Amsterdam sees startups become city’s top job growth engine

How significantly is Amsterdam’s startup ecosystem contributing to the job market? A new report by Dealroom.co in partnership with StartupAmsterdam, addresses this question. The report has already received widespread media attention by the Financial TimesSifted.euParoolTelegraaf and Nu.nl (leading Dutch newspapers).

What you’ll find in this report:

  • 69K total jobs in tech companies, equaling 13% of the total 545K job market
  • 1,661 tech companies, covering a vast spectrum from seed startups like Crisp, to scaleups like Picnic and Swapfiets, to established tech companies like Elastic, Adyen, Booking.com and Takeaway.com
  • 13K new jobs added in last two years, making startups the economy’s #1 job growth engine, well ahead of any individual sectors. Interestingly, companies younger than 5 years add most jobs
  • The average startup employs 28 people
  • 12% of startups have mixed or female founders, slightly below the European average

Report - Amsterdam sees startups become city’s top job growth engine

About this report

In November 2017, Dealroom published the first edition. Now, 18 months later, the second edition is taking the same bottom-up approach using Dealroom’s database as its foundation, with additional desktop research. This study has screened nearly 3,000 organisations, of which eventually 1,600 companies were included in the dataset.

Most of the data used here is available for free on the Amsterdam Startup Map. Methodology and scope are covered in detail in the final section of this report. Further feedback or questions are encouraged. If you like this report, please share it!

Sifted deep-dive

Sifted (backed by the Financial Times) provided very useful color to the data, through multiple interviews from Amsterdam startups like Crisp, Tony’s Chocolonely, Ace & Tate, Homerun. A must-read!