In the world of European venture capital, Brussels is often the “invisible giant.” To the casual observer, it’s a city of Eurocrats, Art Nouveau facades, and rain-slicked cobblestones. But look closer at the data, and a different architecture emerges.
It is home to Belgium’s first unicorn, its most secretive unicorn, and also its latest unicorn, and a startup scene that has been quietly outgrowing every expectation.
There is a particular kind of city that does not shout about itself. That does not produce glossy destination branding or stage-managed innovation summits in glass towers. That simply gets on with things -building, connecting, failing, rebuilding- while the rest of the country argues which city has the largest tech ecosystem.
Brussels is that city.
In the global imagination, Brussels is a city of bureaucrats and Belgian waffles, of EU summits and diplomatic corridors. The headquarters of NATO. The capital of an institution that moves at the speed of consensus. Not exactly the soil from which you’d expect unicorns to grow.
And yet.
Brussels is the largest tech ecosystem in Belgium by absolute volume. Yet, it operates under a curious paradox: it produces the most startups, but struggles with the “scaleup” label. It is a city that births “Pentacorns” like Collibra, yet retains the gritty, experimental energy of a pre-seed laboratory. While various Belgian cities market themselves as healthtech hubs, Brussels remains the undisputed leader – yet strangly silent about its dominance. Its ecosystem is significantly larget than its peers – boasting twice the scale of Ghent and triple that of Leuven. While others shout about their potential, Brussels simply operates at a scale the rest of the country has yet to match.
Size matters
Let’s start with the numbers, because they tell an interesting story, one of contradictions that, on closer inspection, make perfect sense.
Brussels grew its tech headcount at a 10% Compound Annual Growth Rate between 2023 and 2025, creating roughly 2,235 additional (international) jobs in just two years. That growth rate sits right at the edge between moderate and high, not explosive, not sleepy. But here is what makes Brussels different from every other Belgian city: that 10% translates into the single largest absolute number of new jobs in the country. Because Brussels is, by some margin, the biggest city in Belgium. The biggest in the Benelux, in fact.
It is the largest startup ecosystem in Belgium not because it grows faster than Ghent or Liège or Antwerp – it’s not, but because it starts from a much bigger base. In ecosystem terms, size is a superpower. A 10% return on a large base beats a 20% return on a small one.
But the nature of that growth matters too. Brussels is, at its core, more a startup city than a scaleup city. It is a place where companies are born in abundance. Where they attract early capital, find their first customers, and take their initial steps onto European and global stages. The scaling -the hyper-growth phase- often happens elsewhere, or later, or both, or not at all.
Giants, old and new
Despite its startup-city identity, Brussels has produced some extraordinary companies – and some equally extraordinary stories.
Collibra is the crown jewel. Founded in 2008 as a spin-off from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), it is Belgium’s first unicorn (a privately held company valued at over $1 billion), and has since crossed the threshold to become the country’s first pentacorn – valued at over $5 billion (Odoo is the other one). Collibra builds data intelligence software that is now used by some of the largest companies in the world, from financial institutions to pharmaceutical giants. It is headquartered in New York but born in Brussels, a reminder that you can start anywhere and scale everywhere.
Then there is Kpelr -arguably Belgium’s most under-the-radar unicorn. A leading provider of intelligence solutions for commodity markets founded by 2 Frenchmen in Brussels. There is something very Brussels about that: building something enormously valuable without making too much noise about it.
And Keyrock, the most recent addition to Belgium’s unicorn club, launched by a royal knight. A crypto exchange ecosystem setting a new standard for capital markets – a space that barely existed a decade ago, and which fits Brussels fintech DNA.
Beyond the unicorns, Brussels leads the country in “ponies” -companies valued at or near €100 million- with 19% of that category coming from the Brussels ecosystem, ahead of East Flanders, Antwerp, and Flemish Brabant. It also claims 19% of Deloitte Technology Fast 50 nominees, Belgium’s benchmark for the fastest-growing technology companies.
