Invest-NL warns Netherlands risks losing agrifood biotech lead

Invest-NL has warned that the Netherlands risks surrendering its world-leading position in agrifood biotechnology unless government, investors and industry move quickly to close persistent gaps in venture creation, regulatory speed and industrial scale-up financing. The findings form the second instalment of the Dutch state-backed investor's biotech deep-dive series, following an earlier report on enabling biomanufacturing technologies.

The report, supported by the European Union's InvestEU Advisory Hub and informed by more than 150 stakeholder interviews, sets three headline targets for 2030: double the number of agrifood biotech ventures, reduce average time to market by a factor of three, and produce five Dutch agrifood biotech companies each raising more than €100 million.

Three value chains, three recurring gaps

Invest-NL analyses three segments: seed breeding and genetics, biological agricultural inputs, and biotech ingredients and food applications. Across all three, it identifies the same structural weaknesses. Too few promising research outputs become scalable companies. Those that do form take too long to reach customers. And almost none make the jump to industrial production.

The numbers underline the urgency. The Netherlands accounts for 3.3% of global biotech start-ups but only 1.3% of scale-ups, according to TNO data cited in the report. Only 11.7% of Dutch biotech companies have crossed the $10 million funding threshold, compared with 15.8% across the EU and 25% globally.

Success in all three value chains could add around €17 billion in annual Dutch revenues by 2040, against a global agrifood biotech market the report estimates at roughly €400 billion by that date. The strategic case extends beyond economics: improved crop genetics could reduce pesticide and fertiliser use, while fermentation-derived ingredients can diversify supply chains exposed to climate and geopolitical risk.

Each segment requires a different emphasis. Seed breeding, where Dutch companies already hold around 33% of the global vegetable-seed market, calls for a "Defend and Extend" approach centred on AI-driven breeding and next-generation genomic techniques. Biological agricultural inputs, where adoption timelines of eight to ten years for European regulatory approval are pushing companies to validate and register in Brazil or the United States first, need a pipeline-building effort. Biotech ingredients face the hardest challenge: a chicken-and-egg dynamic between unproven offtake demand and absent first-of-a-kind production finance, with individual FOAK facilities potentially requiring tens to hundreds of millions of euros.

Market context and competitive pressure

The competitive backdrop lends urgency to the findings. China is investing heavily in next-generation breeding, genomics and biomanufacturing capacity as part of its food-security agenda. The United States benefits from deep research-to-commercialisation linkages, and faster regulatory pathways in both markets are drawing European ventures away from domestic scale-up.

Within Europe, Belgium's VIB institute and Denmark's BioInnovation Institute are highlighted as benchmarks the Netherlands has not yet matched. VIB has built permanent venture-creation capabilities that generate a continuous pipeline of spin-outs, while Denmark pairs early venture support at BioInnovation Institute with later-stage growth finance through EIFO. The report argues that the Netherlands' fragmented support landscape, spread across multiple programmes and funding calls, lacks equivalent institutional continuity.

Invest-NL says it can mobilise capital using a blended-finance model, citing its existing food and alternative-protein portfolio, where total financing has reached approximately 3.4 times Invest-NL's own contribution. However, the organisation is clear that financing alone will not close the gap: regulatory reform, shared infrastructure and early customer commitments must move in parallel.

Nettie Buitelaar, chief executive of Biotech Booster, whose organisation is named as a lead delivery partner across several recommendations, said: "Now is the time to turn ambition into action by accelerating the commercialisation of breakthrough innovations through long-term investment and stronger collaboration across the innovation ecosystem."

The report stops short of calling for a new programme office, instead urging clearer accountability within existing structures. The indicative public financing envelope across all three value chains runs to €650 million to €1.1 billion for 2026 to 2030, combining existing, reallocated and new resources rather than representing equivalent new government expenditure.