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Take a peek at the activities and offering of our digital innovation community.
Headquartered in Leuven (Belgium) and with research sites across Belgium, in the Netherlands, Taiwan and the USA, an rep offices in China and Japan, imec leverages its state-of-the-art R&D infrastructure and its team of about 4,000 expert scientists, to drive open innovation across the globe. They unite world-industry leaders, Flanders-based and international companies, start-ups, and academia and knowledge centers, for R&D in nano-electronics and digital technologies, including advanced semiconductor scaling, silicon photonics, smart health, smart energy, smart mobility and smart cities solutions, artificial intelligence, beyond-5G and sensing technologies and more.
Next to its R&D offering, imec also leverages its expertise and large international industry network to support smaller organizations that have limited in-house R&D resources as well as larger companies with their innovation process from initial idea to fully functioning product, from the design of a product or chip, to prototyping, testing and optimizing, and manufacturing.
Finally, imec supports tech start-ups and scale-ups with a tailored offering. The imec.istart program is a business acceleration program that provides tech entrepreneurs with specialized coaching, facilities and overall support to help them grow their businesses, while the imec.scale-ups program focuses on larger innovative tech scale-ups looking to conquer the European market.
Commissioned by the Flemish government, Lantis is building connections that make the city and region flourish. Lantis is responsible for the realisation of the Oosterweel connection, which will increase prosperity and improve the quality of life. Lantis is contributing to this by promoting mobility, including the construction of numerous bicycle connections and multimodal junctions on the city outskirts of Antwerp.
Lantis strives for operational excellence in order to carry out projects as efficiently as possible and deliver quality. Thanks to intensive cooperation with the surrounding area, the organisation works transparently and with a focus on results. Innovation and transformation ensure future-oriented projects with a lasting impact on the dynamics of the region. This is the Lantis way of successfully realising large projects in an urban environment.
Lantis stands for Liveable Antwerp through Innovation and Cooperation and is a public limited company. The day-to-day management is in the hands of the management committee led by managing director Luc Hellemans. David Van Herreweghe chairs the board of directors.
As Europe’s second-largest port and largest integrated chemical cluster, the Port of Antwerp Bruges is a major lifeline for the Belgian economy: annually around 238 million tonnes of international maritime freight are handled. The Port of Antwerp Bruges accounts, directly and indirectly, for a total of around 143.000 jobs and more than €20 billion added value.
Innovation and digitisation enable our mission to be ‘a home port for a sustainable future’ as we aim to flexibly respond to a rapidly evolving maritime market. By supporting The Beacon, we want to ensure that our port platform finds relevant points of contact and vice versa. Furthermore, we want to facilitate the exchange effect created through the ecosystem being built around The Beacon.
The city of Antwerp welcomes businesses, researchers, citizens and city officials to experiment with smart technologies that aim to make urban life more enjoyable and sustainable. Antwerp is a living lab where solutions are tested and co-created with its inhabitants. The city is home to highly innovative businesses and with 171 nationalities that live in Antwerp, it is above all a very diverse, and international city. The Ecosystem in Antwerp is developing rapidly, over the past years the amount of start-ups and scaleups in Antwerp doubled.
Innovative companies are the driving force behind the Antwerp knowledge economy. Their growth is crucial for our future. The City of Antwerp therefore strongly believes in the power of digital networking and is developing an ecosystem for digital innovation in which large and small businesses, startups, scaleups, researchers and capital providers with an interest in the Internet of Things and Artificial Intelligence can meet each other. Thanks to the cross-pollination that occurs in The Beacon, innovative products are developed that are relevant to Antwerp’s ‘smart city’ ambitions and to our financial stakeholders: industry and logistics.
The University of Antwerp is a research university where pioneering, innovative research is conducted at an international level. Research and education are closely linked, with 20,000 students and 6000 staff spread across our nine faculties. As a driving force in the Antwerp innovation ecosystem, innovation is a constant focus.
The Beacon is the university’s pioneering pre-incubation structure for the domain of Metropolitanism, Smart City, Mobility & Logistics. It houses the IDLab research group and the Design Sciences Hub.
The IDLab research group of the University of Antwerp and imec performs fundamental and applied research on Wireless technologies, Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things. IDLab, headed by prof. Steven Latré, targets the most daunting challenges industry is facing to deliver digital transformation, connecting everything and extracting high value from data. Bringing researchers and industrial partners together at the same location facilitates knowledge transfer and enables the cross-fertilization and co-creation insights on smart cities, IoT and AI towards the industrial partners in The Beacon.
