Toon Vanagt Email Address

Managing Partner

Data.be is an information technology services company that founded in 2012.

Toon has been a startup entrepreneur since 1999. His latest ventures are data.be (structuring Belgian business information from official sources) and lex.be (full text search in millions of legal publications). Both these freemium businesses are build on unstructured data and heavily relying on open data. Toon is a strong believer of all things open, which he supports via the non-profit Open Knowledge Belgium. He enjoys being the "master of ceremony" during FinTech events, which has grown into a grass root non-profit federating the Belgian FinTech community. Toon holds a Commercial Engineering degree from Solvay Business School at the VUB and was awarded "ICT manager SME of the year 2002" by Datanews. Toon followed the Virtualization industry for over a decade as the publisher of Virtualization.com. His failures include being too early with Virtualization.com in 1999 and launching a hardware device "infamously" named IPhone in 2005... Toon has a broad experience in all aspects of setting up, managing and scaling internet ventures. His career is filled with hands-on experience in delivering e-business, consulting, big data and ICT projects in general. Toon splits his professional time between entrepreneurial and innovation coaching roles, while trying to keep focus on the development of his ventures. Interested in early-stage startups as well as companies “on the bubble”. Specialties: SME directorships, ICT project management, coaching, strategy consulting, innovation projects & ventures, publisher (running blogs and broadcasting video coverage) & big data. Experience in technology, insurance, financial, government, data brokerage, open data, FinTech, SaaS and construction industry.