Startup Failures in Netherlands

A marketplace nobody wanted to join—least of all the vendors with the data.

€34M and 350 employees weren't enough to crack the European helpdesk market.

The lab-grown meat pioneer stalled on costs and EU red tape after a decade of promise.

The solar-powered car that died before its first customer drove it

The Red Sea crisis proved PortWatch right — six weeks after they ran out of money.

Europe's $3.8B communications API unicorn imploded after a chaotic acquisition spree and governance crisis

Rode the COVID digital wave and drowned when the tide went out.

The "Tesla of e-bikes" with proprietary anti-theft tech — and a repair cost structure that bankrupted it.

Dutch fractional real-estate tokenisation platform raised €8M but suspended operations in 2023 as ECB rate hikes eliminated retail investor appetite for illiquid property tokens.

PostNL spent €50M trying to out-Chinese the Chinese in ecommerce — and failed in 18 months.

Blockchain P2P insurance with 40 members per pool was math that never worked.

Dutch Kubernetes canary release tool outgunned by LaunchDarkly's $200M funding machine.

Dutch energy tax rules killed peer-to-peer electricity trading before it could prove itself.

Dutch container CI pioneer acquired by Oracle for a song, then slowly deprecated into nothingness.

The internet TV startup founded by the creators of Skype — $45M from CBS, Viacom, and Warner, then shut down a year after launch when YouTube went HD

The Dutch neobank that Bunq outcompeted in its own home market

Netherlands' neobank competing in the country that produced Bunq, Adyen, and Mollie

Dutch cross-platform mobile messenger that reached 200 million users before WhatsApp's free unlimited messaging killed the carrier-billing model.

Dutch peer-to-peer large item transport marketplace that raised 8M euros to match drivers with furniture movers before going bankrupt in 2023.

Dutch cloud comms unicorn that burned $200M on acquisitions and collapsed into bankruptcy.

A Dutch pay-per-article journalism startup backed by The New York Times that spent 10 years proving readers do not pay for individual articles.

Dutch data pipeline AI platform acqui-hired as Snowflake and Databricks commoditized the market

Amsterdam's workforce planning SaaS was overwhelmed by the Workday-Planday-Shiftbase competitive pile-on

ING's open banking app that 1.6 million users loved but ING couldn't monetize

The Dutch online travel deals startup backed by Insight Partners raised €50M and went bankrupt in 2018 as margin pressure from Booking.com made profitability impossible.

Amsterdam performance management startup acquired by Kahoot! and absorbed into its learning platform.

Dutch IoT satellite network ran out of signal and funding

Dutch pioneer of HR text parsing AI acquired by SD Worx after 22 years as an independent company.