Hi, I'm Koen Verstrepen. I build products powered by AI that serve customers at scale. I have strong conviction about the benefits of combining leadership and hands-on engineering.
I'm currently CTO at Willow where my team and I build two products: Will, the AI for managing your personal brand on LinkedIn, and Willow, the best Social Media Management Solution for B2B service SMEs.
Previously, I founded and led froomle.ai where I built a large-scale, real-time recommender system from the ground up, scaled to €1.5M ARR, and grew the team from 0 to 25 people.
Work
2024 - now: CTO @ Willow
(Agentic AI, Engineering Leadership, Product)
2016 - 2024: Founder & CEO @ froomle.ai
(Real-time RecSys, Team Building, €1.5M ARR, €2M Funding)
2016 - 2017: Postdoc Machine Learning @ University of Antwerp
(Research into novel recommender systems algorithms)
2012 - 2016: PhD Researcher Machine Learning @ University of Antwerp
(Research into novel recommender systems algorithms)
2008 - 2012: Mechanical Engineer @ Bekaert
(Energy efficiency R&D, Global manufacturing)
If you're building agentic systems or recommender engines, I enjoy swapping ideas and comparing trade-offs.
Academic Research
My research focused on recommender systems and collaborative filtering. I hold a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Antwerp (2015).
Most notable publications:
- Unifying nearest neighbors collaborative filtering – RecSys 2014 – 113 citations
- Top-n recommendation for shared accounts – RecSys 2015 – 58 citations
- Collaborative Filtering with Binary, Positive-only Data – PhD dissertation – 58 citations
More publications on Google Scholar.
Background
- PhD, Computer Science – University of Antwerp, 2015
- MSc, Electromechanical Engineering – Magna Cum Laude – KU Leuven, 2008
- Based in Turnhout, Belgium (CET)
- Dutch native; fluent in English; basic French and German