One more distinctive trait: Brussels is significantly more B2C-oriented (37%) than any other Belgian city or region. While Ghent and Leuven lean heavily into deeptech, life sciences, and enterprise software, Brussels builds products that end users actually touch. Apps. Platforms. Consumer finance tools. That consumer-first instinct shapes everything from how its startups are funded to how they recruit and market.
Before there was an ecosystem, there was BetaGroup
Every startup scene has a creation myth. Brussels has BetaGroup.
Before the ecosystem had a name, before there were accelerators and venture funds and co-working campuses, there was a monthly gathering in one of the largest lecture halls at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Close to 10,000 members (!) at its peak. Students, investors, developers, designers, marketers -a genuinely cross-functional crowd united by curiosity and, it must be said, free beer.
The format was radically simple: if you had something to share or ask, you took the microphone. No gatekeeping. No pitching panels. Just an open stage and whoever was brave enough to use it.
BetaGroup was founded by Jean Derély -one of the true quiet heroes of the Brussels tech story before he moved to Spain- and later led by Ramon Suarez and Julie Cruyt.
Out of that community came some of the earliest structured initiatives in the ecosystem: Startup Weekend Brussels, BetaCowork, BetaInvest, the BetaGroup Award, and the Founder Institute Brussels chapter. The #BeTech community, led by Nicolas Frenay, found its home in BetaCowork. And it was in this milieu that tech visionary Walter De Brouwer organised TEDxBrussels, bringing the global ideas conversation to a city that had plenty of its own.
BetaGroup was not a programme or an institution. It was a posture -the idea that a community built on openness and generosity could be the foundation of something much larger. It was right.
The accelerator generation
The infrastructure for turning ideas into companies came next.
Startathlon, one of Belgium’s first formal accelerator programmes, was launched from Brussels by Peter Verhasselt, Nick Boucart, and Vladimir Blagojevic from Sirris – over 15 years ago, at a time when the concept of a startup accelerator was barely understood in Belgium. It remains a founding chapter in the ecosystem’s institutional history. It’s also the first program where I was invited to bring content for startups. We became such a good team that I joined Sirris as a fellow not much later.
Since then, Brussels has built out an impressive roster of support programmes. BEyond from Pulse Foundation backs international ambition. Startit @KBC offers a well-resourced launchpad with an investment fund behind it. We Are Founders cultivates the next generation from the heart of BeCentral. RTBF/VRT Sandbox & STADIEM support media and creative tech. BEARTH focuses on the circular economy – particularly relevant in a city of European policy power, where sustainability regulation tends to arrive first. And on the horizon: Le Village by CA, the Credit Agricole-backed accelerator, set to launch in 2026 (29% of all Brussels tech companies join an acceleration or incubation programme).
What ties these programmes together is less a common methodology and more a common ethos: Brussels builds for Europe. It is no accident that a city which hosts the continent’s major regulatory institutions has developed a particular fluency in building products and services that are designed to work across borders, across languages, and across legal frameworks from day one.
Startups.be and the making of a movement
If BetaGroup was the seed, startups.be was the soil.
For many years, this organisation -launched by serial impact entrepreneur Karen Boers, one of the most influential figures in Belgian tech- served as the de facto backbone of the national ecosystem, with Brussels as its home. I had the honor to be part of the board of startups.be where I collaborated with the shakers and movers of our ecosystem. The annual startups.be event at The Egg became the grandmother of SuperNova, the largest innovation and tech event in the country (which has since moved to Antwerp). Yet Brussels has reclaimed its own grassroots celebration: the Belgium Startup Awards, back at The Egg, honouring the founders and builders who make the ecosystem run.
Brussels was also home to what became one of the world’s largest hackathons: Hack Belgium, powered by creative entrepreneur Leo Exter, who remains among the most accomplished practitioners in the hackathon format anywhere in Europe. These events were not just parties. They were talent pipelines, idea incubators, and community rituals – the glue that held an otherwise fragmented ecosystem together.
