Bright Signal - Tech News & Interviews from a European perspective

A fashion collection takes shape across spreadsheets, Miro boards, emails and product lifecycle management systems, with hundreds of people trying to keep the same information in sync. Charlotte and Bart talk to Heidi Van Dyck, co-founder and CEO of Athena Studio, about building an AI operating layer that connects that scattered data and helps teams work in the tools they already use. We cover the pivot from sustainability software, why context matters as general AI tools improve, and how to price an AI product profitably when customers want a fixed fee but your costs are counted in tokens. Heidi also shares her experience bootstrapping, selling to US brands as a European founder, and building a commercial team to take over sales and customer relationships.🙋‍♀️ Guest: Heidi Van Dyck, co-founder and CEO, Athena Studio📩 Connect on LinkedIn: https://lu.linkedin.com/in/heidivandyck🌐 Athena Studio: https://athenastudio.io/🔗 Follow Athena Studio on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/athena-studio-io/

Bart and Raphaël sit down with Gilles Praet, co-founder of Belgian startup Visiblie, to talk about getting brands recommended by ChatGPT, Claude and other AI search tools. Gilles explains why the company moved from selling dashboards to doing the work, and what generative engine optimization (GEO) involves beyond publishing more blog posts. We dig into Reddit’s influence on AI answers, the challenge of proving returns, and why personal relationships still matter in an AI business. We also cover fundraising through convertible loans and the choice between growing in Europe and heading to the US.🙋 Guest: Gilles Praet, co-founder of Visiblie📩 Connect on LinkedIn: https://be.linkedin.com/in/gillespraet🌐 Website: https://www.visiblie.com/00:00 Meet Gilles Praet: from audit to entrepreneurship03:10 Starting Visiblie + the shift to AI search07:11 From dashboards to delivering results14:10 How GEO works: audits, content + authority17:37 Reddit, YouTube + the race for AI visibility27:47 Fundraising with convertible loans32:03 Pricing, sales + proving the return42:31 Europe first, or straight to the US?

Charlotte Verhamme joins the show as a new co-host, bringing an EU policy lens to the founder interviews, and we start with Lennard Kooy, CEO and co-founder of Lleverage.Lleverage is an Amsterdam startup building the autonomous back office for companies that make, move and sell physical products: quotes, order handling, production planning, invoice matching. Lennard has started somewhere around 20 companies (he lost count), sold Storyteq, and now runs an eight-developer team that ships about as much code as the hundred web developers he used to employ. We get into why Lleverage charges per agent instead of per hour, why the most interesting commercial job in AI is selling to a cheese manufacturer that does not care about AI, and which customer objections actually hold up once you are standing in a 700-person factory.Then it turns political, and the discussion moves to Europe's competitive position. Kooy weighs European versus US investors for a Series A, and whether "buy European" actually moves a sales pitch or just sounds good. That question opens onto a bigger one: As China and the US battle for AI dominance, and the right to set the rules everyone else follows, does Europe need a preference clause to hold its ground? He's not against regulation; he sees it as one of Europe's strengths, provided it's applied pragmatically.He ended with a simple principle: protect what makes us human, automate the rest.Lleverage has raised €5 million to date, a €2 million pre-seed in 2024 and a €3 million seed in 2025 led by Peak.🙋‍♂️ Guest: Lennard Kooy, CEO and co-founder, Lleverage🌐 https://www.lleverage.ai📩 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennardkooy/Chapters00:00 Welcome + Charlotte joins as co-host02:27 Lennard's 20 companies, Storyteq, and the exit07:19 Eight developers doing the work of a hundred11:57 What the autonomous back office actually automates16:07 Charging per agent instead of per hour18:01 Selling AI to companies that don't care about AI26:57 SME objections: hallucination, security, and jobs34:51 Raising €5M and the case for European capital39:27 Europe as an open air museum48:21 The Bright Signal question: keep humans being humans

In this episode, Bart and Raphaël sit down with Séverine Nolf, co-founder and CEO of PleaseFix.ai, the Belgian-American startup building the AI workforce for finance and strategy professionals. Séverine and co-founder Maxime Lahy left McKinsey's internal AI team to bring agents into the tools where analysts actually live: Excel, PowerPoint and Word. We dig into her three-layer vision, from last-mile document agents to a collaborative operating system, all the way to firms' agents negotiating NDAs with each other, and why you have to ace the first two layers before anyone lets you build the network.We also cover starting the company in San Francisco while keeping the tech team in Brussels, landing meetings with the biggest banks six months in, the $2.1M pre-seed led by Pitchdrive, why PleaseFix wants to be "the Legora of finance," and how the analyst job shifts from crunching slides at midnight to building conviction.🙋‍♀️ Guest: Séverine Nolf — co-founder & CEO, PleaseFix.ai📩 Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/severine-nolf/ 🌐 Book a demo: https://pleasefix.ai

In this episode, Bart and Murilo sit down with Alexandre Pereira, co-founder & CEO of 2501.ai — the Paris- and NY-based startup building autonomous AI agents that don't just spot infrastructure incidents, they fix them. We dig into why the real blue ocean is the on-prem, legacy enterprise world the cloud never absorbed (JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Société Générale are still mostly on-premise), why roughly half of 2501's work is safety and guardrails rather than the AI itself, and why a privacy-first deployment means they almost never reach for Claude. Alexandre breaks down the model landscape — Qwen vs. GPT-OSS for Windows Server, the “skateboard benchmark”, and why a niche French firewall like Stormshield defeats every frontier model — plus €10M raised across a pan-European cap table and what Europe's pre-seed scene gets right and wrong.🙋 Guest: Alexandre Pereira — Co-founder & CEO, 2501.ai🌐 2501.ai📩 Connect with Alexandre on LinkedInChapters(00:00) Intro: autonomous agents that fix enterprise IT(01:00) Meet Alexandre: from Decathlon at 18 to founding 2501(03:50) Genesis: LLM chaining, AutoGPT, and Devin's $100M moment(10:05) What 2501 does: automating IT maintenance for big corporates(13:34) Autonomy vs. safety: why half the work is guardrails(16:57) Earning trust: proving it alongside the customer(25:00) The on-prem blue ocean nobody is serving(29:30) Model wars: Qwen, GPT-OSS, and the skateboard benchmark(35:15) Privacy-first deployments and the future of open weights(41:03) Roadmap: observability and cybersecurity(45:30) Raising €10M and Europe's pre-seed reality