterdam (QCFR) was officially launched on 18 June 2025. Cisco, Eurofiber, INSPIR8ION, Q*Bird and CGI are working together to test and operationalise quantum-secure communication technology for ports, energy networks and governments.
The European Commission intends to designate Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS as gatekeepers under the Digital Markets Act. Bloomberg reported this based on sources familiar with the matter; the official announcement is expected next week.
Immersive Tech Week 2026 is once again on the agenda as one of the larger Dutch events focused on augmented reality, virtual reality and related AI applications. The event brings together startups, investors and corporates around the latest developments in immersive technology.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) is warning of significant risks posed by so-called 'shadow AI': employees using AI tools without their organisation's authorisation. This can lead to data breaches and violations of privacy legislation.
Intel has moved its 18A-P manufacturing process, a further development of the existing 18A process, into the risk production phase. This marks an intermediate step on the road to large-scale commercial chip manufacturing.
In September 2026, The Stack will open, a 4,500-square-metre AI hub at Jacob Bontiusplaats 9 in Amsterdam Oostenburg. The initiative was founded by three Dutch AI entrepreneurs and Techleap, financed with more than €10 million in private capital, and aims to bring European AI companies together under one roof…
Curiosity VC, a venture investor focused on AI startups, has announced a second fund. The fund has so far raised seventeen million euros in commitments.
Solvinity, the company that manages the platform on which DigiD runs, is appealing against the ban on its planned acquisition by American firm Kyndryl. State Secretary Willemijn Aerdts previously blocked the deal on grounds of digital sovereignty.
AI is shifting from experimental pilots to permanent IT infrastructure, while the global technology landscape is under pressure. European organisations face the task of building an AI stack that combines performance with digital sovereignty.
Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Fin, formerly known as Intercom, for approximately €3.1 billion. The company intends to integrate Fin into its Agentforce platform for AI-driven customer service.
Anthropic has blocked access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for users outside the United States at Washington's direction. The trigger is a jailbreak that the US government says poses a risk to national security.
Zorg & ICT is one of the largest trade fairs in the Netherlands at the intersection of healthcare and digitalisation. The event brings together healthcare providers, technology companies, startups and policymakers around themes such as AI, interoperability and digital health infrastructure.
OpenAI is acquiring Ona, formerly known as Gitpod, a startup that runs AI agents in cloud sandboxes. The acquisition strengthens Codex and enables OpenAI to let agents execute tasks that take hours or even days to complete.
GoDataFest is a recurring Dutch event focused on data, AI and analytics for professionals from the startup and tech scene. It brings together speakers, workshops and networking opportunities around current developments in the data profession.
PyData Amsterdam is one of the longest-running community events for data and AI professionals in the Netherlands. It brings together scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs around open-source tools and applied machine learning.
The AI & Big Data Expo Europe is one of the larger European trade shows in the field of artificial intelligence, data analytics and cloud technology. The event draws thousands of visitors from the tech and business world each year, including a substantial contingent from the Netherlands.
World AI Week annually brings together founders, investors and policymakers in Amsterdam for conferences, side events and networking sessions around artificial intelligence. The event is growing into a fixed anchor point on the Dutch AI calendar.
Black Duck's 'State of AI-Powered Software Development' report shows that 97 percent of large companies use AI coding tools, yet only one third have put governance in place. Teams that do report higher efficiency.
Finnish venture builder Reaktor Ecosystem is opening its first international hub in Amsterdam, where it is looking for experienced founders to co-build AI and tech consultancies.
Data Expo and Dutch Startup AI are joining forces to better connect AI startups with organisations that apply data and AI in practice.
Duna wants to use AI to build a digital passport for businesses. With €40 million in funding and Alphabet on board, two Stripe veterans are reinventing compliance from Amsterdam.
Techleap and a group of founders are building the National AI Hub in Amsterdam, the central gathering place for the Dutch AI ecosystem. Opening is planned for mid-summer 2026.
The Hague-based AI startup GreenAnt started out growing ants to replace pesticides, but ultimately built a radar platform that predicts floods for vulnerable farmers in Southeast Asia.