The academic engine
Behind every great startup city is a great university system. Brussels is unusually well-endowed.
It is the only city in Belgium with two full-scale universities on its territory: the ULB and the VUB, plus the Royal Military School and branches of numerous other institutions and colleges. The result is the largest student population in the country – and therefore the deepest available talent pool.
Brussels-based tech entrepreneurs and CEOs have graduated from more than 107 different universities and colleges, Belgian and foreign – a striking indicator of the city’s cosmopolitan pull. The largest group are ULB alumni (23%), followed by UCLouvain (15%), KU Leuven (10%), VUB and UGent (5% each). The founder profile skews toward engineers: 21% are civil engineers, 16% are business engineers -twice the national average. Only 8% hold PhDs, below the 12% national norm.
The research institutions are formidable too. The von Karman Institute -relatively unknown outside specialist circles- is a world-class fluid dynamics research centre. FARI, the AI for the Common Good Institute, is building one of Europe’s most principled AI research agendas. The Brussels Life Science Incubator sits at the intersection of biotech and entrepreneurship.
In terms of university spin-offs, VUB and ULB together account for 64% of all spin-offs from the Brussels ecosystem. The Catholic universities KU Leuven and UCLouvain contribute 19%, with imec at 6%. Spin-offs are a much smaller share of the Brussels ecosystem (5%) than the national average (11%). And this despite the number of entrepreneurial programs on-campus (one was under the leadership of the most inspiring entrepreneurship professor, Olivier Witmeur of Solvay Brussels School of Economics and my mentor when I became myself a professor of entrepreneurship).
But quantity, is not everything.
VUB, a mid-sized university, has produced Belgium’s first and so far only spin-off unicorn (Collibra). Their Computer Science education is top-notch (Patty Maes is a famous graduate and my former jury co-member at Deloitte Rising Star). ULB, from its side, has produced four Nobel Prize winners in medicine, chemistry, and physics – a record for any Belgian institution. Both universities have produced Fields Medal winners, mathematics’ highest honour. Brussels may not flood the market with spin-offs, but the ones it produces punch well above their weight.
Money and the people who move it
Capital is the oxygen of any startup ecosystem, and Brussels needs more of it.
As the national capital, Brussels houses the highest concentration of investors in Belgium. The public side is anchored by finance&invest.brussels -the most active local investor- alongside Innoviris, PMV, and FPIM/SFPI. The private side includes Seeder Fund, SF Ventures, KBC Focus Fund, M80, Sofina, Astanor Ventures, and Syndicate One. Corporate investors include D’Ieteren, Proximus, and the major Belgian banks.
The international reach of Brussels-based deal flow is striking. Foreign investors who have put money to work here include CapitalG, Index Ventures, Dawn Capital, Point Nine Capital, Tiger Global Management, Battery Ventures, Rocket Internet, Kima Ventures, Iconiq Capital, Insight Partners, Sequoia, and -in one of the more headline-grabbing endorsements- Peter Thiel. These are not second-tier names.
In aggregate, Brussels receives 23% of all funding directed at Belgian startups and scaleups -though the figure fluctuates dramatically year to year (from 43% in 2022 to just 6% in 2024), reflecting the outsized influence of a small number of large deals.
Two women deserve particular mention as forces in the funding landscape. Claire Munck, CEO of BeAngels (a business angel network), is among the most influential figures in early-stage capital allocation in the country. Barbara Roose of finance&invest.brussels (and former board member at Collibra) is another cornerstone of institutional investment in the ecosystem.
Joining them in this top-tier circle is Béatrice de Mahieu, who recently transitioned from the front lines of talent development at BeCode to become Deputy CEO at finance&invest.brussels. In a field that remains frustratingly male-dominated across Europe, their visibility and influence matters.
The exit landscape: a mirror of startup DNA
The maturity of an ecosystem is often measured by its “acquisition appetite,” and in Brussels, the data reflects a city still firmly rooted in its startup origins. Currently, only 3% of Brussels tech companies are actively in acquisition mode, while 13% are being acquired – the latter lower than the 16% of the national average.
