Post by Wilco Schoonderbeek

The latest Quarterly Startup Report (Dealroom.co, Golden Egg Check, KPMG, Invest-NL, the regional development agencies, NVP and Techleap) shows that roughly €1.33 billion was invested in Dutch startups and scale-ups in the second quarter of 2026. That is an increase of over 81 percent year-on-year, and the strongest quarter outside the COVID peaks. Good news? Certainly. But anyone who has spent more than twenty years in this business reads past the headline. Three mega-rounds — Nearfield, General Intuition and QuantWare — carry this quarter almost entirely. Series B+ deals account for 90.7 percent of all invested capital. Meanwhile, the number of pre-seed deals has more than halved. And while seed deals remain the largest category by count, they receive just 3.5 percent of the money. That is not a footnote. That is the core of the story. Today's mega-deals were the pre-seeds of ten years ago. QuantWare started as a Delft spin-off with a handful of people and a conviction. If we let the bottom of the funnel dry up now, there will be no record quarters to celebrate ten years from now. This is exactly where public venture capital proves its right to exist. By being present where the market falls short: at the earliest stage, where uncertainty is at its peak and no one can point out the winner. Which brings this report to the question I have spent my entire working life on: how do you make good decisions in a fundamentally uncertain world? One thing I know for sure: the answer is not "only invest where the outcome is already visible". So my question to investors, fund managers and policymakers: is this shift towards later stages healthy market discipline, or the beginning of a pipeline problem we will only truly feel five years from now? #DutchTech #VentureCapital #ScaleUps #ValueCreation #PublicVentureCapital