Tekst Raises €11.5M Series A Led by US VC Elephant — Belgian AI Tackles Enterprise Process Intelligence

A 26-year-old from Ghent just convinced a Boston VC that his company has built something Silicon Valley hasn’t — and €11.5 million says they believe him.

📍 Ghent, Belgium  ·  ·  4 min read

Tekst, a Ghent-based AI startup, has closed an €11.5 million Series A led by Boston-based venture capital firm Elephant, with existing backer Entourage — the fund of ex-Showpad founder Pieterjan Bouten — doubling down. The company has built what it calls a process intelligence platform: technology that maps the invisible, undocumented business processes inside large enterprises and then deploys AI agents to take that work over — not just part of it, but end to end.

The pitch is simple and the market is enormous: companies worldwide are pouring billions into AI, yet most aren’t seeing real returns. Tekst argues the missing piece isn’t better AI models — it’s the context layer that tells those models how work actually flows inside a company.

The problem hiding in plain sight

Every enterprise has two versions of its processes: the official one, written in a manual no one reads, and the real one — buried in email threads, PDF attachments, informal decisions, and tribal knowledge that lives in people’s heads. When companies try to deploy AI agents on top of this reality, the agents fail. They handle isolated tasks without understanding how work actually moves through the organisation. The result is expensive disappointment.

Tekst’s answer is to go straight to the source before deploying any AI at all. Rather than sending in consultants to spend months interviewing and analyzing, the platform reconstructs processes automatically from the digital trail employees already leave behind every day — emails, documents, clicks, system interactions. It reveals which messages trigger which actions, which documents drive which decisions, where exceptions hide.

The processes that actually run a business aren’t written down anywhere. They live in emails, in PDFs, in people’s heads. Our process intelligence technology surfaces all of it. Without that, an AI agent is just an expensive assistant or a glorified chatbot. The companies that crack this open get to use AI on a completely different level — and finally see real returns on what they’ve put in.
— Wouter Janssen, CEO & Co-founder, Tekst

Not just automation — the whole process

Where most enterprise AI tools optimise individual steps, Tekst targets entire end-to-end workflows. The initial focus is on quote-to-cash and procure-to-pay — two of the most mission-critical and least automated processes in large organisations. At a typical Tekst customer, dozens or even hundreds of employees still handle quotes and orders by hand: long email threads, order details buried in PDFs, contract clauses reviewed line by line. The platform connects directly to systems already in place — SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft — and removes the repetitive work without replacing the infrastructure.

Instead of sending in an army of consultants to run interviews and write reports, we go straight to the source — the system itself — and watch how work actually flows. Which emails trigger which actions? Which document drives which decision? Where do the exceptions hide? From there we build a live process model — a blueprint of how information really moves through the company. Only then do we bring in AI agents that genuinely understand the process.
— Tiebe Parmentier, CTO & Co-founder, Tekst

The founders — two Ghent graduates who started a company before graduating

Both founders studied at Ghent University — one of Belgium’s leading technical universities — and built Tekst from a student project into a company with four enterprise-grade customers and €13.5M in total funding raised, all within three years. Wouter Janssen was described by De Tijd as one of the young Belgian entrepreneurs to watch, and has spoken alongside Belgian C-suite leaders including Rika Coppens (House of HR), Hans De Cuyper (Ageas), and Patrick Boone (PwC) on the role of AI in enterprise leadership.

Who’s backing them — and why it matters

Elephant is a Boston-based venture capital firm founded in 2015, focused on fast-growing, capital-efficient technology companies. With 66 investments to date, Tekst is their latest and — notably — their first Belgian portfolio company. The fact that a US firm with no prior exposure to the Belgian ecosystem chose to lead this round is the strongest external validation Tekst has received. As the founders put it themselves: the only reason Americans invest in a Ghent company is because the technology doesn’t yet exist in Silicon Valley.

Many mid-market and enterprise companies want to deploy AI agents — but they’re missing the process intelligence layer needed to do it reliably. Tekst understands that gap and has developed an AI-powered product to help close it. Their technology shows how processes actually flow within an organisation, and we believe that’s the foundation AI agents need to operate properly in the back office.
— Matt Tanenblatt, Partner at Elephant

Entourage, the venture fund of Pieterjan Bouten — who previously co-founded and scaled Showpad, one of Belgium’s most successful B2B software exits — has been with Tekst from the beginning, investing more than €2M across earlier rounds before doubling down in this Series A. Bouten brings not just capital but a lived understanding of what it takes to build a Belgian B2B software company into a global player.

The AI market is moving at breakneck speed, but Tekst has unique technology that maps and automates the most complex business processes in record time. What consulting firms typically deliver in months — with large teams and hefty costs — Tekst delivers in just a few weeks.
— Pieterjan Bouten, General Partner at Entourage

What’s next

The €11.5M will fuel three priorities: deepening the product for quote-to-cash and procure-to-pay workflows, international expansion beyond Belgium, and doubling the team from 35 to 70+ by year-end, with hiring focused on engineering and go-to-market. The ambition is clear — category leadership in process intelligence globally. And with a US lead investor, enterprise customers like Daikin and Becton Dickinson, and technology that doesn’t yet have a direct equivalent in Silicon Valley, the foundation is there. Watch this one closely.

More at tekst.com · Also covered by Tech.eu · Tech Funding News

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