Marketing and adtech in the Dutch startup scene: five companies show where the sector is heading

Marketing and adtech is one of the busiest segments in the Dutch startup scene of 2026. Five young companies, spread across Utrecht, Amsterdam and Rotterdam, show just how broad the sector has become: from automated campaigns for small hospitality businesses to tools that keep brands visible in AI-driven search environments.

What these companies have in common is their reliance on AI as a core technology. Whereas marketing automation a few years ago still revolved around email flows and A/B testing, it now involves taking over entire campaign cycles, generating content, and navigating a search landscape that increasingly resembles traditional search results less and less. The challenge is not purely technical: the market is changing faster than many customers can keep up with.

Who are the players

The oldest company in this overview is The AI Club from Utrecht, founded in 2022. The company focuses on AI tools for marketing automation and website development, with a notable angle: the tools are built on insights from psychology. This sets The AI Club apart from purely technology-oriented competitors and aligns with a broader trend in which behavioural science and AI are increasingly being combined.

Toppi (Amsterdam, 2024) has chosen a more specific target audience: the hospitality sector. The platform helps restaurants and cafés fill empty seats through AI-driven marketing while simultaneously boosting their online visibility. In January 2025, Toppi raised a seed round of one million euros, indicating that investors appreciate the vertical approach. By focusing on a single sector, Toppi can build deeper integrations and learn from user data more quickly than a generalist platform.

Wheel AI, also from Amsterdam and likewise founded in 2024, takes the opposite approach by opting for breadth. The platform positions itself as an all-in-one solution for growth and campaign automation. Where Toppi seeks depth, Wheel AI seeks breadth: the company targets a wide range of sectors and aims to support the full marketing cycle, from strategy through to execution.

PromptMarketing, founded in 2025 and therefore the youngest company in this overview, addresses a specific emerging question: how do brands remain visible and credible within AI systems such as ChatGPT and similar tools? As more and more consumers retrieve information via AI assistants rather than traditional search engines, the question of how brands position themselves is also shifting. PromptMarketing develops methodologies and tools to address this.

MrWork from Rotterdam falls slightly outside the classic definition of marketing, but belongs in this segment due to its approach to labour market communications. The company uses AI to recruit candidates and relieve recruiters of repetitive tasks. Recruitment is a closely related discipline from a marketing perspective, and the challenges overlap significantly: reach, conversion and personalisation.

Two directions in the market

The five companies reflect two movements dominating the sector in 2026. The first is verticalisation: rather than building generic marketing tools, a growing number of startups are choosing a specific industry or target group. Toppi does this for hospitality, MrWork for recruitment. This brings advantages: deeper product knowledge, higher retention and a clearer sales narrative. The downside is a smaller addressable market, which makes investors more critical about growth potential.

The second movement is capitalising on the rise of AI search environments. PromptMarketing is the most direct example of this, but The AI Club and Wheel AI also position themselves as partners for companies looking to adapt their marketing approach to a world in which AI plays an ever-greater role in how people find information and make decisions. This is relatively new territory, and the rules of the game are not yet established. That creates room for early movers, but also uncertainty about which approach will prove effective in the long run.

Challenges for the sector

Dutch marketing and adtech startups operate in a fast-moving market that is heavily dependent on decisions made elsewhere. Major platforms such as Google, Meta and OpenAI largely set the rules: algorithm changes, privacy restrictions or adjustments to how AI assistants function can put a startup's business model under pressure within a short period of time.

In addition, adoption among SMEs, an important target group for many of these startups, is not yet a given. AI tools require a degree of technical readiness and organisational change, and this tends to move more slowly at smaller companies than at large enterprises. Toppi partly addresses this by tailoring its tool specifically to the working practices of hospitality entrepreneurs, thereby lowering the barrier to entry.

Funding is another area to watch. Of the five companies, only Toppi has completed a known investment round. The remaining four are, as far as is publicly known, still without external financing or at an early stage. In a market where product-market fit must be demonstrated quickly, access to capital is a decisive factor in determining who will still be standing in the years ahead.

Position within the broader European ecosystem

Within the European AI scene, marketing and adtech is increasingly seen as a sector with a relatively low barrier to entry, but one where economies of scale quickly become decisive. Dutch startups compete not only with one another, but also with well-funded players from the United Kingdom, Germany and Scandinavia. The presence of five active companies in this segment in the Netherlands points to a healthy level of activity, but the sector has yet to produce a clear frontrunner making inroads internationally.

For investors and policymakers looking at opportunities within the Dutch AI ecosystem, this overview shows that the sector is experimenting broadly: with vertical focus, with new search environments, and with the combination of behavioural science and automation. Which approach will ultimately generate the most traction will become clearer over the next two years.