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Patrick Coomans
At Sirris, Patrick Coomans currently helps companies with their cybersecurity strategy as a consultant cybersecurity innovation and entrepreneurship. In addition, he is a cybersecurity entrepreneurship coach at Agoria and the European Commission, and he also works for KU Leuven Distrinet as industry liaison for an API Security research programme.
Patrick is a former cybersecurity technology entrepreneur. After having sold his company to Verizon in 2011, he held various EMEA and Global roles at Verizon, both in cybersecurity consulting and cybersecurity product marketing, as well as their Innovation Incubator. He helped launch a cybersecurity community at B-Hive, a fintech collective in Brussels, in 2017-2019 and introduced a trust label for fintech startups “Trusted Fintech”. He also works for Agoria to help digital product companies accelerate their growth and internationalization, at Scaleup Vlaanderen.
Patrick is a judge for MIT Innovators Under 35 Europe, a coach at Vlerick Business School, a mentor at IMEC iStart, and he used to coach at Netwerk Ondernemen and Pulse Foundation.
Toon Vanagt
Toon graduated from the VUB as a commercial engineer followed by a specialisation in business informatics from Solvay Business School. He has more than 20 years of experience in developing internet applications, platforms and digital products as well as establishing and developing start-ups. He started his own web development company in 1995 and ever since he has worked on various internet projects and business ventures. In 2000, Toon co-founded Casius.com, and more recently he launched data.be (RegTech in compliance) and lex.be (LegalTech). Open data is at the heart of these latest startups, which were likewise built on unstructured data from multiple official government sources.
In his spare time, Toon coaches upcoming entrepreneurial talent – as chairman of Open Knowledge Belgium, he strives to make open knowledge more widely available to society and as board member of FinTech Belgium he takes the MC role to moderate the events of this umbrella organisation.