When these exits occur, the buyers are most often found close to home; Belgian acquirers lead the way at a staggering 40%, followed by the French at 19%, a predictable result of the cultural and linguistic ties to Paris. The United States (14%) and the UK and Sweden (4% each) fill out the rest of the buyer profile.
Yet, despite this “startup-first” lean, Brussels has a proven track record of producing heavyweight exits. The city has seen a steady stream of deals exceeding the €100M mark, with landmark names like Ogone, Immoweb, Zetes, SoftKinetic, Dalenys, Catalaÿ&Wouters, NorthgateArinso, Enhesa and Adswizz proving that while Brussels might not buy the world yet, the world is certainly buying Brussels.
The financial powerhouse
Brussels is not just a startup city. It is a financial city – and the two are more connected than they first appear.
All of Belgium’s major banks have their headquarters in Brussels. But the real story is Euroclear, one of the most important and most-discussed financial infrastructure companies in the world. As one of the world’s largest securities settlement systems, Euroclear processes trillions of euros of transactions every year. It is not a startup. It is not young. But it is one of the largest software-driven enterprises in the country, and its presence shapes the talent pool, the appetite for fintech innovation, and the institutional knowledge base of the entire city (Carl Annicq, Philippe Van Ophem & Paul Havelange worked there for instance).
Perhaps unsurprisingly, fintech is the second-largest industry in the Brussels startup ecosystem, after healthtech. The region gave rise to Keytrade Bank -a fintech avant la lettre, pioneered by Jean and José Zurstrassen in the early days of online banking, eventually acquired by Crédit Agricole. Today, companies like Keyrock (digital asset market-making), Qover (embedded insurance), Wero (European instant payments), and Lizy (vehicle financing) are carrying that tradition forward.
One notable exception: despite being home to Euronext Brussels, only a single Brussels tech company is currently listed on a stock exchange (Targetspot). The public markets remain largely untapped by Brussels-born tech -a gap and an opportunity.
Hexa: the unicorn factory with a Brussels soul
No account of the Brussels ecosystem would be complete without mentioning Hexa -formerly known as eFounders- the startup studio founded by Belgian Quentin Nickmans and French Thibaud Elzière.
Hexa operates on a model that is rare in Europe: it does not invest in startups, it builds them. Systematically. From Brussels, scaling through Paris. Its portfolio reads like a B2B SaaS hall of fame: Front, Spendesk, Aircall, Mailjet, TextMaster, and many more. It has become one of the most productive startup studios on the continent -proof that Brussels can be not just a place where ideas start, but a place where entire company-creation machines are engineered.
The Hexa model also reflects something deeper about Brussels: its particular genius is in infrastructure. In platforms. In the systems that make other things work. Just as Euroclear settles the world’s securities and Collibra governs the world’s data, Hexa builds the tools that make other companies run. Brussels thinks in systems.
Going international – with a French accent
For most Belgian, and European, tech companies, the first foreign market is the United States. Brussels is different.
France is the number one international destination for Brussels-based startups -ahead of the US, ahead of the Netherlands, ahead of Germany. Part of this is geography: Paris is one hour by train from Brussels Midi. Part of it is language: French is one of Brussels’ official languages. Part of it is culture: the French market, while famously tricky to navigate, is a natural fit for companies that have grown up in a bilingual, bureaucracy-fluent, EU-adjacent environment.
17% of Brussels tech companies have a foreign branch -slightly below the national average- suggesting that international expansion remains a challenge and an opportunity.
The infrastructure to support it exists: Agoria & Sirris (Scaleup Flanders), VOKA Plato & Accelero, BECI, Deloitte’s Growth Lab, PwC Scale, the Euronext IPOready programme, Solvay Business School & Vlerick’s masterclasses, and the EIC Scaling Club all provide frameworks for founders looking to grow beyond Belgium’s borders.
The connectors
In any ecosystem, the organisations and individuals who bridge silos matter as much as the companies themselves.
