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
- 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
- We backed Conveo at seed on a hunch that qualitative research would stop being a project and become infrastructure. Two years in, the customer behavior says the hunch was right: brands keep the conversations running after the study ends. Proud to double down alongside a strong new lead.
- Excited to welcome another wormrider to Syndicate One 🇧🇪 Reach out to Robin or me if you want to fight for Belgian Startup Spice 🌶️
- Google just published its answer to the private AI problem, and we're proud to be one of the main collaborators behind it. At the centre is HEIR, an open source compiler that converts ordinary models into ones that run on encrypted data. That conversion used to require a team of cryptographers. HEIR opens it up to everyone else. Two of the four applications Google showcases are collaborations with Belfort: an ad recommendation model built with LG Electronics and New York University that unlocks private content recommendations, and a
- Extremely proud to share our joint work with LG Electronics' Emerging Technology Lab today: we can now serve encrypted ad recommendations in less than a second. 🔥 When we started Belfort, some were skeptical: "Encrypted computing has been the holy grail for decades, but the technology is too slow by orders of magnitude." This work shows how far that has shifted. LG and New York University did brilliant algorithmic work, a 56x speedup on the hardest part of the problem. Leveraging Google HEIR, Belfort's GPU acceleration added 400x
- One of the best things about building Belfort is building it with Michiel Van Beirendonck, one of the smartest people I've ever worked with. He's dedicated his career to post-quantum cryptography. What started as a PhD with almost 20 papers, 8 patents, and collaborations with Microsoft Research, Rambus and even DARPA, turned into a desire for even more impact as an entrepreneur. Because so much research never gets commercialized, especially in countries like Belgium. AES is the perfect example: invented by two KU Leuven
- Syndicate One is making its most important hire ever. When we started bringing entrepreneurs together about 5 years ago to boost the Belgian ecosystem, the mission was clear: help Belgian founders become more successful. More unicorns please! Skin in the game, through investing with a small fund, was our way to tie ourselves, both to each other and to the entrepreneurs we believed in. Somewhere along the way, we became one of Europe's top-ranked micro-funds, with the highest hit ratio of Belgian unicorns and almost €40M in
- Today, our team at Belfort released the fastest encrypted image classifier available! So proud! 🏎️🔥 ResNet-20 running fully under encryption in 163ms, 3x faster than the previous state of the art. 🏆 Importantly, this comes with no accuracy tradeoff: 92.5% encrypted vs 92.8% in plaintext. 👌 Try it out yourself on https://lnkd.in/g6NSjqQK ! Finally a valid excuse to scroll through cat photos at work! 😸 And if you want to test encrypted AI on your own workloads, reach out! ☎️
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