Imec Launch wrap-up

Imec.iStart is one of Belgium's best-known startup accelerators, based in Leuven. The Launch program runs alongside it: a structured track for early-stage teams, built around peer learning and coaching from operators who have built and sold real products. The cohort is small and the feedback is direct.

Two things stuck with us.

Speed is the constraint that matters right now. Everyone is building with AI. The tools are more accessible than they have ever been, which means the window to establish a clear, trusted position in a specific market is shorter than it looks. For us, that means getting into live customer workflows, learning from real deployments, and not spending time optimising for things that have no signal yet. The competitive landscape in AI moves fast. You cannot afford to move slow.

Go to market first, then build. This sounds counterintuitive when you have a product you believe in. But the feedback you get from being in front of the right customers, even before everything is built, is worth more than months of internal product decisions. For private capital teams, the workflows are specific, the trust bar is high, and the only way to learn what actually matters is to be inside a live deployment, not to assume.

We learned more than this. Not all of it belongs here. But these two are the ones we keep coming back to as we build.