October 2025
Building Xlagent from WAT (beta)
We moved into WAT(beta) in October 2025. It has been the right place to build.
WAT(beta) is an experimental incubator for early-stage startups in Brussels, set in a former industrial site that has become a dense community of founders, builders, and early-stage investors. There is an energy to the place that is hard to manufacture: people who are genuinely in it, building things that do not exist yet, in a space that is still figuring itself out alongside you. That kind of environment sharpens you in ways that a polished office cannot.
The mentoring and coaching matter as much as the community itself. Being surrounded by founders who have been further down the road, and by advisors who have built and sold real products, changes how you make decisions. You move faster, you challenge your assumptions earlier, and you stop spending time on things that do not have signal yet.
For Xlagent, that matters in a specific way. We are building an AI platform for private capital teams: real estate investors, private equity firms, and private credit managers who run document-heavy workflows where accuracy and traceability are not optional. The problems are technically hard and commercially specific. The feedback you need cannot come from inside the building.
Brussels is also a meaningful place to build a company in this space. It sits at the centre of European regulation: GDPR, the EU AI Act, and DORA are all shaping how financial firms across Europe think about adopting AI. Building here means being close to that regulatory reality, which matters to the firms we serve.
If you are building in AI or working in private capital and want to connect, we are at WAT(beta) and happy to talk.
