10 Tech Startups Putting Belgium on the Innovation Map in 2026

Belgium’s technology ecosystem may be smaller than those of some of Europe’s largest startup hubs, but it continues to produce companies operating in highly ambitious and technically demanding markets. From cybersecurity and enterprise AI to biotechnology, climate technology and space infrastructure, Belgian founders are increasingly building companies designed for international markets from the beginning.

The country’s strengths in engineering, life sciences and research are also helping create a startup ecosystem where software companies sit alongside deep-tech businesses tackling challenges that require significant scientific and technical expertise.

The ten companies featured in this list reflect that diversity. They include a cybersecurity company that has already reached unicorn status, AI startups building new infrastructure for enterprise automation and professional services, biotech companies developing advanced therapies, and deep-tech businesses working on carbon removal, nuclear medicine and computing infrastructure for space. These companies have been selected because of their technology, commercial momentum, investment activity or potential to become increasingly influential in their respective markets during 2026.

10 Belgian Tech Startups to Watch in 2026

1. Aikido Security

Aikido Security is a Ghent-founded cybersecurity company building developer-first security software designed to help engineering teams identify and fix meaningful vulnerabilities without slowing down software development. Founded in 2022 by Willem Delbare, Roeland Delrue and Felix Garriau, with Madeline Lawrence also part of the early founding leadership team, Aikido emerged from the belief that many traditional security products create excessive noise, false positives and complex workflows for developers.

The company’s platform brings together security across code, cloud infrastructure and runtime environments, helping teams scan source code, dependencies, infrastructure and other parts of the software development lifecycle while prioritizing risks that are more likely to be genuinely exploitable. Delbare serves as CEO and CTO, Delrue leads operations and commercial functions, while Garriau has played a central role in marketing and growth. Aikido has become one of Belgium’s most significant software success stories in a relatively short period.

In January 2026, the company raised a $60 million Series B led by DST Global, with PSG Equity participating alongside existing backers Notion Capital and Singular, at a valuation of $1 billion. The round gave Aikido unicorn status and brought total funding to approximately $85 million.

The company says its platform now protects more than 100,000 teams and has expanded to more than 200 employees, with customers including Revolut, SoundCloud, Niantic and the Premier League. Aikido’s larger ambition is to build “self-securing software,” where security testing, validation and remediation become increasingly automated as software is built and released. With AI-generated code and autonomous development tools accelerating the pace of software production, that proposition could become increasingly important, making Aikido one of Belgium’s most consequential tech companies to watch in 2026.

2. PanTera

PanTera is a Belgian life-sciences company focused on solving one of the critical supply challenges facing the emerging field of targeted alpha therapy: producing sufficient quantities of the medical isotope actinium-225. PanTera was created as a joint venture between IBA, a major particle accelerator technology company, and SCK CEN, the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre, bringing together expertise in nuclear technology, isotope production and healthcare.

The company’s technology is designed to support the development of next-generation cancer treatments that use highly potent alpha particles to target and destroy cancer cells while potentially limiting damage to surrounding healthy tissue. Actinium-225 is considered one of the most promising isotopes for this approach, but its availability has historically been constrained by limited production capacity. PanTera is working to industrialize and scale production so that pharmaceutical companies and treatment developers can access larger and more reliable supplies.

The company’s leadership includes a management and technical team with expertise in radiopharmaceutical development, regulatory strategy and nuclear medicine, while its board brings together representatives connected with IBA, SCK CEN and investors.

In May 2026, PanTera expanded its collaboration with TerraPower Isotopes, supported by IRE, to increase global actinium-225 production capacity, with new facilities planned in Belgium to support supply for next-generation cancer treatments. PanTera’s significance extends beyond Belgium because isotope supply could become a major infrastructure bottleneck for the broader radiopharmaceutical industry.

As more pharmaceutical companies develop targeted alpha therapies and clinical programs progress, dependable production capacity will become increasingly valuable. PanTera is therefore operating at the intersection of nuclear technology, life sciences and cancer treatment, giving it an opportunity to become an important supplier within a rapidly expanding medical technology market.

3. Tekst

Tekst is a Ghent-based enterprise AI company developing what it calls a Process Intelligence layer for the agentic era. Founded by Wouter Janssen and Tiebe Parmentier, Tekst is built around a problem increasingly confronting large organizations: artificial intelligence can process information and generate answers, but AI agents often struggle to understand how real business processes actually operate across systems, people, exceptions and informal decision-making.

Tekst’s technology analyzes the digital trail created by emails, documents, system events and operational decisions to reconstruct how work flows through an organization. It then uses that context to help AI systems automate business processes more reliably.

