Most awards in Life Sciences, Cleantech and Hightech sectors
The COL has mainly supported innovative businesses in the Netherlands: the Life Sciences (56%), Cleantech & Energy (54%) and Hightech (53%) sectors had the highest award percentages. These are sectors with a high risk profile and a large capital requirement. The COL was an emergency loan for companies for which other financial support measures were not appropriate.
Most often, companies applied for a loan between €50,000 and €250,000. 58% of the applicants were startups, 22% were scale-ups.
High-risk sectors still struggling to attract financing
“We have not yet started repaying our COL loan,” says Erdem Ay, CEO of Fited. Fited uses smartphone photos to 3D print scoliosis braces. “We are now looking for additional financing so that we can continue our clinical work.” Rinke Zonneveld (chairman ROM-Nederland & director InnovationQuarter) and Maurice van Tilburg (Managing Director Techleap.nl) indicate that they will continue to monitor the companies closely. “Our work does not stop here. We are monitoring whether the companies that have received a COL are also successful in the follow-up phase. A large part of the market is reopening, but high-risk sectors with a large capital requirement – important for our economy – still have great difficulty attracting financing.”
Companies in corona are running out of money four times as fast
A technology that dramatically increases the performance of heat pumps (Blue Heart Energy), a highly innovative and affordable support sole (T-soles) and safe bed tents for severely disabled children (CloudCuddle); these are just a few of the companies that survived the corona crisis thanks to the COL loan. The runway for investments became 4 times shorter for companies during the corona period; they therefore ran out of money 4 times as quickly. For relatively young companies with little fat on their bones anyway, this poses a direct problem. After research by Techleap.nl among hundreds of startups into the financial situation as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate withdrew €300 million in various tranches from April 2020 to retain startups, scale-ups and innovative SMEs for the Dutch economy.
“Innovation is the backbone of our future earning capacity,” says Minister Stef Blok of Economic Affairs and Climate. “The corona outbreak, a pandemic of unprecedented proportions, was an acute threat to almost all entrepreneurs. We were able to help many of them with the various support schemes. For start-ups, scale-ups and innovative SMEs, the bridging loan offered a solution. Thanks to the COL, we were able to retain almost 1,000 companies for the Netherlands, all with great potential because they play or will play a role in, for example, the energy transition, digitalisation or sustainability.”
Most requests from North Holland, South Holland and North Brabant
The regions of North Holland, South Holland and North Brabant received the most applicants. The most frequently awarded applications were from the ROMs Impuls Zeeland and Horizon Flevoland. In all regions, less than half of the awarded applications consisted of portfolio companies of the ROMs, with LIOF and NOM having relatively the most portfolio companies a COL awarded and Innovatiefonds Noord-Holland and InnovationQuarter awarded the least.
