50 SHADES OF VENTURING

Luc De Vos pioneered "the Internet" in Europe in 1993 when UUCP was some weird protocol and WWW was still a CERN project. He was founding father of the EUnet International group as the first commercial ISP in Belgium and also the first pan-European large(st) ISP. It was in fact a European counterpart of what UUnet/Worldcom meant in the US. Advent International Ltd was our VC from 1996 to 1998. EUnet International Ltd was acquired in 1998 for $154 million by Qwest Communications (NYSE:Q) and was about a year later subsequently injected into a new joint venture with KPN, creatively named KPNQwest.

As such, he is one of the very early business angels of this new "media and Internet" generation industry that was shaped in the nineties.

Luc has been a key actor in the creation, development and internationalisation of some of the household names that sparkle or have sparkled on the ICT sky of Europe such as: KPNQwest, Stepstone, Starlab, and was an early business angel, director for 8 years and still is an investor in the vehicle remarketing company CarsOnTheWeb.com ("COTW").

In 2011 Luc was again at the cradle of a paradigm shifting company in the 'digital health' space: Scanadu, that was started in Belgium with and by serial entrepreneur Walter de Brouwer as its CEO, who then moved to Silicon Valley. Scanadu closed about $60 mio in Seed and Series A and B+ funding and is now awaiting FDA clearance for its first series of products. Luc has also invested in 'tech.eu' and more recently in fintech company Finactum (BE), Finnish hardware think-tank Circular Devices (FI), and predictive analytics company DataStories (2017).

Vintage year 1958 but still feeling rather young Luc has now ventured in 60 companies for 25+ years in one or another role as founder, director, investor or advisor. The aggregated numbers show 45 years in management, 92 years as founder or co-founder, 152 years as shareholder, 173 years as a director, 80 years as a chairman and an accumulated 219 years of venturing, about 3.5x my age. As of today 7 out of these 60 companies reached 9-digit valuations at exit which is likely a pretty unique score in business angel landscape.