The Syndicate One Podcast

Every field women enter starts making better products, not just for women but for everyone. 
Dewi Van De Vyver no longer argues that diversity is fair; she argues that it works. 

Dewi's been building tech companies for 15 years, jumping into startups at Fortis Venturing in 2006, then founding Flow Pilots with three co-founders in 2011 and selling it in 2022, before taking a KU Leuven spin-off out of the lab and turning it into Effex, which Minitab picked up this February. Two exits, two totally different companies. She sits on several boards, helps steer the Flemish STEM Platform, co-founded The Ada Talks, and now she's one of us at Syndicate One. 

Dewi sat down with Robin Wauters to talk through the twenty years she's spent inside this ecosystem, and the one thing it still hasn't fixed. 

Here are the highlights: 

• We still design the world as if women are just smaller men, whether it's medicine, cars, or materials. Dewi calls it an engineering failure before it's a moral one. 
• The funding gap isn't VCs refusing to read the deck; it's that the playbook for how venture capital works has always been broadcast in rooms built for men. 
• Growing up in Puurs, she believed there were exactly two safe places to work: the government or Pfizer, and she unpacks what that kind of mantra does to a country's appetite for building things. 
• She has no patience left for founder mistakes that used to be forgivable: be informed, hire people better than you, and know your customer, or admit you're building a bad product. 
• The thing most people get backward: women ran the shops, the bakeries, the businesses. Entrepreneurship was never just a man's field. Somewhere along the way, we unlearned that. 
• Dewi's co-leading something with us that starts from all of this. It's called Untapped. More on that soon. 

Recorded shortly after Minitab acquired Effex. 

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Syndicate One is a crew of founders, operators, and investors backing Belgian tech. We don't just write cheques. We open doors, share what we've learned, and help founders go further, faster. Building something big from Belgium? You know where to find us.

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Dewi Van De Vyver on LinkedIn: https://be.linkedin.com/in/dewivdv 
Effex: https://www.effex.app 
Syndicate One: https://www.syndicate.one 
Robin Wauters on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinwauters 

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#WomenInTech #FemaleFounders 
#StartupBelgium #SyndicateOne 
#BelgianTech #Entrepreneurship 
#STEM #DeepTech 
#Podcast #Effex

Europe's regulators put everything online in the name of transparency, but it's scattered across a dozen sites and formats, and no human team can keep up with the flood of information. That's how regulation turned into a hidden market.

Pepijn Mores spent years pushing new ideas inside ING, Amazon, and Accenture, building AI for EU projects back when GPT-2 was still rough, before leaping with Christophe Geudens (a Greek-and-Latin scholar turned logic PhD, now Prismos's co-founder and CTO) to start Prismos, turning the regulatory firehose into daily, personalized reports for policy teams.

Pepijn sat down with Robin Wauters to talk about building in a market most people don't know exists. In this episode:

• Why do big companies and associations quietly put whole teams on tracking early regulatory signals, when nobody talks about it?
• How can a few beers with policy people in Brussels teach you more than formal market research ever could?
• Why does your moat now change every three months, and why is the answer to stop building another layer and become infrastructure?
• What can Belgian startups learn from Belgian jazz, where players from Ghent, Liège, and Wallonia find the groove together instead of each sticking to their own city?
• When is Brussels policy actually worth an early-stage founder's attention? Rarely, with one rare exception.

Recorded following Prismos's pre-seed round, backed by imec and Seeder Fund.
Give it a listen, share it around, and if you're building something big from Belgium, you know where to find us.

What if your AI interviewers are pulling better answers than your human team, just because people aren't worried about being judged?

Filip Schouwenaars has been building in AI since 2013, back when it was neither cool nor easy. He was DataCamp's first hire, rose to VP of Engineering, then moved to ML research at VITO. In January 2026, he joined Conveo, a Y Combinator S24-backed AI research platform that lets companies run qualitative interviews 10 times faster than before. He's also one of us at Syndicate One.

Filip sat down with Robin Wauters to talk about what actually works (and what doesn't) when you bring AI into a startup moving at speed.

• He breaks down why people give answers that are three times as long to an AI interviewer as they do to a human interviewer.
• He shares what we learned at the S1 portfolio AI meetup about where Belgian companies really stand on adoption.
• Filip says Belgium's biggest missed shot isn't the capital. It's deep tech that never makes it out of academia.
• And he gives the most honest answer we've heard yet to the classic founder question: Would you ever start your own company?
• Six weeks at Conveo. Filip hasn't written a single line of code. That's exactly how it should be.

Recorded following Conveo's $5.3M seed round.

Listen. Share it. Building something big from Belgium? You know where to find us.

Spentys had customers walk out to build their own thing. Six months later, they showed up again. So what does that really say about the whole 'vibe coding' threat to SaaS?

Louis-Philippe Broze co-founded Spentys in Brussels while still in his master's. He'd just wrapped a full-time internship at Wooclap. Now he's on Forbes 30 Under 30, and Spentys has 24 people split between Brussels and Georgia. Half their revenue comes from the US. They use 3D scanning, modeling, and printing to digitize custom orthoses and prosthetics.

Louis-Philippe sat down with Robin Wauters to break down what really happened when customers tried to roll their own solution, and why they came back. He gets into:

• How Spentys is building AI modules so tailored to orthopedics that nobody else can touch them. 
• How raising money too early burned 18 months they could've kept.
• Why you should bring on an independent US board member from day one, not years down the line. 
• Why Belgium's political setup is slowing down the whole ecosystem.