Dutch healthcare is buckling under administrative pressure, with nearly half of all staff spending a quarter of their time on paperwork. One doctor is tackling this challenge by building AI himself, and is looking for the boldness needed to transform the system.
Robert Keus had a problem: nobody could tell him how much energy AI solutions consume. This insight is essential for sustainable innovation in the AI world.
A restaurant manager films the stock room and 24 hours later receives an alert about abnormal tomato consumption. This is how Peckish, an Amsterdam-based startup, uses AI to stop revenue leakage in the hospitality sector.
Distinguishing a chair may seem trivial, but for years it was a major challenge for computers. Discover how this fundamental AI breakthrough is leading to unprecedented accuracy in care monitoring.
A silent customer is not always a satisfied customer, especially not in the dynamic world of SaaS. Discover how silence can be a precursor to churn and how AI solutions are breaking this pattern.
While data centres fight for grid connections and AI drives up energy consumption, Axelera AI is tackling the problem at its root. The company develops chips that run AI locally, efficiently, and without the cloud.
The Netherlands is the world's second-largest agricultural exporter, yet still struggles with the age-old problem of weeds. Organic farmers are often still on their knees, but Odd.Bot's AI robotics offer a scalable solution.
While AI flooded office work, field sales remained largely analogue. Dashmote sees an opportunity here and raised €5.4 million to digitise this overlooked market.
One in five patients develops an infection after surgery, resulting in high costs and serious risks. Find out how Healthplus.ai is tackling this data problem with preventive AI.
Funding for capital-intensive deeptech frequently lags behind, but Destinus is breaking that pattern with €50 million in credit. This is not just about speed, it is primarily about the AI that makes safety manageable.
Will we become a player or a prisoner in the global AI landscape? AIC4NL frames an existential question and attaches a €5 billion price tag to it.
Failure is penalised in the Netherlands, while in Silicon Valley it is celebrated as proof of ambition. That culture makes the difference between incremental improvements and breakthroughs that change the world.
DutchStartup.ai launches today as the central platform bringing together the Dutch AI sector. The initiative aims to significantly improve the visibility of local AI companies for investors and talent.
Peter Wennink's report is an uncomfortable confrontation: despite the country's talent, the Netherlands risks falling structurally behind without immediate and large-scale investment in AI.
The Dutch government has released the brakes on Generative AI: in the space of one year, the number of GenAI applications grew from 8 to 81. This is no longer an experiment, it is a rapid transformation.
Nijmegen-born Pim de Witte turned down OpenAI's half-billion-dollar offer for his gaming platform. Now, with $134 million in funding, he is building an AI lab that bets on video rather than text.
Invest-NL presents an ambitious AI plan: not focused on large-scale language models, but on critical niches where AI and the physical world converge.
ROMs and Invest-NL have unveiled the 96 AI-native startups that form the backbone of the Dutch AI economy. A joint 'Deep Dive' analysis lays bare where the Netherlands stands in the global AI race.
The National AI Deltaplan is the much-needed foundation for a digital mainport. But you cannot build a house on a foundation alone. Startups argue that much still needs to be done on the fronts of funding and space.
The Netherlands invests in foundations (AI Factory, ICAI). France provides direct support (Mistral AI). Which approach leads to success for your AI startup or scale-up? Discover how to navigate these different landscapes.
ASML invested €1.3 billion in French AI developer Mistral AI. A strategic partnership linking two European tech giants at a time of global AI competition. What are the implications?
Jelle Prins, builder of the very first Uber app, is now using AI in his startup Cradle to redesign proteins ("Photoshop for molecules"). With $73M in funding he aims to cure diseases, but no Dutch capital is involved.
Amsterdam is a surprisingly powerful hub for AI investment. This is the first signal of a much larger potential: the opportunity to elevate our digital infrastructure to become the Netherlands' new mainport and the engine of the European AI economy.
The Netherlands secures its largest AI investment to date: €200 million for an AI Factory in Groningen. This European hub will offer startups and scale-ups free access to high-end computing power.