The company’s approach is aimed at enterprise workflows such as quote-to-cash, order processing and other administrative processes where employees still spend substantial amounts of time manually moving information between systems. Tekst argues that the next stage of enterprise AI requires more than powerful models; it requires software capable of understanding the context and unwritten rules behind how organizations actually work.

The company announced a $13.5 million Series A round led by Boston-based venture firm Elephant, with existing investor Entourage also involved, bringing additional resources for product development, hiring and international expansion. Tekst said it planned to double its team from approximately 35 to 70 people by the end of 2026 while expanding its engineering and go-to-market capabilities.

As enterprises move beyond AI pilots toward autonomous systems capable of performing real work, the ability to understand and govern complex business processes could become an important layer of the enterprise technology stack. Tekst’s attempt to define that emerging category makes it one of Belgium’s more interesting AI companies to watch in 2026.

4. Donna

Donna is a Belgian AI company developing a proactive assistant designed specifically for field sales teams. Founded in 2024 by Nicolas Christiaen, Jonas Deprez and Xander Berkein, Donna addresses one of the persistent problems facing sales professionals who spend much of their time traveling and meeting customers: administrative work often takes time away from actual selling.

The company’s AI assistant is designed to help sales representatives capture information, manage follow-ups and update customer relationship management systems without forcing them to spend significant time manually entering notes after meetings. Christiaen serves as CEO and leads Donna’s go-to-market strategy and commercial expansion, Deprez serves as COO and leads product, delivery and customer success, while Berkein is CTO and oversees technology and product development. All three founders bring previous entrepreneurial and technology experience, including leadership roles at companies such as Cashforce, Daltix and Deliverect.

Donna’s proposition reflects the broader shift toward AI assistants that are not simply chat interfaces but are designed to proactively perform useful tasks within specific professional workflows. In 2024, the company announced a $1.6 million pre-seed round from US and European investors to support hiring and expansion across Europe and the United States.

The company’s opportunity lies in its specialization. Rather than attempting to build a general-purpose AI assistant for every type of employee, Donna is focused on a clearly defined group of users whose daily work is highly repetitive but difficult to automate with conventional software. Field sales teams generate significant amounts of information through conversations, meetings and travel, and much of that information must eventually be entered into structured business systems.

If AI can reliably handle that administrative layer, sales professionals could spend more time with customers. With enterprises increasingly looking for AI products capable of delivering measurable productivity gains, Donna is a Belgian company worth watching as vertical AI becomes an increasingly important part of the software market.

5. Sirona Technologies

Sirona Technologies is a climate technology company developing direct air capture systems designed to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. The company is working in one of the most technically challenging areas of climate technology, where businesses are attempting to build infrastructure capable of removing previously emitted carbon at sufficient scale and at a cost that could eventually support a global carbon-removal industry.

Sirona’s technology is designed around modular direct air capture systems, combining engineering, thermodynamics and industrial-scale deployment. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Thoralf Gutierrez, who previously spent five years at Tesla’s Silicon Valley headquarters and worked on data and engineering systems supporting hardware development, alongside co-founder and CTO Gauthier Limpens, a thermodynamics specialist with a PhD and experience building energy systems.

Sirona’s approach reflects a growing recognition that reducing future emissions alone may not be sufficient to meet long-term climate goals. Industries, governments and companies are increasingly exploring carbon removal technologies that can address emissions already accumulated in the atmosphere. Direct air capture remains expensive and energy intensive, however, making engineering efficiency and scalability central to the commercial success of companies in the sector. Sirona is therefore pursuing a difficult but potentially important opportunity: developing technology that could become part of the infrastructure required for a future carbon-removal economy.

The company also benefits from Belgium’s strong engineering and research ecosystem, while the broader European climate-tech market is increasingly attracting investors and corporate buyers interested in durable carbon-removal solutions. Sirona’s next major challenge will be moving from promising technology and engineering development toward larger-scale deployment. That transition is where many climate hardware companies face their greatest capital and execution challenges.

Nevertheless, if direct air capture becomes an increasingly important component of global climate infrastructure, companies capable of designing systems that are efficient, modular and commercially deployable could occupy valuable positions. Sirona is one of the Belgian deep-tech startups worth following as the carbon-removal market continues to evolve.

6. Spica Therapeutics

Spica Therapeutics is a biotechnology company developing antibody-based therapies designed to precisely target disease-driving macrophages involved in cancer and chronic inflammatory diseases. Originally developed from scientific research associated with Aarhus University, the University of Southern Denmark and Inserm in France, the company began operating as Spica in 2024 with support from BioQube Ventures and established operations spanning Denmark and Belgium.

