Belgium: Nurturing tech talent and entrepreneurship in the heart of Europe
Strategically located in the heart of Europe, Belgium leverages its multilingual and highly educated workforce to foster innovation and entrepreneurship. The nation’s tech scene boasts a robust mix of startups, scale-ups, and established companies across sectors such as fintech, healthtech, biotech, and smart cities.
The country’s central position within the European Union grants unique access to a broad market, making it an attractive hub for tech companies looking to expand across Europe. Key cities like Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, and Leuven serve as focal points for tech activity, each offering distinct advantages.
Belgium’s tech ecosystem benefits from strong support structures, including numerous incubators, accelerators, and co-working spaces, providing critical resources for startups.
Here are 10 companies that contribute to the creation of the strong, innovative and dynamic Belgium tech ecosystem.
Odoo
Industry: Software
Amount raised in 2023: €150M
Odoo is a comprehensive suite of open-source business applications that aims to streamline and optimize various business processes for organizations of all sizes.
The company offers a wide range of integrated applications covering areas such as CRM, e-commerce, accounting, inventory management, manufacturing, project management, and human resources.
The platform is highly modular and customizable, allowing businesses to select and configure the specific modules they need. Odoo is known for its user-friendly interface, scalability, and strong community support, making it a popular choice for businesses seeking an affordable and flexible ERP solution.
Agomab Therapeutics
Industry: Helathtech
Amount raised in 2023: €94.9M
Agomab Therapeutics is a company that focuses on developing innovative therapies to treat severe fibrotic diseases and conditions related to tissue repair and regeneration.
Agomab Therapeutics leverages its expertise in growth factor biology to create novel drug candidates that aim to modulate key pathways involved in fibrosis and tissue healing.
The company’s lead programs target diseases with high unmet medical needs, offering potential new treatment options for patients suffering from conditions such as liver, lung, and kidney fibrosis.
Aphea.Bio
Industry: Agritech
Amount raised in 2023: €70M
Aphea.Bio is an innovative agricultural biotechnology company specializing in the development of sustainable biological solutions for crop protection and crop improvement.
The company combines cutting-edge expertise in microbiology, genomics, and data science to create bio-based products that enhance plant health and productivity while minimizing environmental impact. Its flagship products harness the power of naturally occurring microorganisms to promote plant growth, increase stress tolerance, and suppress plant pathogens.
By leveraging the latest advancements in biotechnology and leveraging a deep understanding of plant-microbe interactions, Aphea.Bio aims to revolutionize agriculture by providing farmers with effective and eco-friendly solutions to address the challenges of modern crop production.
Qover
Industry: Insuretech
Amount raised in 2023: €27.6M
Qover is a tech-driven insurance company focused on providing innovative insurance solutions for the digital age.
By integrating insurance seamlessly, the company aims to establish a universal safety net, safeguarding individuals worldwide.
Through Qover’s embedded insurance orchestration, any enterprise can leverage technology to seamlessly integrate insurance into its core offering or as an additional feature. This approach transforms embedded insurance into a potent tool for businesses, enhancing their value proposition, fostering success, and safeguarding their communities.
RISORCE
Industry: Cleantech
Amount raised in 2023: €12.5M
RISORCE (Renewable, Innovative Solutions towards Recycling & Circular Economy) offers sustainable solutions for recycling waste tire shreds into valuable products for both Belgian and international markets. This is achieved through a non-catalytic pyrolysis process, free from any chemical additives.
Established in 2022, RISORCE utilizes a pyrolysis process primarily generating oil from tires, which is then sold as a raw material to European petrochemical firms.
Furthermore, the factory extracts carbon black and gas, suitable for industrial applications or for the plant’s operational requirements. This treatment significantly reduces carbon emissions associated with used tire materials.
Paleo
Industry: Food
Amount raised in 2023: €12M
Paleo is a company that through utilizing precision fermentation, offers a sustainable source of animal protein with genuine meat flavor, enabling the food industry to provide beloved alternatives to meat and fish.
By cultivating heme proteins, the company eliminates the necessity for livestock breeding, transportation, and slaughter, thus contributing to the preservation of biodiversity, reducing land, energy, and water usage, and diminishing humanity’s carbon footprint.
Cowboy
Industry: Transportation
Amount raised in 2023: €10M
Cowboy is a leading brand in the electric bike industry, committed to revolutionizing urban mobility with stylish, efficient, and sustainable transportation solutions.
Founded with the vision of making city living easier and more enjoyable, Cowboy designs and manufactures innovative electric bikes that blend cutting-edge technology with sleek design aesthetics.
Cowboy’s bikes are equipped with powerful electric motors, intuitive controls, and integrated smart features, offering riders a seamless and effortless experience as they navigate city streets.
Cumul.io
Industry: Analytics
Amount raised in 2023: €10M
Cumul.io is a dynamic data visualization platform that empowers businesses to transform their data into actionable insights.
Founded with the goal of making data analysis accessible to everyone, Cumul.io offers a user-friendly interface and a wide range of customizable visualization tools.
Whether it’s creating interactive dashboards, real-time analytics, or embedding visualizations into existing applications, Cumul.io provides a seamless solution for businesses to unlock the full potential of their data. With a focus on flexibility, scalability, and ease of use, Cumul.io enables organizations to make informed decisions and drive business growth effectively.
Aikido Security
Industry: Software
Amount raised in 2023: €7M
Aikido Security is a developer-centric software security platform. Delivering cutting-edge code scanning and cloud vulnerability evaluations, Aikido Security’s platform emphasizes genuine threats, minimizes false alarms, and simplifies the comprehension of Common Vulnerabilities & Exposures (CVEs).
Aikido Security serves as an all-aspects defense tool for developers. The platform scans the source code and often wide variety of cloud components involved in SaaS organisation operations and ranks vulnerabilities by severity, ensuring critical issues are addressed first and separating them from false positives.
With Aikido, safeguarding product security becomes effortless, enabling companies to concentrate on their core strength: coding.
Henchman
Industry: Legal
Amount raised in 2023: €6.5M
Henchman is the company that enables a sharing mindset among hundreds of organizations across 35+ countries, turning their collective knowledge into a superpower.
The company adds an intelligent layer on top of its clients’ existing contract database, making it ideal for their legal professionals to tap into their team’s collective expertise and help modern-day organizations scale their legal excellence. By centralizing past clauses and definitions paired with contextual data, it eliminates time-consuming tasks and allows lawyers to focus on adding value and expertise that amazes clients.
The company’s solution has AI-powered capabilities, backed by a multi-LLM approach, that allows clients to translate clauses, automatically change verbiage (eg. single to plural, or vice versa), and instantly enrich existing clauses during the drafting process.
