Belgium has so much more to offer than just strong beer, great chocolate, and funny comics. The rather small country also plays a quite important role in European politics, with Brussels being kind of the capital of the EU. But most importantly, at least for us, Belgium has a blooming startup scene.
This week we took a close look at the Belgian startup ecosystem with the goal to provide you with an overview about 10 promising startups to look out in 2018. Here they are:
Cowboy bike – Cowboy is building the next generation of electric bicycle. Founded in 2017 and powered by “intuitive and automatic motor assistance”, Cowboy’s bike is elegant and smart electric bike, featuring live dashboard, navigation, GPS tracking, removable battery and ride stats, light controls, “Find My Bike” bottom, all available through an accompanying app. Available for purchase for €1,790. So far, the young company has raised about $3 million in venture capital.
Cumul.io: The Leuven-based startup Cumul.io offers an easy-to-use, cloud analytics platform, connecting data from different sources and present it in an interactive, real-time, sophisticated graphs and charts in one user-friendly interface. The best part: it does not require any IT involvement for implementation or support. The startup has already secured over 50 paying clients, in Belgium, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
Find.me – The winner of the Disruptive Innovation of the Year Award, Find.me is a personal online assistant that helps you to ‘find without searching’. The objective is to give a more personalized and complete offer to customers and to result in more efficient advertising spending for retailers. The Brussels-based team is currently building a test market for the automobile sector, but they are planning to expand into the home, holiday and job sector as well.
Lynx Care: The Belgian startup Lynx Care is building AI-powered Big Data platform with the aim of transforming medical data into insights for hospitals, physicians and patients. Funded by government-backed innovation schemes, Lynx Care will eliminate administrative tasks, provide tailored care to patients in real-time and enable care process optimization. With €1.6 million in funding, they are moving to San Francisco to join the Alchemist Accelerator.
Parcify – The Antwerp-based startup offers a mobile delivery app and platform for personalized B2C package deliveries using customer’s geo-localization, instead of a delivery address. After two funding rounds, in December 2017 Parcify was acquired by the Belgian national postal company Bpost. Delivery by kayak in the Amsterdam canals and partnership with fashion giant Zalando are their latest news.
Pick it – The Leuven-based robotics startup, named Deloitte Rising Star, has developed a robot vision solution, Pick-It. The Pick-it product consists of a 3D camera and accompanying software that guides your robot to see, pick and place a wide range of products. The Universal Robots Certified plug and play smart automation product is already used by more than 100 customers from Europe, the US and Asia.
Qover: Founded in 2016 and based in Brussels, Qover is an insurtech startup, building the world’s first ‘Insurance-As-A-Service’ platform. Their on-demand digital insurance infrastructure allows them to build personalized insurance products, ultimately changing the way insurance is designed, managed and distributed. Two years into existence, Qover won the prestigious DIAmond Award and raised about €7 million in funding.
Spencer: Described as Google Now for big companies, Spencer’s the digital workplace assistant for employees aims to make employees’ lives easier, by centralizing and synchronizing information from different enterprise tools into a single digital interface. A spin-off of innovative Antwerp company November Five, Spencer is already building a modern workforce with Telenet, Proximus, and DEME.
The Glue: The Brussels-based fintech provider was founded in 2015 with the aim of building modern, next-generation infrastructure to allow banks to rapidly develop new products and offerings. With four products in their portfolio, The Glue has already attracted €13 million investment led by Swiss and Silicon Valley-based Polytech Ecosystem Ventures and signed BNP Paribas Fortis as their customer.
Yields.io: The Ghent-based startup Yields.io offers an AI platform for model risk management for the financial sector, providing a real-time comprehensive overview of all model risk across an enterprise. Founded in 2017, Yields aims to identify issues in algorithms and turn them into actionable business insights, saving time for validation teams and increasing their productivity.
By the way: If you’re a corporate or investor looking for exciting startups in a specific market for a potential investment or acquisition, check out our Startup Sourcing Service!
