About

These days most of my time goes to 'Pidgy’ the latest product we build at Alkmist. By now everybody has a personal AI. Your assistant knows your inbox, mine knows mine. Almost nobody is fixing what happens between us when we collaborate. Which is strange, because that is where a lot of time is wasted for knowledge workers.

Pidgy works in exactly that gap. It reads what your mail is actually asking of you, turns it into tracked, prioritized work, and keeps every party clear on who needs to do what by when. Also the people you work with who never signed up for anything. If your day is decided by your inbox and by people at other companies, Pidgy is built for you.

You can try it for free, no credit card needed. Sign up here.

Alkmist (2024-Now)

Pidgy comes out of 'Alkmist', the company Toto and I started after Ad Astra was acquired. Selling a bootstrapped company to a multinational comes with a strange gift: for a while you get to watch a very large organisation work from the inside. We were baffled by the coordination tax we experienced. Knowledge workers spend their days, heck, weeks waiting on other companies, chasing documents, repeating themselves across mailboxes.

Everybody is busy giving individuals better tools, while the overhead sits in between organisations. So that is what Alkmist builds: collaboration software for professional services firms, where the work between organisations lives in one shared place instead of in everyone's inbox or in fragmented excel sheets. We launched with a focus on the enterprise segment, raised 1.4 million in funding, and today 8,000+ profesionals in 62 countries use our software daily.

PhD (2021-2025)

After graduating my masters in psychology summa cum laude (top 1%), I completed a PhD in psychology and in business economics (both UGent). In my academic work, I study how smart humans often make seemingly stupid decisions, in a predictable way. I try to work on things that matter outside academia, and I am endlessly curious about how people decide, whatever the context. From pensions, to health at work, predicting churn and building kick-ass UX.

That same thinking goes straight into the products we build. Knowing how people decide is one thing, designing software around it is another, and that is the part I find most fun. Every product we build starts from the same question: not what can this tool do, but what will people actually do with it. So we build with the latest evidence from behavioral science baked in, instead of hoping users will behave the way the roadmap assumed.

Behavior, not technology, will shape the future. While technological advancements are rapidly progressing, the human brain has remained the same for the last 70,000 years. Understanding decision-making is key to success.

Ad Astra Industries (2019 - 2024)

Alkmist wasn't my first company. After ending my topsport career, I participated in a Ghent University acceleration track (DO!), where I discovered my passion for entrepreneurship. I met my entrepreneurial partner in crime Toto De Brant and together we co-founded Ghent based technology start-up Ad Astra Industries. Today I'd call it a forerunner of agentic AI. We built complex machine-vision based automations for any repetitive task a human did on a computer, and we built them in a human way. Because the biggest issue in autimation isn't the tech, but the human needing to adapt and feeling threatened.

So we added a behavioral layer: digital sidekicks with character, and clients could even bake their own mascot (kind of like Mr Potatohead from Toy Story). We bootstrapped this startup (no external funding) to a team of 13. This company got acquired in 2024 by a multinational.

Creating a technologically advanced product is one thing, but getting people to use it is another. This is essentially a matter of applied psychology.

Root (2022-2024)

With Root we had the ambitious vision of building a marketplace for distributed compute. AI needs enormous amounts of computing power, while about 80% of the compute inside companies just sits idle. Our mission was to enable exactly that, and turn a cost into a business model for enterprises. But as with many startups, a vision and a long term plan are not enough. The short term economics were too brutal to make this one work.

Gymnastics (2002-2016)

And before any of that, I was lucky enough to be part of the Belgium National Acrobatic Gymnastics Team. Together with my partner, we achieved the title of Vice-World Champion in acrobatic gymnastics, representing Belgium on the world stage.

It wasn't always easy, balancing 28 hours of training per week with my masters in Psychology at Ghent University, but it taught me the value of discipline, partnership, and hard work. Looking back, those years were a defining part of my life, shaping me into the person I am today.