The Netherlands is the perfect breeding floor for inexperienced tech startups
3 min read
The Netherlands is likely one of the greatest locations on the earth for startups and companies engaged on inexperienced tech.
Managing the local weather is deeply rooted in Dutch tradition. With practically a 3rd of its land beneath sea stage, the nation has been highly-adaptive to environmental challenges — discovering methods to show them into alternatives for technological progress.
Assume, for example, of how the Dutch have managed to reclaim land from sea with polders, or keep away from flooding from the North Sea with the development of the Delta Works, a collection of dams and surge boundaries alongside the southern West coast.
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The Netherlands’ environmental credentials prolong far past managing water techniques although. One factor that’s usually ignored is the nation’s big agricultural trade.
Regardless of being the 131st largest nation on the earth, it’s the 4th largest exporter of vegetables. A lot of that is right down to its funding and pioneering analysis in modern greenhouse farming, which mixes hydroponic know-how and geothermal vitality.
There’s extra although, the nation plans to make 16% of all energy used sustainable by 2023 — and it’s already residence to one of many largest offshore wind farms and floating solar energy parks in Europe.
The vast majority of these examples come up from massive quantities of funding and governmental intervention, however this environmental innovation is mirrored within the startup scene as properly.
In line with the Startup Employment Report 2022, impression startups — corporations which have sustainable improvement objectives (SDGs) on the core of their enterprise — are at present producing over 13,900 jobs within the Netherlands.
Particularly, 40% of those jobs have been created by corporations lively within the vitality sector, which has seen an annual job progress of twenty-two% between 2021 and 2022.
Notable employers within the area are lively in electrical mobility, together with photo voltaic carmaker Lightyear, ebike producer VanMoof, and EV charging station supplier EVBox.
The report additionally discovered that the traders’ curiosity in local weather motion as an SDG has obtained the very best funding since 2016, totaling €2.6 billion. And past personal funding, corporations growing sustainable applied sciences can profit from governmental help as properly by means of collaborations or subsidies.
All this comes collectively to make the Netherlands a number one location for the creation of environmentally-focused applied sciences. Not solely is that this supported by the federal government and embedded within the nation’s tradition, there’s a pre-existing workforce that’s extremely expert in coping with this kinds of issues.
It’s no coincidence that the Dutch are huge exporters of climate resilience knowledge, in spite of everything.
In the end, the Netherlands has each a pedigree in environmental applied sciences, but additionally the potential to be the world chief in revolutionary inexperienced applied sciences. Startups working on this sector could be hard-pressed to discover a higher place to function from.
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