Silicon Luxembourg Interview
Text by Silicon Luxembourg:
As part of the Rants series, Silicon Luxembourg interviewed Yannick Bontinckx, cofounder of Property Technology (PropTech) startup Ziggu.
What is your activity in Luxembourg?
Along with Vincent Van Impe, David De Winter and Pieter Gistelinck, I founded Ziggu, a PropTech company based in Luxembourg. From a bird’s eye view, we help homebuilders manage their projects and client communications on a single portal.
Homebuilders and property developers have a hard time managing all their projects and data in spreadsheets—there’s just too much room for human error. When they are serving a multitude of hasty homeowners with moving preferences and decisions, these errors only multiply.
Then they have to try to manage everything from an email account, which, let’s admit, isn’t very easy when you’ve got 100 variables within 100 client accounts.
What advantages are there of being a startup in Luxembourg?
I need to put my comments into context by providing a little history.
Ziggu ended up in Luxembourg by accident. Our entire team is Belgian by birth, and we had the dream of Ziggu while working in Ghent. The thing is, Belgium is pretty small, so the instinct to go international was almost immediate.
In early stages of our development, we were looking at the BeNeLux region. We had thought about seed funding, where we could lose 15-20% of initial equity, but with our product and mindset that wasn’t really a viable starting point.
So we looked at government-funded programs.
It was actually on Silicon Luxembourg, Paperjam, and Luxinnovation that we saw advertisement for Fit4Start.
It’s a rare breed of funding options that provides coaching AND considerable funding for new startups.
In a sense, we came on blind faith!
“The ideal Luxembourgish startup scenario, in my mind goes something like Fit4Start, match-funding programs, subsidiary offerings, and then a seed round.”
