Entourage, an early-stage venture firm based in Ghent, Belgium, has closed a €100M second fund to back startups in AI, enterprise software, robotics and deeptech, the term for companies built on scientific or engineering breakthroughs. At €100M, the new fund is more than three times the size of the first, which closed at $30M (about €27.7M) in 2024.
Pieterjan Bouten, co-founder and former chief executive of the Ghent sales software company Showpad, founded Entourage and leads it as general partner. The firm set out to raise €75M for the new fund, reached that figure in about two weeks and then capped it at €100M.
“The next decade will produce some of the most iconic technology companies in history,” Bouten said. He also said: “AI is reinventing software and taking intelligence into the physical world.”
Entourage has not named the investors in the new fund. Backers of the first fund were mostly software entrepreneurs and family offices, among them Jason Lemkin, founder of the business software community SaaStr, and the founders of several Belgian software companies.
How The Fund Will Invest
Entourage plans to back about 25 companies from the new fund at pre-seed and seed stage, the earliest rounds of professional investment in a startup. Initial cheques will range from €1M to €5M. Part of the fund is held back so the firm can invest again in later rounds, and Entourage will look for companies across Europe and beyond.
The first fund focused on European business software sold by subscription. The new one keeps software but adds robotics and physical AI, meaning AI that senses and acts in the real world through machines rather than only on a screen.
Bouten works alongside partners Evert Beeckman and Maarten Mortier, and Erwan Gardelle, Sixtine Riescher and Illja Schiller have joined the investment team. The firm has also opened an office in London and has a presence in Paris.
Early Bets From The First Fund
“We wrote the first cheques into companies like Aikido, Conveo and Lexroom,” Bouten said. Aikido Security, a Ghent company that helps software developers protect their code and cloud systems, became Belgium’s seventh tech unicorn, a startup valued at $1B or more, when it raised $60M in January in a round led by DST Global and PSG Equity.
Conveo, which runs an AI consumer research platform, has gone on to raise $50M in its Series A, the first large funding round after seed. Lexroom, a legal technology startup, reached €30M in annual recurring revenue, the yearly value of its subscriptions, in under two years.
The first fund also came with a venture studio, Entourage Studio, set up to build business software companies from scratch. The studio’s first project was tekst.com, an AI platform for customer support and back-office work.
Beyond Business Software
Entourage’s first fund stayed close to the business software world its founder came from. With the second, the firm spreads its money wider, into robotics, physical AI and science-led startups, while still investing at the earliest stage.
The fund also filled faster than its original target and ended up more than three times the size of its predecessor, giving Entourage a much larger pool for the 25 or so companies it plans to back.