Spica’s scientific approach centers on its proprietary Macrophage Fingerprinting Platform, which is designed to identify specific subsets of macrophages that contribute to disease progression. Macrophages are an important part of the immune system, but in certain diseases they can become pathogenic and support processes such as tumor growth and chronic inflammation. Spica aims to selectively target those harmful cell populations while restoring healthier immune function. The company’s programs include anti-CD163 monoclonal antibodies intended to eliminate disease-driving macrophage subsets in oncology and fibroinflammatory diseases.

Spica reached an important financing milestone in June 2025 when it closed a €10 million seed round co-led by Bioqube Ventures and the Flanders Future Tech Fund, managed by Belgian investment company PMV, with participation from Qbic. The financing was intended to advance multiple lead programs into early IND-enabling studies and deepen the company’s scientific collaborations, including work with Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the VIB research institute. Spica represents the strength of Belgium’s broader life-sciences ecosystem, where university research, biotech venture capital and specialized scientific infrastructure often work closely together.

Drug development remains a long and high-risk process, but companies capable of identifying new biological mechanisms and translating them into targeted therapies can create significant value. With its focus on macrophage biology, precision targeting and chronic disease, Spica is building in a scientifically specialized area that could attract increasing interest as biotechnology becomes more dependent on advanced cellular and computational approaches to discovering new treatments.

7. Conveo

Conveo is an AI-powered market research company using automated video interviews to help businesses generate qualitative customer insights faster. Founded in April 2024, Conveo emerged from the growing recognition that traditional qualitative research can be slow, expensive and difficult to scale. Organizations often need to understand how customers think, feel and behave, but conducting, transcribing and analyzing large numbers of interviews can take weeks. Conveo is attempting to compress that process by using AI to conduct and analyze video interviews at scale.

The platform acts as what the company describes as an AI-powered research coworker, allowing businesses to run interviews across areas including behavioral research, innovation, user experience, branding, communications and customer experience. Its technology is designed to help researchers and business teams access the depth of qualitative research without relying entirely on lengthy manual interview processes. Conveo has already attracted a notable customer base, with companies including Unilever, Orange, Sanofi and Google using its platform.

The startup also has significant backing for a young company. Conveo announced a $5.3 million seed round backed by Y Combinator, 6 Degrees Capital, Entourage Capital, Pitchdrive and Syndicate One. The company’s development reflects one of the most important questions emerging around generative AI: which professional services can be accelerated or partially automated without losing the quality that made human expertise valuable in the first place? Market research is a particularly interesting test case because businesses need both scale and nuance.

AI can make interviews faster and analysis more systematic, but understanding customers still requires the ability to interpret complex human responses. Conveo is betting that AI can become a productive collaborator in that process rather than simply replacing researchers. With AI increasingly entering knowledge-intensive professional workflows, Conveo is one of Belgium’s more interesting companies building at the intersection of AI, research and enterprise decision-making.

8. Powernaut

Powernaut is a Belgian technology company operating in the growing intersection of artificial intelligence, energy and industrial infrastructure. The company is part of a broader generation of startups attempting to make energy systems more intelligent, efficient and adaptable as electricity demand grows and grids become increasingly complex. The global energy transition is creating new challenges for companies and infrastructure operators because the energy system is becoming more decentralized.

Renewable generation, batteries, electric vehicles, heat pumps and other technologies are turning consumers into active participants in electricity markets while creating larger amounts of operational data. Software and AI are increasingly needed to understand and optimize those systems. Powernaut is pursuing an opportunity within this changing landscape by developing technology intended to help organizations better manage and optimize energy-related operations. Its broader relevance comes from the increasing importance of energy software as Europe invests heavily in electrification and renewable infrastructure.

Hardware alone is unlikely to solve the operational complexity created by a more distributed grid. Companies will also need digital platforms capable of forecasting demand, coordinating assets and helping businesses make more intelligent energy decisions. Powernaut’s development therefore sits within a market that combines two major technology trends: the rapid advancement of AI and the transformation of energy infrastructure. The company will need to demonstrate that its technology can create measurable operational and financial benefits for customers, particularly in a market where energy businesses are often cautious about deploying new systems into critical infrastructure.

However, the opportunity is substantial. As electricity becomes increasingly central to transportation, heating, manufacturing and computing, the software layer surrounding energy systems could become as strategically important as the physical infrastructure itself. Belgium’s strong engineering base and its location within a highly interconnected European energy market provide an interesting environment for companies building these technologies. Powernaut is worth watching because the next generation of energy technology companies may increasingly be defined not simply by what power they generate or store, but by how intelligently they manage it.

