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. 

Listen. Share it.  

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

"Every day building my own company is so many learnings. I really don't see it as a risk."

📍 Speed is the one structural advantage startups have over incumbents. Séverine's rule: be a first adopter in everything, without exception.

🔄 On being a female founder across tech, finance and consulting: she does not dwell on the barrier. When people underestimated her, delivering flipped the bias into a strength.

🇧🇪 Ambitious people in Belgium no longer need to leave to build something global. The risk is not starting. It is the compounding of learnings you miss by waiting.

📍 Great teams on the wrong market go nowhere. Sebastien watched sharper engineers than him get outpaced by someone on a better wave. Market choice, he argues, is what separates the top league from the rest.

🔄 On picking investors: skip the success stories. Talk to the founders who returned one and a half times. They are the ones who will tell you what a fund is really like when things get hard.

🇧🇪 On ecosystems: cities work because proximity creates serendipity. What Ghent built, Brussels can replicate, but it needs participants, not just leaders.

📍 Laurent Hublet got a call on a Friday the 13th and had an hour to decide whether to become Brussels Minister for Economy, Employment and Digital Economy. He called his wife from a client call and said yes.

🔄 Six weeks later, his team had compressed a three-month budget process into five weeks, hired staff from scratch, and launched a government that Brussels had been waiting 18 months for.

🇧🇪 Brussels is one of the five largest power centers in the world, which makes what happens here on cyber, AI and democratic governance matter well beyond the city limits.

📌 How CurveCatch identified and now tackles a massively overlooked problem: the fact that around 80% of bra-wearers may be wearing the wrong size, and why the solution lies in data and better guidance.

☺️ How CurveCatch evolved from supporting their family-run brick-and-mortar bra shops into a (very) fast-growing startup, backed by Y Combinator.

🚨 The bright sides of being a female founder, building a company with your life partner, and challenging the odds 💪