Overview
Michiel Van Beirendonck is the CEO and co-founder of Belfort, based in Leuven. He co-founded the company in July 2024, where he has also served as chief technology officer.
From October 2019 to August 2025 he was a PhD researcher at KU Leuven. During that period he held silicon security internships at Rambus from July to October 2022 and at Microsoft from May to August 2023. In the summer of 2018 he was a student researcher at EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne).
He studied electrical and electronics engineering at KU Leuven, completing a BSc between 2014 and 2017 and an MSc between 2017 and 2019, and spent 2017 to 2018 at EPFL on a SEMP exchange.
Career history
In the news
- My first opinion article in the Belgian newspapers! Belgium is world-class in cryptography, now let's build a sector around it. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the quantum threat and the urgent migration to post-quantum cryptography by 2030. That story continues. Belgium has long been world-class at research in exactly this topic: cryptography and data security. What's often been missing is our own industry of early adopters to capitalize on it. Shifting that balance is one of the core motivations why we founded Belfort. Data security
- Today we’re launching Belfort’s first showcase of encrypted ML: classification of encrypted images. 📸 This is running ResNet-20, fully under encryption, in 163ms. The fastest out there, 3x faster than any previous state of the art. 🔥 There’s no accuracy tradeoff: 92.5% encrypted vs. 92.8% in plaintext. The model doesn't notice it's encrypted. This is just the first demo of what's coming with our upcoming Cyclops release. Try it yourself at https://lnkd.in/dpBG69vY, and stay tuned for more! If you're running AI workloads and
- This week, the US government set hard deadlines for federal agencies to migrate to post-quantum cryptography by 2030. After years of warnings, the timeline is finally real and enforceable. I've spent my whole PhD and career on post-quantum and homomorphic encryption, including internships at Microsoft Research and Rambus, and contributing to DARPA's DPRIVE program. It's exciting to see the world finally treat next-generation encryption as critical infrastructure. But what are we actually racing to protect? Data at rest, on
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