9. EDGX

EDGX is a Belgian spacetech company building high-performance edge computers designed to process data directly onboard satellites and other spacecraft. The company is targeting a major infrastructure challenge emerging from the rapid growth of the space economy: sending vast quantities of raw data back to Earth is expensive, slow and increasingly impractical as satellites generate larger amounts of information.

EDGX is developing computing systems capable of performing artificial intelligence and data processing in orbit, allowing satellites to analyze information closer to where it is collected. The company describes its longer-term ambition as building the compute layer of the space economy, beginning with edge computers onboard spacecraft and eventually expanding toward larger computing infrastructure in space.

EDGX was founded by Nick Destrycker, who serves as co-founder and CEO, and Wouter Benoot, co-founder and CTO/COO. The company’s flagship Sterna computer is designed to provide high-performance, AI-capable processing directly in orbit.

EDGX announced a €2.3 million seed round co-led by imec.istart Future Fund and the Flanders Future Tech Fund, with continued support from imec.istart. The company said the financing would accelerate commercialization and support growing customer demand, including a €1.1 million multi-unit commercial agreement with a satellite operator and multiple government and institutional contracts.

EDGX also announced an in-orbit demonstration on a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission in February 2026, with additional missions planned for the year. As satellite constellations generate increasing amounts of Earth observation, communications and scientific data, computing at the edge could become an increasingly important capability. EDGX is therefore pursuing a long-term opportunity that sits at the convergence of AI, edge computing and space infrastructure, making it one of Belgium’s most ambitious deep-tech startups to watch.

10. Dytto

Dytto is a Belgian AI company building intelligent automation and research capabilities for professional firms, with a particular focus on making AI practical, reliable and grounded in authoritative information. The company is led by co-founder and CEO Niels Van Driessche and co-founder and CTO Jorne De Blaere, supported by a growing team of engineers, AI specialists and product professionals. Dytto’s approach reflects an increasingly important shift in the AI market. While general-purpose chatbots can provide quick answers, professional users in areas such as tax, accounting and legal work often require something more rigorous.

In these environments, an incorrect answer can have significant financial or regulatory consequences. Dytto has therefore developed capabilities around deeper research workflows that break complex questions into multiple components, consult authoritative sources and verify critical facts before generating an answer.

In a July 2026 product update, the company described its Deep Research capability as a system that checks official registers and primary sources, evaluates relevant documents and double-checks important numbers and dates before responding to complex professional questions. The company’s wider mission is to make AI accessible and useful for organizations rather than positioning it simply as a replacement for human expertise. That philosophy is particularly relevant as professional services firms increasingly experiment with AI but remain concerned about accuracy, trust and the reliability of automated outputs.

Dytto’s opportunity lies in building systems that can assist professionals while maintaining the ability to trace and verify the information behind an answer. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in regulated and knowledge-intensive industries, the companies that succeed may not be those offering the fastest response, but those capable of combining speed with reliability.

With a founding team focused on AI-driven automation and a product direction centered on practical professional use cases, Dytto represents an emerging Belgian startup worth watching as the next phase of enterprise AI becomes increasingly focused on trust and real-world deployment.

Belgium’s Next Startup Chapter Is Going Deep Tech

Belgium’s startup ecosystem is increasingly demonstrating that scale does not depend solely on the size of a country’s domestic market. The companies on this list are pursuing global opportunities across cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, climate technology and space infrastructure, often in sectors where specialized technical knowledge provides a meaningful competitive advantage.

Aikido Security’s rapid rise to unicorn status shows that Belgian software companies can scale internationally, while PanTera and Spica Therapeutics highlight the country’s deep scientific and life-science capabilities. Tekst, Donna, Conveo and Dytto demonstrate how Belgian founders are applying AI to increasingly specific enterprise and professional problems, while Sirona, Powernaut and EDGX show that the ecosystem’s ambitions increasingly extend into physical infrastructure and deep technology.

The next challenge will be turning early momentum into globally scaled companies. Belgium has strong universities, research institutions, technical talent and access to European markets, but international growth requires continued capital, commercial execution and the ability to compete against companies from much larger ecosystems. The startups featured here suggest that Belgium is increasingly producing companies prepared to take on that challenge. If more of them successfully make the transition from promising startups to international scale-ups, Belgium’s position on Europe’s technology map could become considerably more significant in the years ahead.