Mollie, Picnic and the Dutch Scale-Up Scene After Bird and VanMoof

The Netherlands has learned since 2023 that producing unicorns is easier than keeping them, and the contrasting fates of Mollie, Picnic, VanMoof and Bird show what separates a durable Dutch scale-up from a cautionary tale. The country ranks among Europe’s top ecosystems by capital raised per head and by the density of its deep-tech spin-offs, yet its scale-up ratio lags the European average and the biggest later-stage rounds are increasingly written by American funds. This article examines Mollie’s path to profitable growth and its GoCardless deal, Picnic’s expensive expansion into Germany and France, the collapse and partial revival of VanMoof, the hollowing out of Bird, and what the 2025 and 2026 funding data say about where Dutch tech goes next. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

Why is Mollie the model Dutch fintech scale-up?

Mollie is the model because it has grown at close to 30% a year for three years while funding itself from operations, and because it has used that strength to buy rather than be bought. Founded in Amsterdam in 2004 by Adriaan Mol, the payments company spent its first decade as a modest alternative to banks’ payment gateways for Dutch web shops before raising €90m in 2020, €665m in 2021 at a €5.4bn valuation from Blackstone, EQT and others, and then surviving the 2022 fintech downturn without a down round.

The 2025 results, published on 20 May 2026, showed net revenue before interest of €147m, up 29%, with growth accelerating from the 28% recorded in 2024 when revenue was €214m on a gross basis. The company generated positive operating cash flow, carries no debt and described a strong liquidity position. It launched in 12 new markets during 2025 with the stated goal of a localised presence in every European country by mid-2026, released Mollie Business Accounts as its first banking product, and reported that Mollie Capital, its merchant lending arm, had advanced more than €250m to European businesses. Chief executive Koen Köppen, a former Klarna executive who took over from founder Mol in 2023, has concentrated on small and mid-sized European merchants, a segment the larger Dutch rival Adyen largely ignores in favour of global enterprises, whose story is told in our piece on Adyen.

The defining move came on 11 December 2025 when Mollie agreed to acquire GoCardless, the London-based bank-debit and open-banking specialist, for about €1.05bn, with more than 90% of the price paid in Mollie shares. The deal closed in early September 2026 after regulatory approvals. The combined group serves more than 350,000 businesses in over 30 markets and runs a pay-by-bank network across 38 countries, with Köppen leading it and chief financial officer Vincent Toolan describing the purchase as investing from a position of strength. The price was well below GoCardless’s 2022 funding valuation of about US$2.1bn, which says as much about the reset in fintech valuations as about Mollie’s negotiating position.

How has Picnic grown so fast, and why is it still losing money?

Picnic has grown by treating grocery delivery as a logistics engineering problem rather than a retail one, and it is still losing money because that engineering requires years of capital before it pays back. Founded in 2015 by Michiel Muller, Joris Beckers and Frederik Nieuwenhuys, the Amersfoort-based company delivers groceries in small electric vans along fixed “milk-run” routes, charges no delivery fee and promises prices at or below Albert Heijn’s.

The 2025 annual report, published in July 2026, showed revenue of more than €1.9bn, up nearly 25%, and a net loss of more than €272m, slightly wider than in 2024. Customer numbers rose by 700,000 to 3.6 million across 690 cities in the Netherlands, Germany and France, and the company opened an automated fulfilment centre in Oberhausen. The Netherlands remains the largest market, but Germany is the growth story: Picnic entered in 2018, has 13 German fulfilment centres, launched Munich in March 2026 after Dresden and Leipzig in 2025, and expects about €1bn of German revenue in 2026, which would make it the biggest online grocer in the country. Muller told the FD that Germany would never reach the Dutch level of penetration because of its size and rural population, but the company’s German shareholder Edeka gives it purchasing scale. France, entered in 2021, is smaller and still building its warehouse network.

Funding has kept pace. Picnic raised a €600m Series D in 2022, €355m in 2024 and €430m on 21 November 2025 from existing investors Edeka, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, Hoyberg and NPM Capital, mainly to fund German expansion. Co-founder Beckers said the company expects revenue above €2.3bn in 2026 and continued significant investment. Picnic’s model only works at density, which is why the losses persist, but the Dutch business is the most mature of the three markets and the question for investors is how quickly Germany follows it towards break-even. The company competes with the supermarket groups profiled in our stories on Ahold Delhaize and Jumbo.

What happened to VanMoof?

