Maarten Masschelein

Maarten Masschelein is co-founder and CEO of Soda, a data quality company in Brussels, Belgium, whose software lets data engineers write quality checks and data contracts and run them inside their pipelines.

Seven years at Collibra

He studied IT and commercial sciences, then spent seven years at Collibra, the Brussels data governance company, including two years in New York City. He came back to Brussels in January 2018 and founded Soda that April. Tom Baeyens, an experienced software engineer, joined him as co-founder and chief technology officer at the end of May 2018.

A Brussels company with an international base

“At Soda, we are all about innovation,” he told Innoviris, the Brussels research agency. “We propose or develop solutions that do not exist yet, which means that we are engaged in a permanent process of innovation, in close collaboration with our customers and prospects.”

He has argued for building in Brussels and selling abroad from the start. “Brussels is the perfect international city for a company like ours. Just two hours from Paris, Amsterdam and London and eight hours from New York,” he said. His one tip for other Brussels founders is to think on an international scale from the beginning: “While the quality of research in our country is exceptional, our client base is international.”