The Design Sciences Hub of the Faculty of Design Sciences is an interdisciplinary innovation and valorization lab. They offer design solutions for urban challenges and wicked problems in the triangle of urban planning, built environment, and urban health.
Startup.Flanders is opening registrations for Slush 2026 in Helsinki (17-20 November, with day zero on 17/11) and offering 12 startups a place in the Flemish delegation.
What's included for €1,200: a half-day demo booth, one full conference ticket (second ticket available at €300 excl. VAT), an invite to Belgian Beer Night, a "How to Hack Slush" prep session, and a trial pitch opportunity for the Slush 100 competition.
To apply, submit your pitch deck via the registration page. Startup.Flanders and Slush will select participants based on the decks, and you'll hear back by end of June. Ecosystem passes sell out early, so don't wait.
Sharing an upcoming webinar that we at Sigli are co-hosting with OVHcloud on Thursday, 18 June (15:00–16:00 CEST, online). It should be directly relevant for Beacon members working with sensitive operational data — port and logistics, industrial systems, smart-city deployments — where the question of where data lives is becoming a board-level discussion.
The session skips the usual "why sovereign cloud" pitch and focuses on the how: which workloads actually need a sovereign environment and which don't, how to deploy AI on proprietary data without handing it to a hyperscaler, what an open-source cloud stack changes for vendor lock-in, and how infrastructure choices translate into compliance posture across EU, UK and DACH markets.
OVHcloud brings the infrastructure perspective — European hosting, full hardware-to-energy stack. Sigli brings the implementation side: workload placement, migration logic, and where AI safely fits in production.
Max Golikov from Sigli is one of the headliners — Beacon members may recognise him from the recent Innovantage podcast episode with Robin Pauwels.
Live attendees get a €200 OVHcloud voucher to test the stack themselves.
Registration is free via Eventbrite — link below.
Happy to take questions from the community here or directly.
John Baekelmans wordt benoemd tot nieuwe voorzitter van de raad van bestuur van The Beacon. Hij volgt Wim De Waele op, die na zijn voorzitterschap sinds de oprichting in 2018 het roer doorgeeft.
The Beacon zet zo een nieuwe strategische stap in zijn ambitie om uit te groeien tot dé Europese innovatiehub voor digitale oplossingen in haven, industrie en mobiliteit. Met een verscherpte focus op IoT, AI, autonome systemen en (cyber)security wil de Antwerpse innovatiehub de centrale plek zijn waar technologiebedrijven en onderzoekers samenwerken aan de volgende generatie maritieme en industriële toepassingen.
In de komende jaren wil The Beacon zijn rol als verbindende schakel tussen startups, scale-ups, grote ondernemingen en kennisinstellingen nog verder versterken. De nadruk ligt op het ontwikkelen van concrete oplossingen die supply chains efficiënter en veerkrachtiger maken en tegelijk de bescherming van kritieke infrastructuur verbeteren. Daarbij wordt ook sterk ingezet op regionale samenwerking tussen innovatiepolen zoals Antwerpen, Gent, Hasselt, Kortrijk en Leuven, om meer talent en kapitaal aan te trekken en het Vlaamse ecosysteem internationaal sterker te positioneren.
Als nieuwe voorzitter van de raad van bestuur zal John Baekelmans een belangrijke rol spelen in het versnellen van deze koers. Met meer dan 25 jaar internationale ervaring in de technologiesector, onder meer in IoT, AI en digitale innovatie in haven- en industriële omgevingen, brengt hij een combinatie van strategische visie en praktijkervaring mee. Baekelmans werkte bij 3 Vlaamse startups en was als VP actief bij onder andere Cisco & imec en is vandaag Chief Product & Technology Officer bij Pointerpro in Antwerpen. Zijn achtergrond in zowel globale ondernemingen als lokale ecosystemen maakt hem bijzonder goed geplaatst om The Beacon te helpen uitbouwen tot een nog sterker innovatieplatform.
Samen met het team en de partners wil Baekelmans de strategische positionering van The Beacon verder aanscherpen en de groei van de community ondersteunen. De organisatie verenigt vandaag al meer dan 100 technologiebedrijven, startups, scale-ups en onderzoeksinstellingen op bijna 10.000 m² kantoor-, werk- en eventruimte in Antwerpen, met een duidelijke focus op digitale innovatie voor havens, industrie en mobiliteit.
Port of the Future Week
Port of the Future Week 2026 brings together three days of groundbreaking innovations in autonomous and sustainable technology in port environments, featuring live demos, showcases, expert insights, and international collaboration.
From 15 till 17 September, you'll discover how autonomous and sustainable technology are being implemented in ports today.
