We celebrate this International Women’s Day by sharing a snapshot of female entrepreneurship in the Netherlands as a follow-up publication on the SHE LEADS Dashboard 2022. Based on a deep dive into Dealroom’s database, we uncovered the following insights about female entrepreneurship in the Netherlands:

• Around 15% of Dutch headquartered companies are founded by women but only 8% of total funding for Dutch headquartered firms goes to these firms with at least 1 female founder
  • This representation is worse than the overall picture in Europe (where approximately 17% of European headquartered companies are founded by women)
• Female-founded firms average at 6 years old
  • This is, on average, 1.2 years younger compared to non-female-founded firms and demonstrates promising signs of growth in female entrepreneurship
• Top investors in female entrepreneurship are not only large public funds, such as Innovatiefonds NH or European Innovation Council, but private VCs such as SHIFT Invest also play a key role
• Funding is concentrated in Amsterdam (€727M), while Rotterdam comes second with only a fraction of the amount of funding (€29M) recorded for its female-founded startups
• Early-stage growth champions in the landscape of female entrepreneurship are Spectral, Octo, Panda International, The Fabricant and 30MHz
• Female entrepreneurship reaches across a diverse variety of sectors where female-founded companies dominate in health, education & media. However, representation still lags behind in fintech and enterprise software when compared to non-female-founded companies

SHE LEADS is a long-term research and education project supported by the Ondernemende Vrouwen Fonds and Jong Ondernemschap Fonds of Erasmus Trustfonds.

Questions? Reach out to us via research@ece.nl
For more information about the SHE LEADS initiative: https://ece.nl/sheleads/