The Brabant Development Agency (BOM) and its co-investors mobilised €561m across 47 funding rounds in the first nine months of 2026, against €238m across 43 rounds in the whole of 2025.
Credit: this report is based on a story first published by IO+. Read the original at ioplus.nl.
According to IO+, the figures come from the latest "Van inzicht naar impact" paper by Rabobank chief economist Otto Raspe and BOM chief executive Brigit van Dijk-van de Reijt. The paper describes capital increasingly concentrating in larger, later funding rounds, while weak productivity growth, labour shortages and international uncertainty threaten the foundations beneath the headline figures.
The numbers
The Dutch startup and scale-up market attracted more than €3.1bn in the first nine months of 2026, already above the total for 2025, according to the Quarterly Startup Report cited in the paper. BOM's €561m, raised together with co-investors, represented more than 18% of that national volume.
Companies including Euclyd, Morphotonics, Keiron, VitalFluid and Tracxon secured growth capital in the period, IO+ reports. Van Dijk-van de Reijt says that for every euro BOM invests, it attracts €12 in co-financing.
Brabant's startup population grew by almost 20% between 2021 and 2025. The paper warns that continued attention to early-stage companies is needed, since today's funding successes depend on businesses that earlier found their first investors, technical talent and commercial guidance.
Growth outlook
RaboResearch forecasts economic growth of 2.6% in Southeast Brabant in 2026, twice the national forecast of 1.3%. Only Greater Amsterdam, at 3.1%, is expected to grow faster. In Southeast Brabant, industry generated around 60% of growth between 2013 and 2023.
Raspe describes productivity growth as having stalled for fourteen years. "At first glance, the Dutch economy is doing well," he says, before calling it the tip of the iceberg.
Capital now, not later
The paper welcomes government plans for a National Investment Institution, an expansion of the National Green Fund and a National Agency for Disruptive Innovation. Van Dijk-van de Reijt expects initiatives such as the investment institution to take years to become operational, while companies raising money now face much shorter deadlines.
BOM is therefore in talks with banks and pension funds about additional financing. At a banking dinner held around LEVEL UP 2026, those institutions again backed more risk capital and innovation financing, she reports.
The paper also points to Supercomputing Brabant, an initiative of Tilburg University, Eindhoven University of Technology, BOM and the province. The partners jointly invested €14m in a supercomputer that, according to Van Dijk-van de Reijt, is offered free of charge to regional startups building advanced AI technology. In West Brabant, The Protein Brewery raised €18m to bring its fermentation-based protein, fermotein, to the European market at scale.
Original source: IO+, "Brabant funding boom has a blind spot: tomorrow's tech champions"
