A great place for startups & scaleups
The Netherlands keeps producing tech companies that outgrow it. In the 2026 Global Startup Ecosystem Report, Startup Genome ranks Amsterdam-Delta at number 23 worldwide, tied with Stockholm. It is home base to companies like Adyen, Mollie, Picnic and Booking.com, and to a long tail of scaleups most people outside the country have never heard of.
Scaleups are the interesting career bet. They have usually found product market fit and are expanding in team and geography, so there is real work to do and room to grow with the company. But the word "scaleup" hides a lot: some of these companies are growing 30% a year and hiring hard, others are cutting. The list below separates them, using the numbers each company has actually published.
First, what changed since 2022
We originally published this list in 2022, and three of the ten no longer belong on it. Being honest about that is more useful than quietly swapping the names out.
Takeaway.com is gone as an independent company. Prosus bought Just Eat Takeaway.com for €4.1 billion, and the shares stopped trading on Euronext Amsterdam in November 2025. It is a business unit of a listed conglomerate now, not a scaleup.
3D Hubs was acquired by Protolabs in 2021, renamed Hubs, and then folded into the parent brand as Protolabs Network in January 2024. The Amsterdam team still exists, but you would be joining a US public company's network division.
MessageBird renamed itself Bird in February 2024 and has been shrinking in Europe since. It cut 120 jobs, roughly a third of its workforce, in February 2025, and announced another round in 2026 with the bulk of the reductions in Europe as its customer base shifts to the Americas and Asia. The original entry here said it might be time to jump on board and fly high. That advice did not age well, and we are not repeating it.
10 Dutch scaleups to check out for career opportunities
Picnic
Picnic is the online supermarket that delivers from its own electric vans, and it is the biggest hiring machine on this list. It raised €430 million in November 2025, almost all of it earmarked for Germany, where it now expects to pass €1 billion in revenue in 2026 and is growing faster than in its home market. It is operationally profitable in the Netherlands and deliberately not yet in Germany. Worth knowing before you apply: much of Picnic's headcount is operations and logistics rather than tech, and the German expansion is where the money and the career upside are.
Mollie
Mollie is the payments platform that competes with Stripe and Adyen by being noticeably easier for smaller merchants to switch on. It reported €214 million in revenue for 2024, up 28%, with €115 million gross profit and its first positive EBITDA since 2018, serving around 250,000 customers. That last detail matters if you are job hunting: it means the company has reached the stage where growth has to pay for itself, so hiring is more selective than it was around the 2021 unicorn round.
Mews
Mews builds the operating system hotels run on, replacing the ancient property management software most of the industry is still stuck with. Born in Prague, headquartered in Amsterdam, it raised a $300 million Series D at a $2.5 billion valuation in January 2026, led by EQT Growth. It handled 42.3 million check-ins and $19.7 billion in transaction volume across 15,000 customers in 85 countries in 2025. With 1,300+ staff spread across many countries, it is the most "big company" option here, so expect structure rather than a garage.
bunq
bunq is the Amsterdam neobank built for people who live in more than one country. It posted €85.3 million net profit in 2024, up 65% from €51.6 million, across 17 million users and €8 billion in deposits, and is pushing into the US via a broker-dealer registration as a first step toward a full banking licence. The caveat is structural: much of that profit came from interest income, which rises and falls with ECB rates rather than with anything the team does. bunq is also famously opinionated about how it works, which people either love or leave over.
Catawiki
Catawiki is the marketplace for unique objects, where you can bid on a classic Porsche, a first-edition comic or a lock of Elvis Presley's hair. It has quietly become a real business: €111 million revenue in 2025, up 9% across the year but accelerating to almost 20% in the second half, with €5.8 million net profit and €11.2 million adjusted EBITDA. Around 755 people work there. Note that a good chunk of new hiring has moved to its Lisbon office rather than Amsterdam.
Framer
Framer is the most Silicon Valley thing in Amsterdam: a design-to-website tool taking on Figma, Webflow and Squarespace at once. It raised a $100 million Series D at a $2 billion valuation in August 2025, having doubled ARR from $25 million to $50 million. The striking number for a candidate is headcount: roughly 130 people carry all of that, which means an extremely high bar to get in and very little hand-holding once you are there. If you want a large team and clear ladders, look elsewhere on this list.
DataSnipper
DataSnipper sells AI automation into the least glamorous, most lucrative corner of software: audit. It sits inside Excel, pulls evidence out of documents, and is used by Deloitte, EY and hundreds of thousands of auditors. It raised $100 million led by Index Ventures at a $1 billion valuation in February 2024 and reports $1.4 billion in customer productivity savings for 2025. At roughly 290 people with offices in Amsterdam, New York, Tokyo and Kuala Lumpur, it is small enough to matter in. The honest downside: the domain is accounting compliance, and that is either fascinating to you or it is not.
Sendcloud
Sendcloud is the shipping layer for European e-commerce, connecting webshops to carriers so nobody has to write carrier integrations. Not in the public eye, but a serious company: it raised a $177 million Series C led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 in 2021 and employs around 450 people out of Eindhoven. Be aware that 2021 was also the last round it announced, so this is a company living on its own revenue rather than fresh capital, which tends to mean tighter headcount plans than the funding headline suggests.
Channable
Channable does feed management and PPC automation, pushing product catalogues out to marketplaces, comparison sites and ad platforms across 3,000+ channels for 11,000+ customers including IKEA, Vodafone and MediaMarkt. In May 2025 it acquired Producthero, Europe's largest premium Google CSS partner, which is a decent signal: scaleups that buy other companies are usually the ones with momentum. It is based in Utrecht at around 280 people, so it is the most commutable option if you do not want to be in Amsterdam.
Fairphone
Fairphone makes repairable phones from a fair supply chain, negotiating on mining and factory labour conditions rather than just publishing a report about them. 2025 was its best year: shipments up 42% to more than 145,000 units and revenue up 35% to €73.3 million, in a shrinking global smartphone market. Read the rest of the numbers before you fall in love, though: it is still loss-making, even after cutting net losses from €4.94 million to €1.91 million. At under 200 people it is the smallest company here, and it is a mission company first, which shows up in the salary.
How to actually choose
The useful filter is not which of these is coolest, but which stage matches what you want. Picnic, Mews and bunq are big enough to have real career ladders and the budget to train you. Framer and DataSnipper are small, fast and unforgiving, where you will own something significant early and there will be nobody to escalate to. Catawiki, Mollie, Channable and Sendcloud sit in between: profitable or close to it, growing steadily, hiring for specific gaps rather than in bulk.
One thing worth checking on every one of these before an interview: where the hiring is actually happening. Several are Dutch by history and increasingly not by geography. Catawiki is growing its Lisbon office, Mews is spread across dozens of countries, and bunq is pointing at the US. A role at an Amsterdam-founded company is not the same as a role in Amsterdam.