Brussels has built a dense connective tissue of institutions: Hub.Brussels (the regional agency for international business development), BeCentral (the digital campus at Brussels Central Station, inside the Victor Horta-designed building), BECI (the Brussels chamber of commerce), Innoviris (the Brussels research and innovation agency), Agoria, BeAngels, FinTech Belgium, Solvay Business School, and imec.istart, among many others.
BeCentral deserves special mention. Founded in 2017, I had the honour to chair the board, and built under the leadership of Laurent Hublet (now Brussels Minister for Economy, Employment, and Digital Economy), it hosts the Google Atelier, Le Wagon coding school, BeCode training programmes, 42 Belgium, the FARI AI institute, Proximus Ada, the ESA accelerator, and the We Are Founders programme. It is a campus in the truest sense -not a co-working space with a ping pong table, but a genuine ecosystem within an ecosystem, connecting learners, builders, investors, and policymakers under one historically significant roof.
If you look at the co-founders of BeCentral, it’s the who’s who of the ecosystem from pretty much all over the country:
The city also has at least 23 digital hubs and clusters -ICAB, Silversquare Louise, the Shell Building, Hive5, Tour & Taxis, The Egg, Brussels Life Science Incubator, Seed Factory, EEBIC, eHealth Valley, greenbizz, among others. These are not just office space. They are communities of practice, each with its own character, network, and specialisation.
Before we look forward, we must commemorate the pioneers that shaped the landscape. Co.Station BXL, for years a central pillar of open innovation, and DigitYser, the flagship for data science and AI, were more than just co-working spaces. They were the crucibles where the first generation of Brussels start & scaleups was forged.
While those chapters have closed, their DNA persists in a new, more ambitious wave of infrastructure. Conveniently located in the “academic heartland” between the VUB and ULB, the WAT campus (10.000 sqm) is the latest vision from the same powerhouse team behind Hexa. By placing this new hub at the intersection of the city’s two greatest talent engines, the creators of the WAT campus are betting on a future where the boundary between deep academic research and lightning-fast AI execution finally disappears. If BeCentral made Brussels a digital city, WAT aims to make it a global tech powerhouse.
On the other side of Brussels, another ambition is taking shape. Brussels native and tech entrepreneur Stijn Christiaens issues a declaration of love for the Kanal project, a 40.000 sqm space with plenty of potential for a mix of cultural and technology entrepreneurship. To be continued.
Adding a final, strategic layer to this map is the upcoming GovTech campus in the European Quarter. Strategically positioned in the political heart of the continent, this hub is designed to bridge the gap between agile tech innovators and the public sector. By fostering a direct dialogue between startups and European policymakers, it aims to transform bureaucracy into a digital-first service. With this addition, Brussels solidifies its position not just as a tech hub, but as the regulatory and administrative capital of the digital age. Powered by BECI, Agoria & BDO.
The people who make it move
Numbers describe ecosystems. People make them.
An ecosystem is only as strong as its “re-investment” loop – checkout Ghent for that matter. In Brussels, the loop is closed by a group of “Elder Statesmen” who built the first wave of Belgian internet success.
Figures like Jean and José Zurstrassen and Grégoire de Streel are the architects of the scene. They were the brains behind Skynet (which became Proximus’s backbone) and Keytrade Bank. Instead of retiring to the south of France, they stayed.
Jean and José Zurstrassen -who built Keytrade Bank from scratch and sold it to a French banking giant- are the ecosystem’s elder statesmen, now active as investors and angels, connecting founders to capital and experience.
Grégoire de Streel, co-founder of Keytrade, is ranked as the most connected person in the Brussels ecosystem, a title that reflects not just his network but his consistent investment in others. Toon Vanagt, Loubna Azghoud, Bart Becks, Robin Wauters (founder of tech publication Tech.eu and one of the most influential voices in European tech media), Anne Cambier, Thierry Geerts, Sébastien Deletaille, Xavier Damman, Julie Foulon, Stijn Christiaens (co-founder of Collibra), Nicolas Debray, Alain Heureux, Adrien Roose – the list of connectors and contributors is long and genuinely impressive:
Female founders and leaders are more prominent in Brussels than elsewhere in Belgium. 10% of CEOs are women, and women make up 28% of founding teams – significantly above the 22% national average. In a startup world that still struggles with gender representation, Brussels is quietly ahead of the curve.
