Martijn Theuwissen

Martijn Theuwissen is co-founder and chief operating officer of DataCamp, a New York City-based online learning company that teaches data science and AI skills through short interactive exercises, in which learners type code and get feedback on their mistakes as they go. He co-founded it in Leuven, Belgium, in late 2013 with Jonathan Cornelissen and Dieter De Mesmaeker.

A Short Stint at Coca-Cola

Theuwissen grew up in Belgium and has been involved with student boards, student unions and education nonprofits since he was about 12, he told the Talented Learning podcast in 2019. He earned a degree in finance and accounting, then spent a year in sales and marketing at The Coca-Cola Company. "Soon after I started at Coca-Cola, I discovered that I'm much better suited to an entrepreneurial environment than a large corporation," he said.

Building DataCamp From Leuven

The idea came from Cornelissen, who was finishing a PhD and teaching R and statistics and found interactive learning sites for coding but none for statistical programming. The project was first called Rcademy, then DataMind, before it became DataCamp. Neither Cornelissen nor Theuwissen had the technical skills to build an interactive learning site, Cornelissen wrote, so De Mesmaeker and another developer joined to build the first prototype. The founders put in about $20,000 of their savings, spent six months in Santiago, Chile, in the Start-Up Chile program and bootstrapped for about two years before the Techstars accelerator helped them raise money.

Growing Through the Data Science Community

In the early years Theuwissen ran marketing. DataCamp started with R, a programming language for statistics, just as it was spreading from universities into industry, and grew by recruiting well-known instructors and speaking at community conferences, he told Growth Hacker TV. He argued that interactive courses keep people going, with completion rates "between 50 and 70%" compared with below 10% for typical video courses. He compared the first online courses to early films, which simply recorded stage plays before filmmakers learned to use the new medium.

Stepping In as CEO

In 2019 he led DataCamp as interim chief executive for seven months, and in November that year he formally took the CEO role, succeeding Cornelissen. "As co-founder of the company, I have worn many different hats in the past 6 years and have built and led a multitude of different teams in our marketing, sales, product, and content departments," he wrote at the time. Cornelissen later returned as chief executive, and Theuwissen is now chief operating officer.

Measuring How People Learn AI

He often shares what DataCamp's learner data shows about AI skills. In 2026 he pointed to McKinsey figures showing that only 25% of European employees report formal generative AI training, against 31% in the United States, and said DataCamp's enterprise data showed AI course starts were lowest in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He also reported that when DataCamp's AI tutor asks learners what they want to get done with AI, nearly half of 3,364 answers were about writing.