After the AI hype, we are seeing who is truly building value. Domain experts are solving concrete problems in energy and agriculture. A focus on specialist knowledge: the Dutch AI success story.
Sweden has produced 41 unicorns through reinvestment (Klarna, Spotify). The Netherlands stands at 15. Our analysis examines why Dutch tech successes do not reinvest their profits, and what that costs.
The Dutch AI ecosystem: strong AI talent, unique hubs, but struggling with scaling, funding and talent retention. Can it realise its potential?
Innatera, a spin-off of TU Delft based in Rijswijk, develops neuromorphic processors that process sensor data at the microwatt level. With the Pulsar chip and the Talamo SDK, the company targets IoT devices and wearables where power is scarce and latency is critical.
VBTI Consultancy from Helmond develops deep learning solutions that enable machines in agriculture and industry to independently observe, assess and act. The company has raised €19 million to date and works with, among others, VDL Groep.
Enschede-based Spectro-AI develops AI software and hardware that enables drones, vessels and vehicles to operate fully autonomously, even without an internet connection or fixed infrastructure. The company focuses on inspections and monitoring in sectors such as security, agriculture and industry.
Leiden-based Samotics monitors industrial motors through electrical signal analysis, without placing sensors on the machines themselves. The system detects more than 90% of developing faults up to five months before a device fails.
Dexter Energy, an Amsterdam-based software company founded in 2017, combines weather data, market information and asset data into forecasts and trading signals for solar and wind energy producers.
Securely, an Eindhoven cybersecurity company founded in 2019, is building an AI platform that protects web applications against attacks and continuously monitors whether organisations comply with regulations such as NEN 7510 and NIS2.
Pacmed develops AI software that helps ICU physicians make decisions about discharge timing and capacity planning. The Amsterdam-based company works with hospitals including OLVG, Maasstad and Catharina Ziekenhuis.
Hihaho, a SaaS platform based in Assen, enables organisations to transform existing videos into interactive learning and sales experiences. The company has been active since 2012, employs 23 people and has generated 20 million views on interactive videos to date.
Amsterdam-based Monumental is developing robots that build façades and structures on active construction sites, with less human labour. The company raised a €25 million Series A round in 2024.
Nijmegen-based Screenpoint Medical develops AI software that supports radiologists in reading mammograms. Its product Transpara is now in use in more than 30 countries and has processed over 12 million mammograms.
I See U Baby Care is developing an AI-based camera system that objectively and non-invasively measures the sleep patterns of premature babies in the neonatal ward. The Utrecht-based company, founded in 2024 by Chanel Sam, grew out of scientific research at UMC Utrecht.
Eindhoven-based Labelfuse is building a platform that allows policy staff and other non-technical users to independently deploy image recognition on CCTV, drone and satellite feeds, without writing any code. The company was founded in 2019 and received a grant of €27.6 million in 2021.
Delft-based QuantWare manufactures quantum processors that other companies integrate into their quantum computers. The company, which emerged from research institute QuTech, raised an extended Series A round of €27 million in early 2025.
Rotterdam-based Gradyent creates a real-time digital twin of heat networks and uses it to help energy companies operate more efficiently and with lower CO2 intensity. The company is active in more than 35 European cities and raised a €28 million Series B in early 2025.
BOTS Capital, based in Haarlem, gives retail investors access to algorithmic trading strategies through its own app. Founded in 2017 and backed by €30 million in funding, the company focuses on consistent returns at low costs.
Betty Blocks, based in Alkmaar, offers a low-code platform that allows organisations to build their own applications while retaining full ownership of the source code. The company targets enterprise clients seeking speed without dependency on a single vendor.
Culios, based in Ermelo, develops specialised search engines and recommendation systems for online supermarkets. The company, founded in 2008, closed a funding round of €32.2 million in early 2025.
Amsterdam-based Harver is building a pre-employment assessment platform that helps large organisations select candidates on the basis of data and scientifically validated tests, rather than on work experience alone. The company, founded in 2015, has raised over €32 million to date.
Visualfabriq, based in Maarssen, builds SaaS software for revenue forecasting and promotion management, specifically for consumer goods manufacturers. The company was founded in 2013 after its founders were unable to find usable tools for Revenue Growth Management.
