Overview
Tom De Kooning co-founded Driven with Andres De Jonge and Ludovic Diercxsens. Driven automates and personalizes sales commission management, helping companies replace error-prone spreadsheet-based compensation tracking with a live, CRM-integrated platform.
Tom's route to Driven ran through the StarApps ecosystem. StarApps, the Ghent-based venture builder co-founded by Lorenz Bogaert and Nicolas Van Eenaeme, backed Driven in its early formation. Tom is described as having built his startup within the StarApps network, which provided early infrastructure, co-founder matching, and network access.
Before Driven, Tom ran De Web Bar, a web design services practice focused on small businesses and non-profits.
Driven raised EUR 1.5M in September 2025 led by Pitchdrive, with additional backing from NewSchool and Belgian SaaS founders. The round validates Tom's positioning within the Antwerp-Ghent early-stage network.
Tom represents the next generation of founders emerging directly from the StarApps studio model: rather than founding independently and seeking backing, they're incubated within a network that provides early validation, co-founders, and investor access from day one.
Career history
- Co-Founder2025 - presentDrivenAI sales compensation automation, EUR 1.5M Pitchdrive-backed
- AffiliatedStarAppsventure studio, Lorenz Bogaert / Nicolas Van Eenaeme
- FounderDe Web Bar, web design for SMBs and non-profits
Education
LinkedIn Voice
Posting style: Active, 7 posts in our data. Themes around sales automation, Company Building, and ecosystem updates.
In the news
- Almost didn’t make it at HubSpot UNBOUND 2026… Some pilot parked his plane at the wrong gate, causing huge delays almost missing my connection. Barely made the flight! Nonetheless, I’m super excited to be at Unbound at this week. Hit me up for a coffee if you want to talk about GTM & sales, let’s share notes.
- My favorite event of the year is coming up, Hubspot UNBOUND next week! Quick throwback to my first day last year with Hendrik Keeris . This time I'm stoked to be there with Tom De Kooning and Andres De Jonge . And we're going bigger this year: organising a proper Belgian beer tasting for revenue leaders. A brewery, a selected group of revenue leaders, talking recenue, sales performance and GTM while having a good laugh and some beers. What else do you need in life? ;) Definitely sign up via our Luma, places are limited! (link in
- I've crossed quite some revenue leaders now, all talking about the same struggles. Outbound is broken, cold-email is dead and outreach on LinkedIn is getting saturated fast as well. The era of easy leads is getting to an end... Everyone with a Claude subscription can call themself a GTM engineer nowadays and bombard 1000s of people through these legacy channels with the "perfect" "personalized" copy, and no-one looks up anymore. All of the sudden sellers need to put more effort in getting good leads again, and were never trained
- Thank you to Le Soir and Emile Thoreau for including Driven in today's piece on Belgian tech funding (article link in comments). Appreciated the chance to share our take on the Belgian ecosystem 😎
- I asked one of our customers last week why their comp split is 50% base, 50% variable salary? Response: “I have no idea.” That’s the answer. Not “here’s our philosophy.” Not even a bad reason. Just nobody knows. That’s the real problem with variable vs fixed. It’s one of the biggest discussions in sales comp, and almost nobody treats it like a decision. It’s an accident that got inherited from an old offer letter or a negotiation years ago. At Driven we see this constantly. Your split isn’t just a number, it’s a philosophy.
- The team is shipping fast! Access your commissions & progress straight from Slack now, zero friction! Read more about Driven (sales compensation agent) here: www.driven.work
- Buyer intent data is useless if you sit on it. Someone hits your pricing page, reads a comparison, comes back twice. That's a signal with a shelf life measured in hours, not weeks. Yet most teams treat their intent list like a chore they get to on Friday. So we stopped getting to it on Friday. We built a Claude managed agent that runs every hour and takes a new account from "showed intent" to "being reached out to" on its own: 1. Hourly intent poll — pulls new companies from our HubSpot intent list, diffed against everything already
- Every sales comp vendor tells you setup is complex so they can sell you a consultant. Well, it isn't anymore. Video below: setting up a full sales comp plan for a company, start to finish, in under 5 minutes. No consultants, no workshops, no waiting. A year ago this would've taken us weeks too. Spreadsheets flying back and forth with finance, someone finding an error three months later, everyone just accepting that's how it works. If you've been told your comp plan is too complex to set up yourself, watch this.
Related profiles
Lorenz BogaertEcosystem peers
Andres De JongeCo-founders
Ludovic DiercxsensCo-founders- YAntwerpLocation
- KAntwerp sceneLocation
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