We hope that from 2019 we will see the Dutch startup ecosystem go into its mature state. In particular, we would like to see a better ‘exit culture’. After years of hard work, the investors and the entrepreneurs deserve a good exit.

Lean Startup Summit is a full-day event that brings big ideas from Eric Ries’s books off the page to show how organizations are making them real around the world. For a 10% discount, use the LEAPFUNDER10 code.

Check out the promising startups currently raising funding: Civocracy, ITPA Group, obob, Soulskill & PlenSat. Stay tuned for our coming soon rounds: RefundMe, Hug A Pet & Bitz.

Happy investing,

Tienko, Rutger, Myrthe, Andrea, Nika & Mark

• Friday, January 11: Round Table Session, Amsterdam
•  Wednesday, January 16: Leapfunder Investor Readiness Session, Berlin
• Friday, January 18: Round Table Session, Berlin
• Wednesday, January 23: Leapfunder Investor Readiness Session, Berlin
• Wednesday, January 30: Leapfunder Investor Readiness Session, Berlin
• Thursday, January 31: Leapfunder Investor Readiness Session, Amsterdam
• Friday, February 1: Round Table Session, Amsterdam
• Wednesday, February 6: Leapfunder Investor Readiness Session, Berlin
• Friday, February 8: Round Table Session, Berlin

Civocracy is Europe’s leading civic tech platform, which empowers local governments to connect with their citizens, by assisting municipalties, cities and territories to make decisions in a more transparent way. We already hit the minimum raise and we’re offering a 30% discount for this round which has space for another €100K. In December, we were named one of the top 100 companies leading growth in Europe by the Financial Times, and won awards from Google, Accenture and Public.io. It will be of interest to German investors to know that we also qualified for a BAFA subsidy. Visit our round here.

ITPA prevents IT performance issues and resolves delays and instabilities in the entire IT environment. How? Let’s say you ship containers worldwide and a ship needs to sail out at 11:00 AM. A computer failure causes a delay and there is a loss worth millions. The data centre people have no idea what caused the problem. There is a need to analyze over 20.000 combinations in a split second to determine the problem and find a solution. Well, our software pinpoints the problem and recommends a solution. Every company in the world with computers is a potential customer. Visit our round here.

obob is an easy to use and powerful photo tool for professionals working in teams, on the field and in the office. Just before the year ended we signed a pilot agreement with the Facility Management branch of a leading European construction company. obob will be deployed with several maintenance teams with the aim to speed up internal processes, improve communication with obob photos and create automatically indexed photo-based documentation. Such deals will generate growing revenue streams, to support and to test new feature development in real life environments. More exciting news next month! Visit our round here.

Soulskill is a talent relationship manager for small and mid-sized teams to maintain and grow their freelance workforce. We have recently started working with Hotstar, the most downloaded video streaming app in India. Our brief with them is to locate and syndicate content from independent channels on YouTube to republish on the Hotstar app. The potential revenue from this mandate is >$100,000 per year. We went live with our funding round on Leapfunder a little while back. Thanks to investments from friends and family, and the technical assistance from the Dutch Good Growth Fund, we have crossed the $100,000 mark. We are very excited to announce the launch of our podcast series, titled “The Future of Content”. Each episode is a ~30-minute conversation between the founder and a leading mind in the content space. It has been tons of fun for us to put this up – but perhaps more importantly, it has tremendously opened up our own perspective on the media landscape. Visit our round here.

PlenSat has initiated limited human feasibility clinical studies at the University of Maastricht. We have successfully introduced a single pill to four of the initial six patients in our investigational Phase 1 study. Based on the successful completion of the Phase 1 study we will apply for approval from the Medical Ethical Committee to start the second phase of the clinical feasibility trials. Phase 2 will involve multiple balloons in the patient’s stomach. This is planned to start in Q1. The €150K loan we got from RaboBank will cover the expenses for the next 6-9 months. Our first investment was received through Leapfunder this week. We also started a discussion with a Dutch VC group interested in evaluating the funding of PlenSat activities after the clinical feasibility. Visit our round here.

RefundMe is a platform that digitizes the VAT refund process for Non-EU tourists using IoT. We got govt approval from 3 countries and positive feedback from 10 airports and 6 brands. Learn more.

Hug A Pet offers digital veterinary services to customers with a mission to make pet healthcare convenient and stress-free. They want to become the European market leader of the veterinary industry. Learn more.

Bitz is your payment app for festivals and social events. For event organizers who want to provide a seamless ordering process, Bitz offers a digital coin and a payment app for festivals and social events. Learn more.

• Undagrid partners with Vodafone to implement IoT services on a global scale.
• Plot Projects & Mixpanel partner to help supercharge user insights with context.
• Civocracy’s co-founder Chloe is listed as one of the top 10 people improving society.
• Etergo reflects on the 2018 milestones that launched them into a new year.
• PickThisUp is one of the 8 Dutch startups that are making logistics and transport industry smarter.