LUGN Security, based in Heerlen, combines sensors, autonomous drones and a centrally AI-driven control system to secure large sites and infrastructure. The company, founded in 2021, raised €36.8 million in a Series B round and operates from the Brightlands Smart Services Campus.
Enschede-based company 20face develops biometric access systems in which users register themselves without a photo being stored. The company operates across offices, logistics, healthcare and leisure sectors, and raised a Series D round of €36.8 million in 2022.
Amsterdam-based Recall helps users automatically summarise and connect articles, videos, podcasts and PDFs in a self-organising knowledge base. The company closed a Series A round of €38 million in early 2025.
Amsterdam-based Duna is building an AI platform that automates business onboarding and compliance checks. The company, founded in 2023, raised a €40 million Series A round and ultimately aims to establish a network of shareable corporate identities.
Weather Solutions NL B.V., based in The Hague, provides accurate, tailored weather forecasts to energy companies, road authorities, airports and agricultural businesses. The company was founded in 2017 by veterans of the private weather sector and raised over €42 million in a Series B round in 2022.
Rijswijk-based Rocsys develops autonomous charging systems for electric vehicles and heavy machinery, so fleet operators no longer depend on manual plug-in connections. The company has raised over €42 million to date and targets sectors such as port logistics, warehouses and robotaxis.
TheyDo, an Amsterdam-based AI platform founded in 2019, helps large organisations centralise their customer journeys so that teams make faster, better-aligned decisions. The company has raised €42.9 million to date.
Sensorfy, based at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, builds custom IoT systems that enable industrial companies to remotely monitor equipment and detect faults at an early stage. The company, which grew out of Meuleman Electronics, combines proprietary hardware, an IoT platform and machine learning in a single approach.
Amsterdam-based Castor EDC develops software that enables researchers to set up, manage and adapt clinical studies from a single system. The Amsterdam company, founded in 2012, raised a Series B round of €45 million in 2021.
Utrecht-based StellaSpark builds digital twins of the physical living environment. Through its platform Nexus, government bodies, water companies and grid operators connect real-time data sources to spatial analyses for maintenance, monitoring and policy support.
Amsterdam-based Source.ag builds software that enables greenhouse growers to use real-time data to improve crop yields and manage their operations. The company has raised €54.5 million to date, including a Series B round in early 2025.
Utrecht-based FRISS has spent nearly two decades building software that enables property and casualty insurers to automatically identify fraud and risks during policy applications, renewals and claims. The company raised a Series B round of €59.4 million in 2024.
Rotterdam-based SYMSON develops AI-driven pricing software for mid-market retailers, manufacturers and distributors. The company, which emerged from Erasmus University Rotterdam, raised a Series B round of nearly €60 million in 2022.
Eindhoven-based Axelera AI develops specialised chips and accompanying software for AI inference at the edge, with a focus on computer vision applications such as video analysis and quality inspection. The company, founded in 2021, has raised more than 61 million euros to date.
Toloka, based in Amsterdam and founded in 2014, combines human experts with technology to deliver high-quality training and evaluation data to companies developing large language models and AI agents. In early 2025, the company closed a Series B round of €64 million.
Amsterdam-based Overstory combines AI with satellite and aerial imagery to help energy companies map and manage vegetation risks along high-voltage lines. The company was founded in 2018 and has raised more than €67 million to date.
Amsterdam-based Silverflow is modernising outdated payments infrastructure with a cloud-native platform that connects acquirers and merchants directly to card networks via a single API. The company has raised more than €70 million to date.
Amsterdam-based Sympower connects companies with flexible energy use to national grid system operators that need that flexibility to keep supply and demand in balance. The company has raised €74.5 million to date and operates in multiple European markets.
Amsterdam-based TestGorilla offers companies a platform to screen job applicants on the basis of scientifically validated skills tests, rather than CVs. The company raised over €81 million in 2022 and has a test library of more than 350 assessments.
