Overview
Laurens founded Syndicate One in Brussels, building it into a structured vehicle for angel co-investment in Belgian tech startups. The syndicate pools deal flow and capital from a network of experienced founders and operators, including LPs such as Stijn Christiaens, Roeland Delrue, and Felix Garriau.
Laurens works closely with Robin Wauters in the Brussels tech ecosystem, where both are active in ecosystem building and media. His work at Syndicate One positions him as a connector between successful Belgian exits and the next generation of startups.
Career history
- Co-Founder & CEO2025 - PresentBelfort
- Founder2021 - PresentSyndicate One
- Partner, Kraken Ventures2021 - 2025Kraken Digital Asset Exchange
- VC Investor2020 - 2021Dawn Capital
- Moonshot Strategy2019X, the moonshot factory / Alphabet
Education
MBA2018 - 2020Harvard Business Schoolrecipient of 5+ merit-based scholarships including Fulbright, BAEF, and Harvard Boas Scholar
BSc & MSc, Energy Engineering2009 - 2014KU Leuven
In the news
- Best support ticket I ever filed. 📩 Meeting and interviewing Samuel Berton at Tectonic turned out to be one of the luckiest hires we’ve made. Now we’re looking for the next people to join us, and work directly with Samuel Berton, me, Laurens De Poorter and the rest of the team: https://lnkd.in/e3T-fDjr
- They say you should never be the smartest person in the room. Well, mission accomplished! 😉 At Belfort, we've built a team of 18 math olympiad winners, hardware bug hunters, and people who invent cryptographic schemes for fun. Together we’re realizing the dream of end-to-end encrypted intelligence. Last week we launched eML Cloud, our biggest product launch yet. What we’re building next is even bigger... Agentic coding lets small teams move mountains, but as the mountains keep getting bigger, we’re looking for a few more
- We spent the past year making encrypted computing incredibly fast! 🏎️💨 Turns out that wasn’t enough. In almost every customer call, we heard the same question: how do we now use this with our own models? The answer was not obvious, given only a few dozen people in the world can write encrypted models by hand. One of those people is Marc, so at some point the running joke at Belfort became: how do we put Marc in a box? 🎁 Today, we’re releasing exactly that! Meet eML: write PyTorch, and we run it on encrypted data. Under the
- My first panel ever, and I didn’t even have to leave our office building. 🎤 Last Friday, Syndicate One hosted its 10th Summit at De Hoorn in Leuven, with the theme “Small Funds, Big Impact”. Christine Hick asked Maxime Lahy and me what first-time technical founders need from their backers. I went straight from a PhD at KU Leuven to co-founding Belfort. Within a year, we grew to a team of 18, partnered with companies like Google and LG Electronics, and learned how to build a company across Leuven and San Francisco. A PhD prepares
- Making encrypted computing fast and accessible has always been our mission. Today, we're also making it fun. 🎙️🎲 It's a simple word game*. You say your guesses out loud, and a hotword model checks them, the same kind that listens for "OK Google" or "Hey Siri." The difference: your voice stays encrypted the whole time. The server does the work but never hears you. A word game is low stakes. But voice AI is already in places where the stakes are much higher. Doctors dictating patient notes. Lawyers on client calls. Defence and
- In exactly one month, on Friday Oct 30th, we will celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Belgian Club of Northern California with a 250+ person black-tie event at one of San Francisco’s most spectacular venues! 🇧🇪🇺🇲 >>> 🎟️ Get your tickets here: https://luma.com/gjvvfi2g Last year, I took the helm of one of California's oldest social clubs: the Belgian Club of Northern California. Can you believe it’s half as old as the United States itself? We've been bringing Belgians in the Bay together for 125 years. That calls for a true
- A new dawn for cryptography is upon us, and it's the answer to the reverse information paradox that is haunting executives around the globe: How can we use intelligence (AI) without giving up the knowledge (proprietary data) that makes it valuable? Read my full essay below, and join the waitlist for Belfort's first product release: https://lnkd.in/eH8hRRBE
- A corner of the internet broke yesterday when OpenAI released a solution to one of the biggest mathematical problems of our times: the Navier-Stokes problem. We could talk for hours about these beautiful equations that were very meaningful to me for a brief period in my life while studying fluid dynamics, but the drama was not about the maths... The drama was about whether or not OpenAI had looked into the chat logs of a competing team of mathematicians that had been working on a solution, and was using OpenAI frontier models to
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