The POD · Thursday, June 25, 2026 · Ottignies-Louvain-la-Neuve

On Thursday, June 25, The POD brought together Alexandre Pasdermadjian (Deloitte), Gauthier Van der Elst (Partner @ ScaleFund), Rémi Brun (Founder & CEO @ Datatopia), Véronique Pevtschin (Co-CEO @ TheGreenShot) and Hervé Bath (Euranova) to unpack the findings of Deloitte’s latest Scale-up Confidence Survey — and confront the numbers with what founders and investors are actually experiencing on the ground.

What does it really take to scale a tech company in 2026? The survey points to a Belgian ecosystem that is becoming more mature — but also more demanding.

The overall picture is cautiously positive. Confidence remains relatively strong despite geopolitical uncertainty and a challenging economic environment. But the priorities of startups and scale-ups are changing.

For years, access to funding dominated the conversation. Today, the challenge is increasingly elsewhere: finding a market, turning innovation into revenue and building a company that can grow sustainably.

That shift set the tone for the discussion at The POD.

From fundraising first to commercial execution first

Capital remains a challenge. Venture capital continues to play an important role, while private equity is gaining traction, with 28% of scale-ups considering it as a financing route.

But the discussion showed that fundraising is no longer necessarily the first milestone founders should optimise for.

Rémi Brun, founder of Datatopia, reflected on the amount of time his company initially spent raising capital. Today, as the company prepares for a Series A, the approach is different: cash constraints have forced the team to become more disciplined, organise faster and focus relentlessly on demonstrating value to customers.

Hervé Bath, whose company has gone through two funding rounds since 2008, offered a complementary view: capital should never be the goal, only a tool in service of a clear mission. His focus today is building a “sales machine” that works on its own terms, rather than chasing the next round to stay afloat.

That tension played out in an interesting paradox raised by Gauthier Van der Elst. Young, AI-native startups are currently commanding very high valuations despite carrying real execution risk, while more established scale-ups — with proven traction and real revenue — are often valued more conservatively. A market behaviour that, in his view, is not always rational.

The real question is therefore not simply how much can you raise?, but what will that capital allow you to prove?

And increasingly, the answer needs to be: a market.

AI is changing the equation — but AI alone is not a strategy

Unsurprisingly, AI was everywhere in the survey and the conversation.

AI and automation now represent a priority for 53% of startups and scale-ups. But its role differs depending on company maturity. Scale-ups tend to use AI primarily to improve efficiency, while younger startups are increasingly building AI directly into their core business model.

For the panel, however, simply adding AI is far from enough.

The conversation repeatedly came back to three fundamentals: industry knowledge, proprietary or high-quality data, and a clear understanding of the processes being automated. In highly specialised sectors such as healthcare or audiovisual production, technology without deep knowledge of the underlying business quickly reaches its limits.

Véronique Pevtschin introduced another useful concept: “AI frugality.” Instead of deploying AI everywhere because it is available, companies should ask where it actually creates enough value to justify its operational risks, energy use and cost — a question too few teams are asking today.

On data, the discussion also highlighted a growing question of ownership and trust. Véronique noted that TheGreenShot’s clients increasingly include contractual safeguards preventing their data from being used to train other models — while the level of maturity around data ownership still varies significantly from one industry to another.

The winners may therefore not be the companies using the most AI, but those that understand where to use it, how to monetise it, and when not to use it.

Scaling no longer automatically means hiring more people

The survey also reveals an important change in the talent equation.

75% of startups and scale-ups still intend to hire, compared with 79% previously. Talent scarcity remains their main people-related challenge, but the figure has fallen significantly: from 62% two years ago to 50% today.

The underlying shift is more interesting than the decline itself. Growth is increasingly expected to come from productivity and expertise rather than headcount alone.

Rémi Brun summed up how he now hires: for the ability to learn fast, for a clear vision to offer — younger talent, he noted, won’t stay without one — and for the ability to rethink how work itself gets organised.

But Hervé Bath sounded a warning. If companies respond to AI by simply stopping the recruitment of junior profiles, they risk creating a major skills gap a few years from now. Young engineers and digital professionals don’t only represent execution capacity: they bring new behaviours, new ways of working and, increasingly, an AI-native mindset the rest of the organisation needs.

The challenge, then, is not to choose between people and AI. It is to build organisations where different generations, business expertise, technological capability and AI complement each other.

International ambition remains high — but expansion is becoming more pragmatic

Internationalisation remains firmly on the agenda: 43% of startups and scale-ups intend to expand internationally.

North America — and the US in particular — remains highly attractive. Yet the survey also points to a more pragmatic approach to expansion. Companies are increasingly looking first at markets where the opportunity is tangible and entry is realistic.

Sometimes, “international” can start surprisingly close to home: for Belgian companies, another region of the country may already represent a new market.

The three founders around the table shared three different playbooks. Véronique Pevtschin builds small local hubs supported by a central team, leaning on international networks and local connections to gain traction. Rémi Brun favours partnerships and the acquisition of small local players already active in his industry — a potentially faster way in than building from scratch. Hervé Bath insists that expansion requires strong local leadership able to carry the company’s culture, values and way of working abroad.

One lesson was consistent across their experiences: internationalisation is not simply replicating your Belgian playbook somewhere else. Even neighbouring markets come with different business cultures, regulations, employment rules and customer expectations.

Expanding early can make sense. Expanding blindly does not.

A more mature ecosystem needs more experienced voices

Perhaps one of the most interesting discussions of the event was not about an individual company at all, but about the ecosystem surrounding them.

What does a more mature Belgian tech ecosystem actually look like?

Gauthier Van der Elst made the case for recycling experience: successful entrepreneurs becoming investors and mentors after an exit, the way “mafias” of alumni from companies like PayPal or Spotify went on to seed entire generations of new founders elsewhere.

Belgium has its own success stories, he argued — they’re just still too fragmented across regions and communities.

Véronique Pevtschin pointed to a related gap: a lack of open, honest sharing about what works — and what doesn’t. Compared with the US, she noted, European founders tend to talk less openly about their failures. Yet those lessons can be incredibly valuable to the entrepreneurs coming next.

Rémi Brun tied it together with a simple framework: an ecosystem is built on three pillars — a market, talent and networks where people actually talk to each other.

The last one may be the easiest to underestimate.

Access to someone who has already built, failed, pivoted, expanded internationally or exited a company can sometimes be worth more than another theoretical framework.

That requires something deceptively simple: creating more opportunities for those people to meet and talk openly.

So, what does scaling look like in 2026?

The discussion did not produce a magic scaling formula — and that was precisely the point.

Different stages require different capital strategies. AI creates extraordinary opportunities, but also new risks. Internationalisation remains essential for many Belgian tech companies, but requires local knowledge and disciplined execution. And talent remains critical even as the definition of a high-performing team evolves.

What does seem to be changing is the mindset.

What does seem to be changing is the mindset. Growth is becoming more disciplined: founders are paying closer attention to commercial traction, profitability and the way capital is deployed. AI is creating new opportunities, but also forcing companies to think harder about where it genuinely creates value. And as the ecosystem matures, sharing experience — including what didn’t work — becomes increasingly important.

That is also exactly the kind of conversation we want to keep creating at The POD: bringing founders, scale-up leaders, investors and ecosystem experts together to challenge assumptions, compare experiences and help companies navigate their next stage of growth.

Because scaling is rarely about following a playbook.

It is about knowing which questions to ask next.