Overview
Van Cauwenbergh co-founded Responsum with Bavo Van den Heuvel, creating an all-in-one privacy management solution for data mapping, risk management, and regulatory reporting. Volta Ventures invested with an initial EUR 1 million that could be extended to EUR 2.5 million. The platform has grown through organic expansion and the acquisition of RealCGR's GDPR division, expanding Responsum's customer base and feature set.
Career history
In the news
- Where I think AI governance is heading in 2027: This year, most organisations treated AI governance as a policy exercise: write an AI policy, set up a working group, ask people not to paste customer data into chatbots. That was a reasonable start. I don't think it will be enough next year. Three things I expect. 1️⃣ The deadline moved, the work didn't. The AI Omnibus pushed the high-risk obligations for most stand-alone AI systems to December 2027. Some organisations will read that as time to wait. I'd read it as one year to
- Thank you to everyone who joined our partner webinar last Thursday! 🙏 The point I keep coming back to: a lot of companies need a DPO, but not a full-time one. And with DPO as a service, clients don’t always see the value. They see an expensive consultant asking questions and telling them what they can’t do. We’re not the consultants, and we don’t want to be. Clients need your expertise. We want to give you the tools that make that expertise visible, and give you back the time you now spend on admin. 🎬 If you missed the recent
- Tomorrow at noon, we're hosting a short webinar for privacy freelancers and consultants. The idea came from conversations with independent DPOs. Many of them already recommend tools to their clients, help configure them, and become the person everyone calls when something doesn't work. They just don't get much back for it, other than more work. Tomorrow we'll show three ways to change that with Responsum. It's 35 minutes over lunch, with time for questions at the end. If that sounds like you, or like someone in your network, the
- A situation I've seen more than once: An external DPO has advised a mid-sized company for two years. She built their records of processing, set up the DPIA process, and knows the organisation better than most people working there. Then the company decides it's time for a privacy tool. Procurement runs the selection, IT signs the contract, and she hears about it afterwards. Six months later, the tool is half configured. It's structured differently from how she organised the work, and she's still the one accountable for the advice, now
- Last night was the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 awards, and Responsum finished 26th! Privacy management isn't the first category people think of when they picture a fast-growing tech company. For a long time, privacy was something organizations did because they had to, in spreadsheets and Word documents, and preferably without anyone noticing. That's changed. Privacy teams now sit closer to the board, they're expected to have answers on AI, and they need to prove what they do, not just do it. We've grown because more
- The question I get asked most at events isn't about the AI Act or NIS2. It's this one: "Do we really need a tool for this?” Often followed by: “Our spreadsheet works fine." And sometimes it does. If you're a small organisation with a handful of processing activities and one person who knows where everything is, a well-kept spreadsheet will definitely get you quite far. The trouble is that it rarely stays that way. The spreadsheet works until: - the person who built it leaves - three departments start keeping their own copies - an
- Which tool should we use?" If you work as a freelance DPO or privacy consultant, you've probably heard this from clients more often than you can count. You give your honest answer, the client goes off and buys something, and that's where your part ends. I think that's a missed opportunity, for you and for your client. You know their organisation better than any software vendor ever will. So on Thursday 29 October at 12:00 CET, I'm hosting a lunch webinar on how independent privacy professionals can work with Responsum. There are
- Meet us at PrivCon 2026! Tomorrow, October 7, Responsum will be at PrivCon 2026 at the Province of Antwerp, and we're proud to be sponsoring this year's edition, organised by Dasprive and Bart van Buitenen. Our CEO Alex Van Cauwenbergh and the team will be there to talk about how to turn privacy from a box-ticking exercise into something that moves your organisation forward. Attending too? Come say hi. 👋 🗓 October 7 📍 Kon. Elisabethlei 22, 2018 Antwerp #PrivCon2026 #Privacy #GDPR #DataProtection
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