Embracing startup innovation

At Pauwels Solutions Group (PSG), a fast-growing European holding uniting businesses across Life Sciences, Engineering, Digital, Aerospace and Fusion Tech, we are deeply invested in driving innovation across the industries we serve. We believe the most transformative breakthroughs increasingly come from ambitious startups that bring fresh ideas, bold technology, and the agility to challenge established ways of working. This belief has shaped our approach to digital transformation and led us to become early adopters of promising new platforms, including the AI-driven recruiting solution developed by Belgian startup Spott .

This article outlines why PSG supports startup-driven innovation, how Spott is helping redefine recruiting workflows, why Belgium (and Ghent in particular) fosters such innovation, and how companies like PSG are evolving from cautious observers to enthusiastic collaborators. We’ll also introduce Volve , another innovative startup from within the PSG ecosystem, to show how we are scaling this belief in startup agility beyond recruitment.

What Spott solves: an AI partner for recruiters

Recruiters today are overwhelmed by repetitive, manual tasks. Writing job descriptions, formatting CVs, matching candidates, taking interview notes, these processes consume time and hinder the relationship-building that makes recruitment truly effective.

Spott, a Leuven-based startup, tackles this challenge with a fully AI-native, end-to-end recruitment platform. Its software automates job matching, communication, scheduling, note-taking, and report generation. More than just a point solution, Spott functions as a recruiter's AI sidekick, freeing professionals to focus on human interaction and strategic hiring decisions.

Spott raised $3.2 million in funding from investors including Y Combinator and Base10 Partners, and now serves clients from San Francisco to Dubai. Early adopters include Stanton Chase, Barrett & Young, and PSG. Within weeks, our recruitment teams saw significant gains.

According to Niels Declerck, Group IT Director at PSG:

“Spott automatically formats CVs and generates tailor-made presentations in our own template, which saves a lot of time and manual work. The team is great to work with and very responsive to our feedback.”

Niels Declerck, Group IT Director at PSG © Foto: PSG

Spott’s system not only reduced admin burdens, it produced tangible output faster, enabling PSG’s recruitment experts to spend more time connecting with candidates and clients. For PSG, the adoption of Spott marked a shift: from seeing startups as risky to viewing them as reliable accelerators of business value.

Why startups lead the way in AI and workflow automation

Disruption rarely comes from inside the industry. Startups have advantages that larger vendors and corporates struggle to match: agility, focus, and a clean-slate approach to problem-solving. While legacy vendors may retrofit AI into older systems, startups like Spott build AI into the very architecture from the beginning.

This allows them to create deeply integrated, dynamic systems that work with recruiters, not just for them. Instead of stitching together disparate tools, Spott reimagines recruitment workflows holistically.

More broadly, this illustrates a pattern we increasingly observe: workforce and workflow automation breakthroughs often emerge from startups, not from the big names. They innovate faster, adapt quicker, and take bigger risks to solve real problems. And in fields like recruitment, that can be the difference between incremental gains and radical efficiency.

Belgium’s fertile ground: Ghent, Wintercircus and the startup ecosystem.

It might surprise some, but Belgium punches well above its weight in fostering startups and scale-ups. PSG HQ’s home base has quietly become a fertile ground for innovation, and the city of Ghent in particular is emerging as a vibrant tech cluster. In fact, if you wander into Ghent’s Wintercircus, an iconic 19th-century former circus, now transformed into a modern labyrinth of coworking spaces, labs, and event halls, you can feel the entrepreneurial energy in the air. The recently opened Wintercircus startup campus is a high-tech playground packed with startups… the real magic is the energy – innovation happens when people connect, whether over coffee or late-night conversations. This kind of physical hub, where serendipitous introductions and brainstorms happen daily, has become the beating heart of Ghent’s startup scene. Wintercircus alone houses dozens of young tech companies and regularly hosts meetups, effectively engineering the collisions of ideas that spark new ventures.

Wintercircus © Foto: VRT NWS

But the environment is more than a single building. Ghent’s ecosystem benefits from a culture of collaboration and a pay-it-forward ethos among founders. Successful entrepreneurs here don’t “cash out and check out”, they stay engaged, reinvesting time and money into the next generation. It’s common to see founders of prior successes mentoring newcomers or even launching new startups themselves. This virtuous cycle has deep local roots. In the late 2000s, the founders of a social network called Netlog created what locals jokingly call the “Netlog mafia”, an early cadre of tech talent who went on to start or fund new companies. That spirit lives on. Founders who achieve success (think of scale-ups like Showpad , Silverfin , or Collibra ) actively mentor and invest in younger teams rather than retreating. As one observer noted, Ghent’s startup scene thrives on an unwritten rule: pay it forward. Founders of recent success stories – Showpad, Henchman, Silverfin, etc. – champion this mindset, which traces back to the early Netlog days. It helps, too, that these role models remain approachable and visible. In Ghent, you might find a prominent CEO sharing advice over a local beer at a meetup, without any pretense. This accessibility of mentors fosters the confidence in new entrepreneurs that they can succeed from Belgium, without needing to relocate to Silicon Valley or London.