You'll also hear about the lasagne-and-burger theory for staying sane as a founder, why 80% of patients choose 3D-printed devices, and what Materialise taught him about getting hospitals on board. Listen in, pass it on, and if you're building something big from Belgium, reach out.

"To ship our first prototype, I had to show up unannounced at our Serbian dev agency's door. Today? I'd vibe code the whole thing." 

Alexis Eggermont co-founded Accountable. If you're a freelancer in Belgium or Germany, you probably know it. Visma owns it now, but Alexis has been with Syndicate One since day one. He sat down with Robin Wauters and walked through eight years of building from zero.

Here's what jumped out. 

• Alexis and Nicolas decided to start a company first, then came up with the idea later. They worked backward through three questions and landed on Accountable.
• Exits aren't a single moment. The Visma deal took four years to pull off. After the sale? Same team, same product, just a bigger family. More gradual than sudden. 
• And while AI is melting software moats, Alexis sees it growing the market, not killing it.

 "Today is a good time to build - just make sure you understand the direction the market is heading before you start."

In this episode, we sit down with Tanguy Goretti, CTO at HEXA, to unpack the new reality of the tech ecosystem. Drawing from his experience, Tanguy shares what he has learned, what he would do differently, and why he has never been more optimistic about what lies ahead for European founders.

The real challenge today is not speed but relevance. Will what you are building now still matter as models evolve? With the barrier to entry lower than ever, every founder must honestly ask whether AI is helping them build something great or just making it easier to build more things.

We also took time to look back and discuss what it really takes to build and scale a hardware company in Europe and what we can learn now that the dust has settled.

Key questions addressed in this episode:

• Will what you build today still matter as models evolve?
• Is AI making it easier to build great companies, or just easier to build more companies?
• Why is the CTPO profile, technical and product, becoming the most critical role of the next decade?

Everyone assumes AI is about to wipe out the junior analyst job in finance. Séverine Nolf thinks it's about to get more interesting, not less.

Séverine Nolf climbed through McKinsey's generalist track before jumping to the tech side, where she met Max Lahy, her co-founder and CTO. A year ago, the two of them left to build pleasefix.ai, a platform that automates document production for private equity, investment banking, and consulting teams, running on Claude and Gemini rather than locking into a single model. 

She's one of us at Syndicate One, backed alongside Pitchdrive, 100IN, and Entrepreneurs First. Séverine sat down with Robin Wauters to talk about what actually happens to the junior analyst role once AI takes over document work, and why she's building the team in Brussels while running go-to-market from New York.

• She'll tell you why killing the junior analyst job misses the point: the work shifts, but the ladder stays put.
• She gets into why a single platform wins out over a point solution, even as the underlying model changes every few months.
• PleaseFix.ai keeps rewriting its own engineering playbook, since just following fast isn't enough anymore.
• She lays out why building in Brussels while selling into New York works for them, and what that split looks like in practice.
• She flips the 'rare female founder' question on its head: the bias that worked against her at the start flipped in her favor once people saw what she built. Founder first, female second.

Recorded following pleasefix.ai's pre-seed round.

Listen. Share it. Building something big from Belgium? You know where to find us.

Sébastien Deletaille pulled together one of the sharpest data teams in Belgium, but the market he picked still killed the company.

He built Real Impact Analytics into Riaktr, riding the telecom big-data wave with some of the brightest engineers in Belgium. Funding, team, momentum, all there. The market just never showed up. He picked himself up and built Rosa instead, now the biggest medical booking platform in Belgium, moving over a million appointments every month.

Sébastien sat down with Robin Wauters to talk through the lesson it took a stalled company to learn, and what it means to build differently the second time around. In this episode:

• He breaks down why even a great team on the wrong market goes nowhere, and why Riaktr never once stopped to ask what market it was actually in.
• He shares the moment when a Dubai entrepreneur selling fart-noise phone gags out-earned his social-graph machine-learning team a thousand times over, and what that taught him about picking a market.
• Sébastien says the real test for any venture is Des Traynor's: is this a big, frequent problem, not a big, rare one, or a small, frequent one?
• He explains why he now vets investors by talking to their average portfolio companies rather than their best ones.
• He shares why Rosa's real moat was never the tech. Dozens of founders have cloned the app with AI in a week, but nobody can shortcut the traction.

Listen. Share it. Building something big from Belgium? You know where to find us.

Laurent Hublet spent six years building BeCentral to fix Brussels' talent gap from the outside. Six weeks ago, Brussels called him to fix it from the inside.

Laurent is now Brussels' Minister for Economy & Employment, three years into a mandate he had one hour to accept. He built BeCentral into one of Belgium's most-cited tech campuses, advised Alexander De Croo on Digital Belgium, and jumped from consultancy at Roland Berger straight into standing up a government with no team and no budget.

🔹 Brussels wants its activity rate at 70% by 2030, up from 65%, and private investment is the lever.
🔹 Cyber and AI are in his ministry's title on purpose: Brussels is a top-five global power center and the country's service hub.
🔹 WAT, a new initiative from entrepreneur Thibault Elzière, is bringing international founders to Brussels.
🔹 His flywheel argument: trust plus early wins compounds into collective success, the same logic BeCentral ran on, now at government scale.
🔹 AI already runs parts of the employment office's back office. The actual policy choices stay human, on purpose.

The regions aren't competing for the same win. That's the whole point.

Serge Morel, co-founder and CTO at Powernaut, is reinventing how energy systems work from Wintercircus (where else?). He talks us through:
🚀 Getting top talents to join and work toward the bigger purpose
🌎 How remote hiring helps bring diversity into a (local) bubble
📌 How growth also comes from product breadth,
... and more!