Overview
Bart Smeets co-founded Dataroots in 2016 and led the Leuven-based AI & Machine Learning and Data & Analytics consultancy through its December 2022 acquisition by Talan.
Bart Smeets studied Healthcare Management and Policy at KU Leuven (2008-2010) and added a Master of General Management at Vlerick Business School (2010-2011). He spent five years at Uz Leuven as a care program manager focused on healthcare process optimisation before turning fully to data work.
In 2016 he co-founded Dataroots in Leuven together with Jonas Tundo, building one of Belgium's better-known AI & Machine Learning and Data & Analytics consultancies. He stayed on as CEO through the December 2022 acquisition by Paris-based Talan, then continued to lead the Belgian operation as it integrated into the wider 4,000-person group. In 2020 he co-founded dploy.ai, a machine learning deployment platform spun out of Dataroots.
After eventually stepping away from operational duties at Dataroots, Bart moved into builder mode with Jonas Tundo and Tim Goedeweeck under the label "Top of Mind". His public focus areas are strategy, AI & Machine Learning, and coding, and he writes regularly about Mlops, dbt, Prefect, and applied machine learning on LinkedIn.
Career history
In the news
- Had a great time at yesterday’s AI-Native meetup! 🙌 Excellent organisation by Ahmet Eren and a fantastic lineup of speakers: Charlotte Verhamme, Mehdi Ouazza and Niels Claeys. Great talks and interesting conversations. Looking forward to the next one! https://lnkd.in/e53agreK
- Over the last few months, I’ve been tinkering with my own meeting transcriber. That project has become Loofah, and its at a few hundred downloads now. I've been active in the OSS space for a while now, but it remains nice to see that something you build for yourself turns out to be useful to others. The latest addition: Nemotron 3.5 ASR is now available as another offline transcription model. Loofah transcribes meetings locally on your Mac, supports optional AI summaries, and stores everything in an accessible format on your file
- I’m looking to invest in small outdoor and endurance sports brands, particularly those selling directly to their customers. I’d also like to meet ambitious founders getting something off the ground in this space. DM me if you’re interested or know someone I should talk to.
- Well deserved, congrats! #wyder #kbcstartit
- Me and Charlotte Verhamme sat down with founder Heidi Van Dyck for an interesting talk about athena studio and how they're improving fashion's coordination workflows. #brightsignal #athenastudio #founders
- When someone asks an AI agent for a recommendation in your category, does your brand show up? Raphaël Di Giambattista and I spoke with Gilles Praet from Visiblie on Bright Signal about helping brands get found and recommended in AI search. Early customer feedback changed their approach. A dashboard could show customers where they stood, but they also needed help doing something about it. That pushed Visiblie beyond measuring visibility and towards helping improve it. We talked about how that feedback shaped the product, why
- My bet is that agents will be requesting their own cards and managing budgets before most incumbent banks make disposable virtual cards routine. My professional account is with an incumbent at the moment, but I suspect my agents will end up banking elsewhere.
- Another Bright Signal episode out 🎧 I sat this one out, but Raphaël Di Giambattista and our new co-host Charlotte Verhamme had a great conversation with Lennard Kooy, CEO and co-founder of Lleverage. Lennard has started around 20 companies and previously sold Storyteq. They talk about selling AI to companies that don’t really care about AI, building an autonomous back office for physical-product businesses, and a principle worth remembering: protect what makes us human, automate the rest. Also very happy to have Charlotte
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