Amsterdam Claims a Quarter of the Netherlands' 2,000 AI Companies
The country's AI sector is concentrating hard around the capital, new RankmyAI research shows, even as a companion study finds it still trails European peers on scale and funding.
See more of Dutch Brief in your Google search results
The Netherlands is currently home to around 2,000 AI companies, and more than a quarter of them, 525, are based in Amsterdam, according to an analysis by RankmyAI, an independent research guide of the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), as reported by Het Financieele Dagblad. Rotterdam and Utrecht follow in a distant second and third place.
A capital-heavy map
Mostly thanks to Amsterdam, Noord-Holland is now accounting for 35 percent of all Dutch AI companies, the largest share of any of the provinces. The city is already home to several AI clusters, with new ones, such as The Stack, opening in September, expanding the city’s AI ecosystem. “We currently have 30 registered companies, but we are aiming for more than 200 companies by 2029,” Esther Bisschop, The Stack’s Founding Director, told FD.
AI companies aren’t just an Amsterdam story, though. They are living and breathing everywhere from Abcoude to Zaltbommel. “The Dutch AI sector is strongly concentrated in Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland,” Jesse Weltevreden, professor of digital commerce at the HvA and co-founder of RankmyAI, told FD. “But if you look at the AI companies relative to total business activity, the provinces of Groningen, Noord-Holland, and Utrecht stand out.”
What is RankmyAI actually measuring
RankmyAI, built by Weltevreden and data scientist David Kakanis at the HvA’s Centre for Market Insights and Centre of Expertise Applied AI, ranks more than 60,000 AI tools and companies worldwide using objective signals such as website traffic, investment figures, and user reviews. At the moment RankmyAI shows, Studocu, the study platform where students can connect and share materials, sitting at the top of both Amsterdam’s and the Netherlands’ ranking lists.
SPONSORED
You’re overpaying your accountant. And they still don’t call you back.
Neno gives you a dedicated bookkeeper, automated admin, real-time financial insights and a free business bank account. Everything your business needs, in one place.
No chasing. No surprises. No unnecessary costs.
Why the map looks this way
The Dutch AI sector is growing fast, but a companion RankmyAI analysis published by Amsterdam AI comparing the Netherlands with five other European countries, shows it is still catching up in scale. Despite counting almost 2,000 companies in the ecosystem, the Netherlands has just 1.1 AI companies per 10,000 inhabitants, against Denmark’s 2.1 andNorway’s 1.3, and its companies skew younger and smaller than counterparts in Germany and France.
This growth has come in two waves: a first moment in 2017 built on traditional machine learning and image analysis, and a faster second wave since 2023 applying generative AI to writing, customer contact, and legal work. More than a quarter of Dutch AI companies sit in advisory services and tool-building for other businesses rather than building proprietary AI products of their own.
Funding is where the gap shows the most: unlike France, where a state investment bank actively backs promising start-ups, the Netherlands has no comparable public investor dedicated to AI yet. This funding gap seems to sit awkwardly next to the government’s own ambitions. AI is one of the “key technologies” targeted by the recently expanded €610 million Deep Tech Fonds. However, the fund spreads across four fields and nit designated for AI specifically. For Amsterdam, the concentration of companies is already a selling point for clusters like The Stack. For everywhere else, from Breda to Kampen, the more pressing question isn’t where AI companies are choosing to locate, but where they’ll find the growth capital to scale once they reach that point.
Four Amsterdam platforms worth watching
Beyond household names like Framer and Studocu, RankmyAI’s top 100 ranking for the Amsterdam Metropolitan Region surfaces a mix of genuine scale-ups and a much longer tail of applied tools, creating a useful cross-section of what “Amsterdam AI” actually looks like day to day.
DataSnipper sits at the scale-up end, bringing an audit-automation software that extracts and cross-references data inside Excel for finance and audit teams. With a $100 million Series B in 2024, DataSnipper became the country’s first new unicorn since 2022. On a different note, Weaviate sits closer to the infrastructure space with its open-source vector database used by other AI builders to plug into for search and retrieval.
The rest of the ranking is made up of smaller in scale, applied tools, making up the layer where AI meets everyday business admin. subsidAI uses AI to scan a company’s R&D documentation, match it against national and EU subsidy criteria, and draft WBSO tax-credit applications that would otherwise take weeks with a traditional adviser, compressing the process to a couple of hours. Neno builds AI-native bookkeeping, payroll and tax tooling for Dutch entrepreneurs and SMEs, automating the admin every Dutch business already has to handle rather than shipping a foundation model of its own.
These four Amsterdam-based platforms truly illustrate the shape of the ecosystem RankmyAI keeps mapping and describing: a handful of scale-ups, alongside a long tail of smaller teams wrapping AI around existing Dutch business processes.
 | A guest post by
|