Good news! The Dutch venture landscape bounced a bit back from two consecutive quarters of decline in funding. Netherlands-based startups and scaleups have raised more than €750M in Q4 2022, compared to almost €556M in Q3 2022. And more from a positive side: this edition of the Dutch Venture Capital Quarterly introduces our first comparison of male versus (partly) female founding teams.
Our analysis, again open-sourced via a publicly available spreadsheet, consists of an additional column that shows whether an investment has been raised by a Dutch startup or scaleup with one or more female founders. As it appears, female founder-led ventures raised €57,1 million during the fourth quarter of 2022, on a total of €750,4 million. In other words, 7,6% of the total funding has been closed by female founder-led startups.
From another perspective, 34 female-led ventures out of 149 ventures have secured growth funding. This indicates that 22.8% of the funded ventures in Q4 are female-led, more than one out of five ventures. The much lower percentage in total capital raised by female-led ventures is rooted in the fact that the 19 largest investment rounds in the fourth quarter are all completed by fully male founder-led startups, from the €7.13M closed by Amsterdam’s Talk360 up to the €125M raised by Amsterdam scaleup econic.
Recovery from the third quarter
Now back to our more gender-neutral analysis: as said, compared to the third quarter, the Dutch venture market has been able to recover from two quarters in which it experienced a decrease in closed investments. In the past quarter, Dutch startups secured almost €200 million more than in the third quarter of 2022, when they did not reach further than €556 million. Among the funded ones is one of our customers, Pixyle AI. Well done!
Although referenced in certain media as Dutch companies, excluded from our Q4 analysis are investments raised by Mews, WeTravel and Dawn Aerospace. Mews is a scaleup from Prague, WeTravel has its roots in San Francisco and Dawn Aerospace’s legal entity is in New Zealand.
In the shadow of a record year
Although our Dutch venture market recovered from Q3 2022, the past year will be remembered by the scene as a year of decline. Overall, when we compare 2022 with 2021, our Dutch startups and scaleups raised significantly less funding. Dutch ventures closed €3,6 billion in 2022, which is around two-third of the €5,3 billion capital raised in 2021.
If you like to go through all past year’s quarters, then take a look at our individual reports about Q1 2022, Q2 2022 and Q3 2022, which include our open-sourced spreadsheets as well.
Wishing you a belated happy new year and follow us for new quarterly analyses on 2023!
