• India and the Netherlands have identified and have been working on building startup collaborations in multiple focus areas. The Netherlands’ Prime Minister Mark Rutte visited India along with a trade delegation in 2018. As part of the visit, Hon’ble Minister for Foreign Trade & Development Cooperation, Netherlands, Mrs. Sigrid Kaag along with Mayor of Bangalore, Sampath Raj launched the Indo-Dutch StartUp Link portal. The portal acts as a first point of contact for navigating the startup ecosystems in both countries. To formalize the partnership between both nations, an MoU was signed between Invest India, Netherlands Embassy in India and State Secretary of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy as part of the state visit to India. Startup India and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands have worked together on many initiatives to encourage cross border startup collaborations like The Next Web Conference, India-Netherlands Tech Summit etc.

• Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Startup India, Invest India and the Embassy of the Netherlands in India have collaborated for Indo-Dutch talks. The program is a series of focused one to many mentorship sessions on various essential topics to prepare Indian startups for market expansion in the Netherlands and will provide an in-depth understanding of the strategies to be adopted. Some of these sessions will be centred around strategic planning, setting up, development and progress priorities, adopting right marketing strategy, identifying target costumers, planning to go-to-market strategies, structuring organizational process, building the team, and more.

• The program was launched on 5th of March 2021 and was graced by H.E. Marten van den Berg, Ambassador of the Netherlands to India, Nepal and Bhutan, Mr. Michiel Sweers, Director, Innovation and Knowledge, Ministry of Economic Affairs & Climate Policy and Mr. Deepak Bagla, MD & CEO, Invest India. The launch event also had a panel discussion on "Exploring the Dutch Gateway for Indian Startups" with the country heads and senior leaders from Unilever, Philips, Shell, TCS and HCL. The discussion chalked out the ways of how both countries can work collaboratively towards building a conducive ecosystem for startups.

• The first mentorship session of the program was held on 24th March 2021 on ‘Expanding to the Netherlands Market’ where more than 80 startups participated and mentors from Dutch ecosystem provided their know-how on the Dutch ecosystem, Startup visa and prominent sectors in the Netherlands. The participating organizations as mentors for the session were- Netherlands Point of entry, Government of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and WorldStartup.