Medal.tv, founded in 2015 and headquartered in Naarden, builds software that lets PC gamers record, edit and share gameplay highlights with the press of a button. The company has raised over €82 million and aims to make clipping accessible to a broad audience, well beyond the circle of dedicated streamers.
Amsterdam-based Kaiko is developing kaiko.w, an AI assistant for oncology teams that works with clinical text, medical imaging and genomic data. Since 2021, the Netherlands Cancer Institute has been using the system in daily practice.
Doxray, an AI company from Neede in the Gelderland province, offers a platform that enables organisations to automatically classify, extract and validate data from documents. The company focuses on heavily regulated European sectors such as legal, real estate and healthcare insurance.
Framer is an Amsterdam-based platform that enables designers and marketers to build and publish professional websites without writing code. The company closed a Series D round in early 2025, bringing its total funding to €85.6 million.
Chatbots.expert, based in Tilburg, helps companies across the Benelux build and implement chatbots for customer service, covering everything from strategy to technical delivery. The agency, founded in 2017 by Ries Deijkers and Petr Chmelař, focuses on the entire lifecycle of a chatbot project.
Podego B.V., based in Utrecht, develops AI-driven audio guides for museums and heritage institutions, converting curatorial material into layered audio content in more than thirty languages. The company was founded in 2024 by Yvan Putra Satyawan and Danna Mulya.
Amsterdam-based Cradle combines machine learning with wet-lab research to accelerate the development of proteins for medicines and industrial applications. The company raised a Series B round of one hundred million euros in 2024.
CuspAI, founded in 2024 and operating from Amsterdam and Cambridge, uses generative AI to design new materials that can be discovered up to ten times faster than through traditional methods. The company has raised $130 million to date and works with partners including ASML, Meta and Hyundai.
Rotterdam-based Crownstone is building an indoor positioning system using Bluetooth modules mounted behind power outlets that draw power from the electrical grid. The system localises people and objects at room level and targets applications in healthcare, safety and building management.
Planck Network, based in Amsterdam, is building a decentralised GPU network on which developers can train and deploy AI models without depending on centralised cloud providers. The company, founded in 2023, raised €200 million in a Series B round in early 2025.
Sybotanica B.V. from Arnhem sells specialised potting soil mixes and care products for houseplant enthusiasts across Europe. The company, founded in 2020 by Sybren Bies, focuses on plant species that thrive in loose, porous soil rather than standard universal potting compost.
Textkernel, founded in Amsterdam in 2001, builds software that enables recruitment professionals to process CVs, match candidates and analyse labour market data. The company has been part of US-based Bullhorn since early 2024 and continues to operate from Amsterdam as an independent unit.
Genzai B.V. from Venlo helps mid-sized companies implement AI and invests in technology companies through its own venture arm. The company operates through a dual structure: a consulting division and Genzai Ventures.
General Intuition, which emerged from Dutch video platform Medal in 2025, trains AI agents on two billion gameplay clips per year to develop spatial and temporal reasoning. The Amsterdam-based deeptech company raised €114 million in a seed round.
Clember, a Utrecht-based AI platform founded by two experienced security consultants, automates the manual and repetitive side of cybersecurity consulting. The platform connects uploaded client documents and existing security tools to compliance frameworks such as NIS2, ISO and GDPR to generate immediate insights.
THE REAL MAG. from Roermond develops custom 3D visualisations and AI applications that enable companies to present products, buildings and activities digitally. The agency focuses on improving sales and reducing costs through digital innovation.
Destinus, based in Katwijk, is developing AI-driven drones and turbojet technology for the defence and energy sectors. The company raised a Series A round of €400 million in early 2025.
Baseboard Pro, based in Hellendoorn, develops software that enables machine builders to digitally capture assembly processes and centrally manage work instructions, quality checks and bills of materials. The platform targets SME manufacturers engaged in complex, low-volume production.
Amsterdam-based Weaviate builds an open-source vector database that allows developers to search data by semantic meaning rather than keywords. The company closed a Series B round of over €45 million in 2024.
Thirty hours scrolling through camera footage for a single incident: a frustrating reality in healthcare. That story became the foundation for Oddity.ai's AI-driven solution.
