Overview
Sortlist was founded in 2014 by four students, Thibaut Vanderhofstadt, Charles De Groote, Nicolas Finet, and Michael Valette. The founders were already running their own digital agency and recognized a repeated problem: companies struggled to find the right agency partner. Their personal experience of being asked to recommend other agencies when turning down work became the product insight for Sortlist.
The platform uses AI-powered matching combined with verified client reviews to connect businesses with agencies across marketing, digital, design, PR, and creative disciplines. Sortlist operates in Belgium, France, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the MENA region, serving 80,000+ verified agencies and freelancers.
Funding milestones include a EUR 550,000 seed round from Lean Fund and private investors (2015), a EUR 2M round (2019), and an EUR 11M round led by Belgium's SRIW and The Club Deal, alongside angel investors including Rodolphe de Hemptinne and Diego Du Monceau. Total funding raised is approximately EUR 15M across three rounds. The company has reported consistent 40%+ annual revenue growth.
Funding history
- Seed, EUR 550K2015Lean Fund, private investors
- EUR 2M2019undisclosed investors
- EUR 11M: SRIW, The Club Deal, business angels
Media & appearances
- The HarbourYouTubeHAROLD MENNEN (TCD Capital) over hoe VC fondsen de truken van de foor kennenPortfolio B2B marketplace matching companies with branding/digital service providers, now grown into a scale-up.
Key people
In the news
- We’re offering internships at Sortlist! 🎓 Final-year Bachelor’s or Master’s student looking to kick-start your career in Sales? We’d love to meet you! We’re hiring for our Madrid office a: 🔹 Sales Development Representative (SDR) Intern — Italian Market 🇮🇹 🔹Sales Development Representative (SDR) Intern — Spanish Market 🇪🇸 Join our international Sales team and get hands-on experience in B2B sales, from prospecting and cold calling to qualification and pipeline building. 📞 No previous sales experience required. What
- I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year talking to founders about AI. The conversation rarely stays focused on models and tools for long. It quickly moves to much harder questions: What happens to your competitive advantage when software becomes dramatically cheaper to build? Which parts of your organisation need to change? What should you automate, and what should remain distinctly human? And ultimately: what will still make your company relevant when AI becomes the default? Those are the questions we've tried to build the
- Je connais beaucoup de CEOs qui pilotent leur boîte avec une conviction dangereuse : « Je connais mes clients. Je sais d’où vient notre croissance. » Je l’ai fait moi-même. Chez Sortlist, j’étais persuadé qu’il fallait concentrer nos efforts commerciaux sur les directeurs marketing avec plus d’1M€ de budget. Ça semblait logique. C’était mon intuition. Puis j’ai regardé les données. Et la réalité racontait une autre histoire : une part importante de notre business venait d’entreprises plus petites. Le problème n’était pas que mon
- Il y a quelques mois, j’annonçais que je quittais Sortlist. Avec le recul, il y a une conviction que je garde : Être en désaccord avec ses associés n’est pas forcément un problème. Le vrai problème, c’est de croire qu’on est alignés… alors qu’on ne l’est pas. Sur la vision. Sur les priorités. Sur ce qui bloque réellement la boîte. Sur ce qu’il faudrait changer en premier. Et plus une entreprise grandit, plus ces écarts de perception peuvent coûter cher. C’est d’ailleurs une des choses que j’essaie de faire ressortir avec FounderOS :
- Tomorrow, millions of people will look up at the sky for the solar eclipse. 🌒 And for us, it’s the perfect moment to share one of those stories that reminds us why Sortlist exists. In 2022, Morpheon (formerly All-In Factory), a boutique creative and technology agency based in Barcelona and Switzerland, joined Sortlist looking for better ways to grow. One day, they came across what looked like a fairly ordinary project: “Educational company looking for a web agency.” They applied. Only afterwards did they discover the client was
- See you tomorrow Brussels 💙
Alumni 1 went on to found or lead
Thibaut VanderhofstadtFounder | Innovation & Business→Expert CEO/Founders Advisor at imec.istart
Andrea BalducciHead of Revenue Operations→Fractional Revenue Operations, AI, and Automation at SiSu RevOps- PFrançois Van UffelenBoard Member→Board Member at Commuty
Related profiles
Something wrong or missing? Send an update. Fixed within 24 hours.