Most successful Belgian tech startups
Belgium often gets criticized for its lack of entrepreneurial mindset, albeit mostly by the ever so critical Belgians themselves. However, in reality, our national startup scene has given birth to multiple successful companies. Despite the prevailing opinion, the rich Ghent startup scene (Netlog, In The Pocket, Team Blue), Walloon Brabant and Brussels produced three unicorns: Deliverect, Odoo and Collibra. Let’s dive into some of the most interesting startups.
DELIVERECT (Ghent)
The European grocery and restaurant delivery market is booming. Deliverect has announced that they’ve secured over €130 million in funding for their global platform that simplifies and streamlines online ordering- which makes it a unicorn.
Deliverect produces a SaaS platform that automates restaurants’ online order flow, taking delivery, table app or takeout requests from services like Uber Eats, Grubhub, Deliveroo, Doordash, Foodora, Shopify, and more and transferring them directly to the kitchen. Both small independent restaurants and large global chains, such as Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), Chipotle, Time Out Market, Five Guys, Taco Bell, Le Pain Quotidien, and Outback Steakhouse use Deliverect to deliver their delicious meals to the hands of happy customers.
The Ghent founded platform has had a period of rapid growth, and now processes one and a half million orders per week in 2021. This is a 300% increase from the previous year. The startup will receive €16.25 million to continue its global growth in 2020. The chain has 20,000 locations nationwide.
Deliverect is investing in engineering and technology advancements, expanding its product portfolio, and scaling to serve hundreds of thousands of establishments, including convenience and grocery stores as well as restaurants. To help support these customers, Deliverect is launching a dedicated app store. The funding will help expand the company’s reach and speed its growth.
SHOWPAD (Ghent)
Deliverect is not the only unicorn coming from the Ghent ecosystem. Showpad raised $100 million in its Series E, at a $1 billion valuation. Its product enabled salespeople to find and arrange pertinent content and other materials for use in their transactions. Pieterjan (PJ) Bouten, Louis Jonckheere, and Peter Minne, who became close friends while working together at Netlog, established the company in 2011. PJ, Louis, and Peter discovered a significant market demand for organized mobile content delivery supported by reliable tracking and analytics after starting and expanding In The Pocket, an agency dedicated to building mobile apps. They created Showpad using their experience creating consumer-facing applications.
The startup has so far raised more than $185 million in capital to fuel its rapid expansion and solidify its position as the market leader.
Presently, the firm employs around 450 people between its Ghent and Chicago corporate offices, as well as those in its offices in London, Munich, San Francisco, and Wroclaw.
ODOO (Louvain-la-Neuve)
Belgian-based Odoo, an all-in-one business software provider for SMBs around the world, is a triple unicorn with a valuation of $3.2 billion. Investment firms believe in the potential of the ERP and CRM software company (founded in 2005). Fresh funds enable the company to employ nearly 1,800 people worldwide. In the latest transaction, a €112 million investment was made by Summit Partners, increasing its stake to 25%, while minority shareholders such as Xavier Niel and Regional Investment Company of Wallonia (SRIW) remained on the cap table.
Odoo’s founder and CEO, Fabien Pinckaers, and his management team own approximately 65% of the shares and retain a lot of control. By all reports, they are keen to maintain this important control.
The company’s vision is simple but ambitious. To streamline the operations of millions of small businesses by providing accessible and affordable solutions for accounting, inventory management, manufacturing, project management, human resources, marketing and more.
Odoo now has over 7 million users using his solution, and according to Belgian media reports, it expects annual sales of around €300 million.
Read the founder’s story here
COLLIBRA (Brussels)
Collibra serves as a global provider of all end-to-end data performance and intelligence and cloud solutions for a range of unicorns in select enterprises and government agencies. The company received a unicorn rating in January 2019 when its valuation reached $5.25 billion. Headquartered in Brussels, it was founded in 2008 by Felix Van De Maele, Pieter De Leather and Stijn Christians.
Collibra has 500 to 1000 employees and has thirteen major investors involved. It accounts for governance, privacy and quality, and the platform that works brilliantly. Combining data silos with a complete and scalable cloud service platform, we design simple and intuitive workflows for data creators. Connect different data applications using an open and flexible architecture.
Collibra is a data intelligence company that takes the complexity out of data management and offers the perfect balance of ease of use and powerful analytics. It’s a platform that contains data that helps you solve various problems, implement ideas, and even grow your business.
Good data has the power to transform relationships and people’s lives, connecting people and ideas. It offers the only data intelligence cloud fact platform that can integrate across the enterprise by delivering accurate data from every source to every user and every user.
Read co-founder Felix Van De Maele’s take on the Collibra story here.
Closing notes
These examples show that Belgium has a startup ecosystem that can set you up for success. If only Belgians were less risk-averse and had that entrepreneurial fire burning within them, there would perhaps be more of these stories to tell. If you’re a student in Belgium and interested to learn more about our startup scene, then apply for the Belgium Startup Trip happening November 3rd until November 5th.
Written by Ulysse Maes
