Brecht Claerhout

Brecht Claerhout is chief executive officer of ONTOFORCE, a role he took up in May 2025, and is based in Gent. Since October 2025 he has also been an "Ad Honorem" professor at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and he has owned illustris BVBA since April 2019.

Claerhout spent more than two decades at Custodix nv, joining as an R&D engineer in 2000 and going on to serve as R&D manager, chief operating officer, chief executive officer from 2013 to 2019, and managing director until April 2025. In parallel he held a series of positions at TriNetX between April 2019 and April 2025, first as senior vice president and managing director for Europe, then as chief data officer and, from November 2022, as chief health network officer.

Earlier he was a researcher at imec from 1998 to 2002 and an IT security consultant at RAMIT vzw, and he interned at the medical registration department of UZ Gent in 1997. He studied electrical engineering at Ghent University, graduating in 1998, and followed a continuous education programme in bioinformatics and biostatistics there in 2003. He attended Sint Jozefscollege.