Marketing and adtech in the Dutch startup scene: five players and the trends of 2026

While 45% of Dutch marketers were using AI tools in 2024, that share has risen to 72% in 2026. The AI marketing market in the Netherlands is estimated at €2.1 billion, with year-on-year growth of 68%. Those figures tell a story of rapid adoption, but also of a sector still searching for maturity.

Five Dutch startups, operating from Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam, are working on different parts of that puzzle: from marketing automation for hospitality businesses to making brands visible within AI systems. Their approaches differ, but the context is the same: AI has become the standard, not the exception.

Toppi targets hospitality with seed funding in hand

The most concrete step in the past year was taken by Toppi, an Amsterdam-based company founded in 2024. In August 2025 it raised almost €1 million in a seed round led by X Investments, with Ollie Dapper and William van Lith as investors. That same month, Emiel van Dongen joined as co-founder and CTO, bringing a background in Python, AI and data infrastructure.

Toppi focuses exclusively on the hospitality sector, helping hospitality businesses optimise their presence on Google, Apple Maps, social media and AI platforms such as ChatGPT. The company offers two products: Toppi Essential, an AI platform for online visibility, and Toppi Co-pilot, which combines AI tools with on-demand expert services. More than 200 hospitality businesses have used the platform to date. Toppi reports an average increase of 206% in profile views, 172% in website clicks, and an average revenue increase of 15% within twelve months among those customers.

The focus on a single sector, and on a specific operational problem within that sector, is a pattern that recurs frequently among early-stage AI startups. Generalist tools are losing ground to providers that go deep into a vertical market.

Five other players, five angles

The AI Club, based in Utrecht, combines marketing automation with insights from psychology. The company, founded in 2022, works on AI tools for website development and marketing processes. It is one of the earlier players in this segment, although public information on funding or customer growth is limited.

Wheel AI, founded in 2024 in Amsterdam, presents itself as an all-in-one marketing platform for campaign automation and growth. Concrete business figures are not publicly available.

Promptwatch, also based in Amsterdam and founded in 2025, positions itself in a specific new space: helping brands become visible and discoverable within LLMs such as ChatGPT and Gemini. This is a direct response to a broader trend in which consumers increasingly pose search queries through conversational AI tools rather than traditional search engines. Brands that are not built for recognition by AI agents risk becoming invisible in that new search environment. Promptwatch has raised €6M in seed funding to accelerate its growth.

MrWork, from Rotterdam, operates at the intersection of HR and marketing. Its platform applies AI to candidate recruitment and relieves recruiters of routine tasks through modules for employer branding, lead generation and job posting. No recent funding rounds or growth figures have been made public.

AI martech startup Aizy, from Breda, focuses on fully automating online marketing campaigns across platforms including Google, Instagram and TikTok. The company, founded by serial entrepreneur Stefan Luijten, has raised €2M in growth capital at a valuation of €22M.

Three trends shaping the sector

Behind the individual companies, three broader movements are influencing how marketing and adtech startups are positioning themselves in 2026.

The first is the shift towards conversational search. Consumers are increasingly asking full questions to AI tools and engaging AI shopping agents for product comparisons. For brands, this means that presence in traditional search results is no longer sufficient; they also need to be recognisable to the AI layer that now sits between brand and consumer. Promptwatch and Promptmarketing are examples of AI startups responding to this trend.

The second trend is the growing value of first-party customer data. Stricter privacy regulations are making third-party tracking more complex, making first-party data strategically more important. Startups that help companies collect, organise and activate that data therefore have a structural advantage.

The third movement is sector specialisation. Generic AI marketing tools are now widely available; the differentiating factor increasingly lies in deep knowledge of a specific sector, as Toppi demonstrates with hospitality.

Scaling up remains a bottleneck

The Dutch marketing and adtech sector shares the challenges of the broader Dutch tech scene. The scale-up ratio, the percentage of startups that raise more than €10 million, stands at 21.6%. For AI startups specifically, that figure is 21.2%, well below the European average of 31.1%. Only 27% of Dutch venture capital investments go to AI companies; in the United States that figure is 60%.

That capital is available is evident from sector-wide figures: the Dutch tech sector counted 11,301 active companies and raised €2.64 billion in venture capital in 2025. However, 75% of AI investments in Dutch startups came from foreign investors, illustrating the limited role of domestic capital.

Beyond funding, knowledge development is a stumbling block. Research shows that 54% of Dutch marketers cite a lack of knowledge as the biggest barrier to AI adoption, while only 32% identify budget as a constraint. A shortage of ICT specialists is also a factor, slowing the development of technical teams at young companies.

Regulation is a third factor. 87% of Dutch people believe AI development should be carefully regulated, even if that slows development. Concerns centre on accuracy (57%), privacy (53%) and ethical risks (43%). For startups in marketing and adtech, which work with consumer data and automated influence, that societal pressure is a context they cannot ignore.

For founders, investors and policymakers in the Dutch AI scene, the marketing and adtech sector confirms a pattern that is visible more broadly: AI adoption is moving quickly, but the capacity to build sustainable, scalable businesses from it is lagging behind. The five startups discussed here show that there is room for specialised players, but also that the road to scale-up still lies largely ahead for most of them.