Yes!

On the one hand, there are stakeholders who assume that Invest-NL has been founded solely to provide transition financing, with an exclusive focus on projects that meet energy transition criteria and similar conditions. Time and again we find ourselves explaining that our role is much broader: that our legislative remit also tasks us with giving other companies access to funding, not least SMEs. Primarily, we translate this remit into financing innovative scale-ups, a category of companies that finds it notoriously difficult to obtain venture capital in the Netherlands, especially when it comes to financing at higher levels. In serving this objective, we also finance intermediaries that finance SMEs; while our own operation is not conducive to supplying small-scale entrepreneurs with small-scale funding, we can to a certain extent finance those parties that do. On the other hand, some stakeholders believe that our purpose is to primarily or even exclusively support SMEs, regardless of how innovative they are and whether or not their activities are relevant to a major social transition. It’s up to us to remind them that this has never been the thrust of our legislative remit, that transitions and innovations occupy an important place in our legally defined field of operation and that we are often much better equipped to finance SME financiers than to provide small loans to those SMEs themselves.

In other words, our strategy always allows room for financing that is specifically aimed at transitions (especially the climate and energy transition) but also for financing that targets young, fast-growing SMEs; directly in the case of larger tickets (scale-up financing) and indirectly when it comes to smaller tickets (in which case we finance an intermediary). If this approach to financing enables us to help steer the Dutch economy towards greater sustainability and innovation, with a focus on innovative companies that contribute to the climate and energy transition, for example, then our achievements will be bang on target. However, these are often the most complex and highly customised forms of financing, so it can take some time before we can deliver them in large numbers.

Financing the Sustainable SME Fund, the initiative we have announced today, is a prime example of our success in uniting various objectives in a single financing measure. Through this fund, we not only offer SMEs access to finance but also make a contribution, however modest, to a more sustainable economy. Meanwhile the Dutch Future Fund (DFF), launched last Friday and co-funded by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, is another outstanding example of how we can achieve several goals at a single blow. With this fund we will strengthen the supply of venture capital for Dutch businesses (goal no. 1) and will probably be able to finance a total of around 200 young fast-growing innovative SMEs (goal no. 2). We are investing € 150 million and the estimate of the European Investment Fund (with whom we work intensively at the DFF) is that this will free up a total of over € 1.5 billion in investment capital. And that’s goal no. 3: making good use of resources available in Europe and ensuring that they do not pass Dutch businesses by.

Many – but not all – companies in line for financing also play a part in the climate and energy transition (goal no. 4). This is because in the DFF we cooperate with existing market parties that are willing to invest venture capital in Dutch companies. Many of these parties focus on IT and Life Sciences: important innovative sectors for the Dutch economy, but sectors that make only a limited contribution to the climate and energy transition. We have therefore decided, jointly with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the regional development companies, to also invest in developing funds that focus on the larger industrial innovations that are so important not only to the energy transition but also to establishing a robust structure of innovative ecosystems in the Netherlands. These investments will primarily focus on those areas known as key technologies.

Lastly, a third collaborative track with the Ministry centres on the financing of SME intermediaries, in a similar approach to the Sustainable SME Fund. More about this collaboration and all the other initiatives mentioned above can be found on our website and in the letter we sent to parliament today. Parliament will be debating the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ budget in the coming weeks, and innovation, sustainable growth and employment are sure to be high on the agenda once again!

Wouter Bos
CEO Invest-NL