General
Invest-NL and Invest International join forces
4 juli 2025
December 23, 2021
4 minutes
Well on course for an even greater impact in 2022!
We have nearly reached the end of another year; 2021 was an eventful one, including for Invest-NL. Not least, of course, because we, just as everyone else, had to struggle through the pandemic. Fortunately, our work lends itself perfectly to working from home. However, something that will stay in my mind is how nice it felt to be back in the office again in large numbers in the autumn: we got to see one another, catch up with each other at the coffee machine and have lunch together again. Stopping by colleague’s rooms for a chat was just a little bit easier than pressing the Teams button. Here's hoping 2022 will be a better year in that respect!
The nature of our work was not affected that much by the coronavirus. In 2020, we launched our TOPSS programme to provide venture capital to promising companies that were having difficulties due to the pandemic. However, that market normalised fairly quickly and so we were able to discontinue TOPSS in 2021 despite the fact that the pandemic was not yet over. As a result, we had room to focus on our strategic priorities again: making things financeable which might appear to be unfinanceable, in particular if they contribute to the transition to a carbon-neutral and circular economy. We do this on the one hand by using subsidies from the Ministry of Economic Affairs each year for market research and development, supervising propositions and making them financeable, and developing instruments to facilitate this, and, on the other, by aiming to commit approximately 250 million euros per year to concrete financing deals.
Looking back on 2021, we were quite successful in both aspects. 2020 was a year in which we still had to get started and recruit a lot of employees. We were in an early stage of the learning curve of impact investing. But in 2021, we entered into partnerships, published reports, spoke at events, sat on relevant consultative committees and built a portfolio that now includes over 400 million euros of committed capital pledged to more than 20 companies and funds.
We want to maintain that pace and quality in the coming year, both in the ways you've come to expect from us, but also in a few new ones. For example, together with the Ministry of Economic Affairs, we have set up the Deep Tech Fund with which we enter into financing agreements for innovative deep tech companies with great significance for the future of the Dutch economy. We also hope to make great strides over the coming year in the financing of heat distribution grids and in the collaboration with the National Growth Fund. Both are still quite exciting given the recently published coalition agreement, the huge amount of additional funding allocated to the climate and energy transition and the transformation of the task of the National Growth Fund. But they also present us with just as many opportunities to help build a more innovative and sustainable Netherlands; and we are more than happy to be involved in that!
We hope to be able to count on you again in 2022, whether as a customer, partner or an interested client. There is still much work to be done, and we will only be able to do it by joining forces, seeking to collaborate and pressing ahead. I wish you a joyous holiday season and above all a healthy 2022!
Wouter Bos
CEO Invest-NL
