Ghent-based Tekst has closed an €11.5 million Series A led by US venture firm Elephant.
Tekst was founded in Ghent in 2022 by Wouter Janssen (CEO) and Tiebe Parmentier (CTO) and is taking aim at one of the biggest headaches in enterprise AI.
Companies are pouring money into AI but struggling to make it pay off at scale. The problem, Tekst argues, isn’t the technology itself — it’s everything that comes before it. AI can read the data, but it doesn’t grasp the context employees rely on to make decisions.
Where traditional tools optimise pieces of a process, Tekst goes after the whole thing — the messy, end-to-end work that runs the back office: quotes, orders, claims, customer service.
According to Wouter Janssen, CEO and co-founder of Tekst, the processes that actually run a business aren’t written down anywhere.
“They live in emails, in PDFs, in people’s heads.
Our process intelligence technology surfaces all of it. Without that, an AI agent is just an expensive assistant or a glorified chatbot.
The companies that crack this open get to use AI on a completely different level — and finally see real returns on what they’ve put in.”
Rather than hiring consultants to spend months interviewing and analysing, Tekst reconstructs processes automatically from the digital trail employees leave behind every day. The system reveals which messages trigger which actions. For most enterprises, these critical processes are often the least automated.
At a typical Tekst customer, dozens or even hundreds of employees handle quotes and orders by hand: long email threads, order details buried in PDFs, contract clauses reviewed line by line. Tekst’s platform connects directly to systems companies already use — SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft — and lifts the repetitive work off the table.
Customers include Daikin Europe N.V., Colruyt Group, Securex, and Becton Dickinson.
The investment will fuel product development and international expansion. Tekst has 35 employees today and plans to double headcount by year-end, with hiring focused on engineering and go-to-market.
“The AI market is moving at breakneck speed, but Tekst has unique technology that maps and automates the most complex business processes in record time. What consulting firms typically deliver in months — with large teams and hefty costs — Tekst delivers in just a few weeks,” shared Pieterjan Bouten, General Partner at Entourage.
According to Matt Tanenblatt, Partner at Elephant, many mid-market and enterprise companies want to deploy AI agents — but they’re missing the process intelligence layer needed to do it reliably.
“Tekst understands that gap and has developed an AI-powered product to help close it.
Their technology shows how processes actually flow within an organisation, and we believe that’s the foundation AI agents need to operate properly in the back office.”
Lead image: Tiebe Parmentier (left) and Wouter Janssen (right).
