Xavier Rouby

Xavier Rouby is the founder and CEO of Opal Solutions, a role he has held since January 2016, and is based in Brussels. He has also been the owner of Pfease since October 2013, a company he founded and ran as managing director from July 2010 to September 2013. Between April 2021 and April 2023 he sat on the advisory board of AI4Belgium.

Rouby co-founded Swan Insights in October 2013 and served as its CTO until December 2016, then headed productisation there from January 2017 to December 2018.

His earlier career was in physics. He was a teaching assistant and post-doctoral researcher at the Université catholique de Louvain from 2009 to 2010, a research associate and post-doctoral researcher at the University of Freiburg from 2008 to 2009, and CMS L3 coordinator at CERN from 2007 to 2008, having previously been a CERN summer student in 2001. He also spent time at DESY and Imperial College London in 2003, and took part in a parabolic flight campaign at the ESA European Astronaut Centre in 2001.

He completed a master's degree in elementary particle physics at the Université catholique de Louvain in 2003 and a PhD in high energy physics there in 2008. He later took courses at the Centre d'Entreprise et d'Innovation CEI and the Microsoft Innovation Center Boostcamp, and completed an executive master's in the management of health and care institutions at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management in 2022.