TechWolf co-founder: Ghent flywheel "super important”
Tech.eu John Reynolds
TechWolf’s co-founder says Ghent’s startup buzz helped build the company. He says the city’s ‘flywheel effect’ matters, just as SAP moves to buy TechWolf.
Based on reporting by Tech.eu, John Reynolds — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
A TechWolf co-founder is making the case that Ghent’s startup scene is more than background noise. Jeroen Van Hautte, the company’s CTO, said the city’s “flywheel effect” is “super important” while talking on the Tech.eu podcast about TechWolf’s sale to SAP and a few other subjects.
That sale has become one of the biggest Belgian software stories in some time. Earlier this month, SAP said it would acquire TechWolf in a deal reported to be the largest acquisition of a venture-backed software company in Belgian history. The price tag was described as being in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
TechWolf uses AI to help companies understand their employees’ skills and work, and SAP says it will become a key part of its talent and workforce strategy. That is a neat fit on paper, and a very large one in practice. SAP is not buying a random feature here; it is buying a company it wants at the center of how it thinks about workforce software.
Van Hautte’s comments on Ghent were about more than local pride. He described a loop in which people from startups go on to launch their own companies or back others, keeping the ecosystem moving. He pointed to Ghent as having one of the highest densities of startups in the world. He also discussed his move to San Francisco, TechWolf’s business model, and the split between open and closed source AI models. A chunk of the episode was removed at TechWolf’s request.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the sort of thing every startup city wants to say about itself, but Ghent appears to have the receipts. The real test is whether the flywheel keeps spinning after the biggest winners cash out. Otherwise it’s just a nice poster for the office wall.
Read more about this at: Tech.eu