VanMoof collapsed in July 2023 because it sold a beautifully designed but unreliable premium e-bike at a price that did not cover the cost of servicing it. Founded in Amsterdam in 2009 by brothers Taco and Ties Carlier, the company raised well over US$100m from investors including Balderton, Felix Capital, Hillhouse and Norwest, including US$40m in 2020 alone, hit sales of nearly US$48m in 2019 and became the poster child for Dutch consumer hardware during the pandemic cycling boom.

The business model carried a hidden liability. VanMoof’s bikes used proprietary components, an integrated electronics system and an app-controlled lock, which meant that only VanMoof could repair them. As volumes rose, so did warranty claims for frame damage, electrical faults and slow service; the company’s own stores filled with bikes waiting for parts. Sales were halted on 29 June 2023, a Dutch court granted creditor protection on 12 July, and the Dutch entities were declared bankrupt on 17 July 2023, followed by the German, British and US units in August. Creditors, including investors, suppliers and tax authorities, were owed €143.8m.

The brand survived. On 31 August 2023 Lavoie, the e-scooter subsidiary of McLaren Applied, agreed to buy VanMoof’s assets for what its chairman Nick Fry described as tens of millions of pounds. The new owner kept the Amsterdam base, rebuilt the service network around third-party partners rather than company stores and launched the S6 and S6 Open in Europe in 2025 as its first new models. In April 2026 VanMoof returned to the UK with the S6 at £3,098 through 42 retail partners, and chief executive Eliott Wertheimer said European sales had exceeded forecasts. VanMoof is now a British-owned Amsterdam brand with roughly 130 staff, a far smaller company than the one that raised venture capital, but one that may finally have a sustainable service model.

Why did Bird leave the Netherlands?

Bird, the communications-platform company founded in Amsterdam in 2011 by Robert Vis as MessageBird, moved its operations out of the Netherlands in 2025 because its founder concluded that the Dutch environment made it impossible to stay competitive with American rivals. The company had reached a valuation of about US$3.8bn (€3.6bn) in 2021, employed about 600 people in Amsterdam at its peak and roughly 1,000 worldwide, and had bought the US email provider SparkPost for US$600m in the same year.

The retreat happened in stages. MessageBird cut 240 jobs in 2022, rebranded as Bird in 2024, cut a further 120 jobs in February 2025 and announced that it would run the business from hubs in New York, Singapore, Dubai, Lithuania, Istanbul and Thailand, leaving around 40 staff in Amsterdam while keeping the legal headquarters in the Netherlands for now. Vis blamed over-regulation, the inability to offer tax-efficient equity compensation comparable to US firms, Dutch redundancy rules that he said did not suit tech, and a working culture that he contrasted unfavourably with Silicon Valley; his comments praising Elon Musk’s management of US federal employees drew criticism in the Dutch press.

By September 2026 Bird had shrunk to about 120 employees, down from roughly 1,000, a reduction the company attributed to automating its own operations with AI, and it had raised about US$450m in debt, a US$400m term loan and a US$50m revolving facility led by JPMorgan, Capital One and Citi, mainly to provide liquidity to existing shareholders. Bird reported a profit of US$165m for the prior year and repositioned itself as communications infrastructure for AI agents, letting software agents send messages, place calls and obtain eSIM plans without custom integrations. Vis has argued that AI raises the value of high-agency generalists and makes large headcounts unnecessary. Whether Bird is a leaner success or a cautionary tale depends on whether its revenue holds as its workforce vanishes, but for the Netherlands the outcome is the same: a company that was once the country’s most valuable software start-up now employs a few dozen people there.

What do the 2025 and 2026 funding numbers say?

Dutch start-ups raised €2.64bn of venture capital in 2025, up 11.5% on 2024, but the number of deals fell 14.5%, which means money is concentrating in fewer, larger rounds. Techleap’s State of Dutch Tech 2026 report, published on 11 February 2026, counted 11,301 active tech companies, about 135,000 people employed in the Netherlands and a scale-up ratio of 21.6%, up from 13% in 2019 but below the European average of 24.1% and far behind the United States at 52.2%.

The first half of 2026 was stronger still. The Dutch Startup Association’s quarterly report, compiled with Dealroom, Golden Egg Check, KPMG, Invest-NL and Techleap, recorded about €1.3bn of disclosed investment in the second quarter, up 81% year on year, bringing the first half to roughly €2.3bn, close to the whole of 2025. Three deep-tech rounds dominated: photonics firm Nearfield raised US$380m, AI company General Intuition raised US$320m and quantum-hardware maker QuantWare raised US$178m, with the first two reaching unicorn status. Series B and later rounds took 91% of second-quarter capital, while pre-seed deals fell from 20 to 7 and Series A from 17 to 12. Invest-NL participated in five of the ten largest deals.

