Four billion-dollar companies, 108 AI startups, one city

Ghent has four companies valued above a billion dollars and 108 AI startups inside its city limits. Brussels Times journalist Dominique Soenens went looking for why, and published what he found in the article 'The Belgian city churning out billion-dollar tech companies.'

Why the companies keep coming

Soenens puts the run down to a handful of things that feed each other. The university keeps producing talent. Founders who have already built something reinvest in the ones coming up behind them, a habit the article describes as a "pay it forward" mentality. Everyone is close enough to run into everyone else. And the ambition points outward from the start, at global markets rather than Belgian ones.

Ghent still has to pull talent in from abroad to hold the pace, and access to capital is a live constraint on how far the city gets.

The market Spotable is betting on

Spotable appears in the article as an AI software startup helping construction firms prepare quotations, working out of Wintercircus, the hub Soenens uses as shorthand for Ghent's founder density. A desk there is not automatic. "It's not easy to get in here; there's a long waiting list and the jury is very strict," co-founder Julie Dumoulin tells him. Her case for building in construction specifically takes one line.

"The construction market is still very old-fashioned. There is a lot of profit to be made through digitization."

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Six days a week, five hours a night: a year inside Spotable

Brussels Times gives Dumoulin room to describe the cost of a year.

"Outsiders often see the success but miss the hard work behind. I work six days a week and sleep maybe five hours a night. Spotable has only been around for a year, but we want to become a unicorn as soon as possible."

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The next few years, she says, are American ones:

"I'm going to the US for the next few years to build the market there."

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