And Brussels is diverse. 18% of CEOs are foreign nationals, with French entrepreneurs making up the largest group. In a city of 180+ nationalities, this is perhaps unsurprising – but it is still remarkable that nearly one in five leaders of Brussels tech companies was born elsewhere. That international openness is both a product of the city’s EU identity and a reinforcement of it.
The story that didn’t have a happy ending – and why it matters anyway
No honest account of an ecosystem ignores its failures. Brussels has had its share.
Take Eat Easy -founded by a bold team of young Brussels entrepreneurs- was a pioneer in food delivery long before Deliveroo and Uber Eats came to dominate the market. They attracted some of the world’s most prestigious investors: Rocket Internet, Index Ventures, Tiger Global Management. They built something genuinely innovative. And then, in 2016, they shut down under the weight of the global delivery wars.
But the team that built Take Eat Easy did not disappear. They went on to create Cowboy, the premium electric bicycle company that has become one of Europe’s most admired hardware startups – and has since been acquired. They attracted world-class talent. They attracted world-class capital. They proved, repeatedly, that Brussels can produce founders who think at a genuinely global scale.
One of the talented young co-founders, Karim Slaoui, passed away too soon (may Allah bless his soul). His absence is felt.
What the numbers say about who Brussels is
The average tech company in Brussels was founded in 2011. It takes seven years before failing -which prompts the obvious question: whatever happened to “fail fast”? And it gets acquired after an unexpectedly long 11 years.
The average CEO is 47 years old, and was 34 when they started their company. The founder most likely to appear in a Brussels cap table? Someone named Nicolas, Philippe, Marc, or Frédéric. Or Aurélie, Isabelle, Marie, or Charlotte. Less diverse than expected in this city. Hence the need for MolenGeek.
These are not just demographics. They are a portrait of an ecosystem that values durability over velocity, relationships over transactions, and long-term institution-building over quick exits. There is something distinctly European -distinctly Belgian- about that posture. And in a global startup culture increasingly questioning the wisdom of growth-at-all-costs, it may be a posture whose time has come.
The unlikely capital
So here is where we land.
Brussels should not be a great startup city. It is the seat of European bureaucracy, a city often mocked for its institutional heaviness, its linguistic complexity, its resistance to the kind of slick self-promotion that tech hubs are supposed to excel at. It does not have Silicon Valley’s weather, London’s capital markets, or Berlin’s counterculture cool.
What it has is something harder to replicate: depth.
Universities producing world-class researchers and engineers. Financial infrastructure that has trained generations of builders in how money actually moves. Deep institutional knowledge of European regulation, which in a world of increasingly complex tech governance is not a handicap but an extraordinary advantage. Deep community -the kind built over decades of BetaGroup meetups, Startathlon cohorts, BeCentral gatherings, and events at The Egg.
And deep ambition, often hidden beneath the famous Belgian modesty -nuchterheid, as Dutch speakers say. The refusal to oversell. The preference for doing over announcing. The quiet confidence of a city that has been building things that matter for a long time and expects to keep doing so.
Brussels is not trying to be the next Berlin or the next London. It is trying to be the best version of Brussels -which, as it turns out, is already something quite remarkable.
The unlikely capital is, improbably, exactly where it was always meant to be.
Omar Mohout is a former technology entrepreneur, widely published author, and trusted C-level advisor to growth companies. As Scaleup Director at Deloitte and Professor of Entrepreneurship at Solvay Business School, he brings hands-on experience and cutting-edge expertise.
This article was first posted on April 6th in his a highly recommended newsletter ‘Silicon Waffles’ https://omarmohout.substack.com
