Belgian Tech growth plan

Engine for growth.

Policy makes entrepreneurship possible.
BeTech makes it successful.

“The engine is already built and running.
Belgium only has to fuel it.”

The Series A for the Belgian Tech ecosystem.

BeTech is entirely privately built by builders, for builders.
Twelve years of continuous building with 7,300 entrepreneurs directly rather than through intermediaries.
BeTech is not asking to get started. It’s asking to get fuel so it can scale.

7,300
Entrepreneurs
12 yrs
Privately built
110+
Experts
9
Categories live40 extra identified
59%
Outside Brussels
1,200
Members abroad

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An engine, drawn
01 · Where we stand

The problem is known.
What is missing is a fueled engine.

9× more Tech companies in
The Netherlands, a country only 1,5× our size

That gap is not talent and it is not ideas. Belgium has both. Every neighbour worth comparing to funded an engine to turn them into companies, and in each of them tech now ranks first or second as a driver of growth.

Active tech companies

Netherlands 11,301
Belgium 1,324

Annual venture funding

Netherlands €2.64bn
Belgium €772m

Belgium ranks 23rd globally. The Netherlands is in the top ten, and got there on roughly €7M a year of ecosystem investment through Techleap.
Sources: Techleap.nl (State of Dutch Tech 2026) · Agoria (Belgian Tech Funding 2025) · StartupBlink (Global Startup Ecosystem Index 2026)

02 · Why the return is different here

One engine, already running.
Public money fuels the loop.

A fuel can, drawn
French Tech & Techleap Investpublic money first Buildyears to get it running Growththen it compounds
BeTech · 2014 to 2026 Build ✓done, privately, twelve years Investwe are here Growththe same compounding

France and the Netherlands invested first, then built. BeTech did the reverse: twelve years of private building, at no cost to government.
That means the same public money goes straight into growth — not into starting another initiative from scratch.
This is a Series A, not a start-up round.

What the investment starts turning
What BeTech drives
Builders
Founders, talent and the next generation, reached directly. This is the execution layer between policy and entrepreneur.
What the investment unlocks
Growth
Customers, capital, operators, international reach accelerated.
The outcome
Success
Exits, scale-ups, champions. Companies that put Belgium on the map.
↶ Pay it forward Capital, expertise, customers, board seats and introductions flow back to the next generation. The loop is what makes this investment temporary rather than permanent.
03 · The plan · The ambition levels

How does this translate in ROI?

Investment
€50M 10-year building budget
Transformation · our ambition
+18 to +21
Additional unicorns
24,000–45,000
Additional tech jobs
Average investment per additional job €1,450
What runs at this level

    National reach is part of every level, not only the top one.

    Every level returns. The top level compounds.
    Additional tech jobs, by level of investment. Ecosystem returns are not linear: at a smaller base a programme can only run a few things at once, and above a certain scale the loop starts feeding itself.
    Outcomes rise faster than budget

    The menu is not the constraint. BeTech has 49 initiatives documented and ready: 9 from the existing operation, 24 described future initiatives, 11 further possibilities under BeTech Experts and 5 strategic directions. The budget decides how many run, and how hard. Delivery is bottom-up and co-built: the community and 110+ BeTech experts carry much of the work, partners carry a share, and third-party initiatives can be backed too. For scale, Techleap delivers roughly 3 to 4 such initiatives a year on about €5M a year; BeTech can stretch the same budget further because it co-builds rather than owns every initiative. Outcomes are modelled on Techleap, the Dutch benchmark, population-adjusted (11.8M vs 18.0M) and discounted for a harder market over ten years; stated as ranges.

    04 · The ask

    Not a spending budget to spend.
    A building budget to build.

    Digitalisation starts with builders

    Technology adoption accelerates where builders concentrate. Three or four startups doing AI on your street drive adoption faster than any campaign. Builders, entrepreneurship, companies, jobs, growth. This is the front end of that chain, not a parallel programme.

    Brussels, or several

    The investment can come from one budget or be assembled across Brussels, Flanders, Wallonia and the federal level. That is a political choice - and not a neutral one. Taking the lead positions Brussels as the Tech centre of Belgium. Pooling the investment as others join reduces Brussels’s share of the cost - but also its ownership of the ambition.

    Why €50M, and why now

    One budget of €50M across ten years, against Techleap's roughly €7M a year over a shorter run. Longer horizon, harder market, engine already built. We recommend the top level because it is the only one that signals to talent and capital that this country intends to keep and attract them.

    This is not an investment in BeTech as an organisation. It is an investment in economic infrastructure. BeTech is the engine; what it unlocks reaches well beyond BeTech itself, into talent, capital and growth across the whole ecosystem.

    The engine is built and running.
    All it has ever needed is fuel.
    €10M to grow.
    €20M to accelerate the ecosystem.
    €50M builds a Tech nation.
    "Faire bouger les mentalités, c'est dur, mais quand on y arrive, on peut soulever des montagnes." Vinc Vanasch · BeTech ambassador · Olympic champion, Tokyo 2021

    BeTech VZW · Cantersteen 12, 1000 Brussels · belgiantech.com · August 2026