The pattern worries policymakers. Techleap’s report found that American investors’ participation in €50–100m breakout rounds rose from 14% to 40% while European participation fell from 55% to 21%, and that foreign investors supplied 75% of AI funding in 2025. Deep tech, 12% of the ecosystem, produces 41% of scale-ups, and universities have generated 405 spin-offs since 2022. Constantijn van Oranje, Techleap’s special envoy, said the country could no longer coast. The Wennink report, commissioned by the government in 2025, estimated that the Netherlands needs 300,000 additional technicians and IT specialists by 2030. Capital, in other words, is available for the best deep-tech companies, but the seed layer is thinning and the growth layer is American.

Sources: company disclosures, Techleap, Dutch Startup Association, NL Times, DutchNews, BikeRadar.

What explains the gap between the winners and the losers?

The winners share three characteristics: recurring revenue tied to customer transactions, unit economics that improve with density, and founders or boards willing to accept slower growth to protect the balance sheet. Mollie earns a percentage of every payment and grows with its merchants; Picnic’s costs per order fall as its routes fill up. Neither depends on selling an expensive physical product with a long warranty tail.

The losers shared the opposite traits. VanMoof’s revenue came from one-off hardware sales while its costs came from a service obligation that grew with every bike sold; the more successful the launch, the bigger the liability. Bird’s problem was different: a software business with good margins but a founder who concluded that the operating environment was wrong and that the workforce was dispensable. Both cases also show how the 2021 funding peak distorted decisions. VanMoof raised at valuations that assumed hardware could scale like software; MessageBird’s US$3.8bn valuation and US$600m SparkPost purchase were made at the top of the market and never had to be justified by a listing.

The Dutch context matters too. Vis’s complaints about equity compensation and redundancy rules are shared, more quietly, by other founders, and the government has responded in part by restoring parts of the 30% expat ruling and consulting on employee-option taxation. But Adyen, ASML and Mollie have all grown from the same jurisdiction, which suggests that the rules are a cost, not a barrier. The country’s structural weakness is later-stage capital: the pension funds that hold more than €1.5trn of assets invest very little in Dutch venture, a theme that connects to our story on Dutch pension reform.

How does the Netherlands compare with other European ecosystems?

The Netherlands ranks consistently among Europe’s top five ecosystems by capital raised and first or second per head of population, but it has produced fewer companies above €10bn than the UK, Germany or France and fewer than Sweden on a per-capita basis. Its strengths are deep tech, photonics, quantum and fintech, built on Eindhoven, Delft, Twente and Amsterdam, and a high retention rate for international graduates, 53.4% against 15–30% elsewhere in the EU.

Its weaknesses are the scale-up conversion rate and the thin late-stage market. Only 21.6% of Dutch start-ups reach scale-up status against 24.1% across Europe. The largest Dutch technology successes of the past decade, Adyen, Booking.com, Takeaway.com and Mollie, either listed abroad or in Amsterdam with mostly foreign investors, or were acquired early, as Booking was by Priceline for US$133m in 2005, a story told in our piece on Booking Holdings. The 2026 mega-rounds for Nearfield, General Intuition and QuantWare were led or co-led by American funds.

Amsterdam itself remains the hub, with Noord- and Zuid-Holland absorbing more than 70% of venture flows, although Eindhoven’s semiconductor cluster is the fastest-growing source of deep-tech spin-offs, as described in our story on the Dutch chip cluster. For a comparison with how similar questions play out elsewhere, see the Amsterdam City Startup Atlas and the Germany Company Stories hub.

What can founders and investors learn from the Dutch scale-up scene?

The first lesson is that profitability is a strategic weapon, not a concession. Mollie’s ability to buy GoCardless in shares, and to keep expanding into new markets while rivals cut back, came from refusing to run a loss-making growth model when capital was cheap. Picnic is the counter-example in progress: its losses are deliberate and funded, but they depend on a small group of patient shareholders, including a German supermarket group and a US foundation, that most founders cannot count on.

The second lesson is about the service tail. VanMoof shows that a connected hardware product is really a service business, and that pricing must cover the lifetime cost of keeping the product working. The relaunch under McLaren Applied, with third-party service partners instead of company stores, is the model VanMoof should have adopted in 2019.

The third lesson is that the ecosystem’s rules are a cost of doing business, not a reason to leave. Bird’s exit made headlines, but the Dutch companies that have scaled, from ASML to Adyen to Mollie, did so under the same rules. Investors looking at Dutch deals should weigh the depth of local talent and deep-tech research, which is unusual, against the shallowness of local growth capital, which is fixable, and should expect the next decade’s biggest Dutch exits to be led from Eindhoven and Delft as much as from Amsterdam.

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