Zooming out, Belgium as a whole provides several strategic advantages for startups. First, there is the talent pool – and it’s world-class. Belgium boasts a highly educated, diverse workforce with a strong focus on engineering and STEM skills, multilingual capabilities, and top-tier business education. Our universities, such as KU Leuven (just down the road from Spott’s offices) and Ghent University, consistently rank among Europe’s best, producing a steady stream of engineers, scientists, and multilingual graduates. That mix of technical prowess and language ability is a huge asset. A Belgian startup team can easily operate in English, Dutch, French (and often more), which means from day one they have a global mindset. When your domestic market is small and multilingual, you naturally think about international expansion early – building products that can scale beyond one country. This cultural agility, the ability to bridge languages and cultures, gives Belgian companies an edge when selling into international markets. It’s no coincidence that we’ve seen globally-focused startups emerge here, from Brussels-based data governance unicorn Collibra, to Ghent’s own Showpad, which now serves over 1,200 customers worldwide.

Another strength is Belgium’s central location in Europe and connectivity. We literally sit at the crossroads of Western Europe, bordered by large economies and hosting the EU capital. This makes Belgium an attractive base for companies looking to target the European Union market. You’re a short train ride from London, Paris, Amsterdam, or Frankfurt. For startups, that means easy access to major clients and investors across countries. As one report highlighted, Belgium’s strategic location and infrastructure offer easy access to major European markets, making it an ideal hub for international expansion. On top of that, government initiatives have increasingly catered to startups, from tax incentives for R&D, to innovation grants, to thriving incubators often backed by public-private partnerships. Ghent’s city authorities, for example, actively supported projects like Wintercircus and the Tech Lane Science Park, understanding that enabling innovation (rather than trying to control it) yields long-term economic benefits.

Ghent by night © Foto: Adobe

Finally, there’s something to be said about the mindset of Belgian entrepreneurs, often described as ambitious yet humble. This “humble swagger,” as it’s been called, means founders here aim for global impact but without the ego or hype that sometimes pervades larger startup hubs. They focus on building solid products and sustainable growth. The benefit is a tight-knit community that shares knowledge freely and stays grounded, which in turn attracts talent and investors who appreciate substance over flash. In short, Belgium provides a Goldilocks environment for startups: big enough to have resources and talent, small enough that the community stays collaborative, and ideally located to go international. It’s precisely in this environment that PSG found Spott, and many other promising tech partners, right in our backyard.

In this climate, Spott is not an outlier, but part of a growing wave. It shares the ecosystem with other forward-thinking companies, including Volve, a data and transformation consultancy backed by PSG that focuses on translating business strategy into digital execution. Volve works with organizations to future-proof their operations by unlocking insights from data and building adaptive digital capabilities, making it a natural complement to the kind of AI-driven automation Spott brings to recruitment.

Together, startups like Spott and Volve show how PSG is not just observing the innovation economy, we are participating in it, actively supporting technologies that can scale across our group and industries.

The iconic former UCO tower, today PSG's HQ © Foto: PSG

PSG’s shift: from hesitation to belief in startup innovation

It would be disingenuous to pretend large companies like PSG don’t approach startups with caution. We do, and with good reason. Scale brings complexity. Reliability, compliance, and long-term support matter. Startups must prove they can deliver.

But in recent years, PSG has reframed this caution into curiosity and calculated risk-taking. We now evaluate startups not just on their current feature set, but on their trajectory and their fit within our broader innovation strategy. With Spott, the fit was clear: a team with deep industry understanding, a product solving real bottlenecks, and an openness to partnership.

By working closely with startups, we don’t just consume technology, we help shape it. Our collaboration with Spott influenced how features were rolled out and tailored to enterprise needs. We’ve taken the same approach with Volve, co-developing data strategies that align with PSG’s consulting and engineering domains.

This new way of working, blending startup speed with enterprise insight, has become part of our strategic mindset. It enables us to stay agile without sacrificing the rigor required in regulated industries.

Looking ahead: innovation as a partnership model

At PSG, we believe the future belongs to those who innovate together. Whether it's an AI firm rewriting recruitment or a data consultancy driving business transformation, we are committed to supporting and scaling technologies that solve real-world problems for our customers.

We’ll continue to scout for startups like Spott and Volve that align with our mission. And we’ll continue to invest time, resources, and trust in these partnerships, because we’ve seen the returns.

Innovation isn’t just something that happens inside a lab or a boardroom. It happens when startups and established companies find common ground, co-create solutions, and move fast, together. That’s how we stay relevant. That’s how we deliver more value to clients, consultants, and the industries we serve.

And that’s why PSG is proud to support startups who are bold enough to challenge the status quo, and smart enough to build the future with us.