DroneHorizon (Antwerp)
Drone Horizon is an international platform for drones and autonomous systems in infrastructure, logistics, and port operations, with a strong focus on European cooperation in unmanned systems.
Autonomous Summit (Antwerp)
A day full of demonstrations and showcases. What you can expect during this second edition:
More than 30 real-life demos of autonomous technology in a port context
Live showcases from start-ups, scale-ups, and R&D projects
Use cases on interoperability between systems, vehicles, and infrastructure
Side events such as pitches, panels, and networking opportunities
The Gathering reception & networking, powered by Antwerp Innovation Powerhouse
A delegation of around 18 senior Portuguese port decision-makers: the Portuguese government, all major port authorities: Lisbon,
Setúbal, Sines, Leixões, Aveiro, Figueira da Foz and Silotagus. They are executing Ports 5+, a national port modernisation
programme of more than €4 billion running to 2035. What they are looking for above all is technology already running at Port of
Antwerp-Bruges that could transfer directly to a Portuguese port.
The programme
17:30–18:00 Welcome, drinks and finger bites Lounge
18:00–18:20 Short welcoming presentations: The Beacon, FIT, Imec.start Welcome area
18:20–18:25 Guided move to your room —
18:25–19:25 Thematic deep-dive: 45 to 60 minutes, one session, no rotation Meeting rooms 1–3
19:25–19:30 Move to the marketplace —
19:30–21:00 Open marketplace: booths, food and drinks, free-flow networking Booth hall & lounge
Overzicht
Whether the US is still an "American dream" on your roadmap or you're already deep in planning mode, this afternoon is built to give you rea
Thinking about expanding to the US? Or already knee-deep in the process?
Join us for The Big Leap USA, an afternoon built for ambitious Belgian startups and scaleups looking across the Atlantic.
Agenda
12:30 - Lunch & networking
13:30 - Catalina Daniels, author of Smart Startups and Venture Partner at ERA (NYC accelerator)
14:15 - Panel discussion with founders and operators who've made the leap and / or are currently in the process:
Amaury Hellebuyck, Global RevOps @ TechWolf
Jonathan Bovijn, Chief of Staff @ PolySense
Andreas Geamanu, Co-founder @ introw.io
15:30 - The No-Nonsense US Expansion Playbook: practical, tactical, no fluff
16:00 - After-work drinks, because the best insights happen off-stage too
Hybrid networking - Meet Beacon members online or on-site, book 1-on-1s + Breakfast
Join us for this event where you get the opportunity to meet the entire Beacon community at The Beacon Community Connect! This event is designed to create and strengthen connections, collaboration and friendship among our The Beacon Community.
We're looking forward to seeing all of our community get in touch with each other!
SPARK! is a pitch event specifically aimed at innovative tech start-ups.
Ten start-ups will have the opportunity to pitch their innovative ideas to an audience of corporate innovators, investors, corporate buyers, CTOs & professionals.
SPARK! offers a unique opportunity to get to know tech start-ups better. The start-ups are selected from the five Flemish provinces.
When?
The fourth edition of the SPARK! session will take place on Wednesday 24 June from 9u30 to 2 pm, followed by networking lunch.
Who?
10 start-ups offering tech solutions in the fields of industry, defence, Port Safety & security. They have a product with market fit and are specifically looking for market validation, customers or funding.
LUXOR ONE - AI computer vision that turns large camera networks into real-time safety monitoring.
Sveric - A portable, rapidly deployable multi-sensor unit (radar, LiDAR, optical, AIS) that delivers maritime surveillance and risk scoring within minutes.
Space Applications Services (MOSAIC) - A hub-and-agent platform that coordinates drones, ground robots and satellite data into one common operational picture.
ZYGO - Physical-AI software that lets autonomous robots handle security patrols, inspections and micrologistics, offered as Robot-as-a-Service.
GeoPXL - A geospatial intelligence platform that turns drone imagery into accurate 3D models, measurements and digital twins for inspection and asset management.
KLIQ AI - AI image recognition that turns any photo — from smartphones, cameras or satellites — into verified, ready-to-use data for inspections and checks.
ArmOTura - A Belgian specialist in OT (operational technology) security, giving ports, terminals and industrial operators visibility and control over connected assets.
TapPass.ai - a security "firewall for the agentic age" that monitors and governs AI-agent, LLM and tool calls through a granular, EU-built policy engine.
Pronect - A security SaaS platform whose voice-first guard assistant supports officers in real time and turns frontline activity into reliable data.
Hybrid Core - A sovereign, AI-native decision-support ecosystem combining intelligence fusion, simulation and quantum-secure command & control for defence and critical infrastructure.
