Can Your Customers Vibe Code You Out of Business?

Spentys had customers walk out to build their own thing. Six months later, they showed up again. So what does that really say about the whole 'vibe coding' threat to SaaS?

Louis-Philippe Broze co-founded Spentys in Brussels while still in his master's. He'd just wrapped a full-time internship at Wooclap. Now he's on Forbes 30 Under 30, and Spentys has 24 people split between Brussels and Georgia. Half their revenue comes from the US. They use 3D scanning, modeling, and printing to digitize custom orthoses and prosthetics.

Louis-Philippe sat down with Robin Wauters to break down what really happened when customers tried to roll their own solution, and why they came back. He gets into:

• How Spentys is building AI modules so tailored to orthopedics that nobody else can touch them. 
• How raising money too early burned 18 months they could've kept.
• Why you should bring on an independent US board member from day one, not years down the line. 
• Why Belgium's political setup is slowing down the whole ecosystem.

You'll also hear about the lasagne-and-burger theory for staying sane as a founder, why 80% of patients choose 3D-printed devices, and what Materialise taught him about getting hospitals on board. Listen in, pass it on, and if you're building something big from Belgium, reach out.

What is The Syndicate One Podcast?

Conversations with the founders, investors, and operators driving Belgium’s startup scene,
Exploring the ideas, stories, and strategies that accelerate the ecosystem flywheel 🚀.

Guest: Louis-Philippe Broze, Co-founder and CEO, Spentys
Host: Robin Wauters

Louis-Philippe Broze: Hello everyone, my name is Louis-Philippe Broze. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Spentys. Spentys is a company active in the medtech space, more specifically in the orthopedic field. We use 3D technologies to digitalize the production of custom-made orthoses and prosthetics.

Robin Wauters: Louis-Philippe, thank you so much for your time and for accepting the invitation to join the Syndicate One podcast. We'd love to know more about you, your background, how you got started, and how you developed into the entrepreneur you are today. What's your backstory?

Louis-Philippe Broze: I basically started Spentys while I was still studying. I studied business engineering here in Brussels. During my studies, I did a full-time internship at Wooclap. I decided not to attend classes and to go all in on the internship. I was basically the first intern there, so I spent a lot of time with the CEO and the CTO, Sébastien Lebbe and Jonathan Alzetta. There, I learned a lot about what it means to build a startup.

After about two and a half years there, I decided to start my own business during my master's degree. My co-founder, Florian De Boeck, and I started Spentys. That's how the journey began — inspired by the people building Wooclap and deciding to take that leap ourselves.

Robin Wauters: Did you already have that entrepreneurial drive before you started your studies and internship? Was it always there?

Louis-Philippe Broze: I always wanted to participate — to be a producer in society, not only a consumer, but someone who produces things and is an actor in the world. That drive has always been there. In parallel with my studies, we also started an entrepreneurship club called YouStart to introduce students to entrepreneurship. So yes, the willingness to make an impact and move things forward has always been there.

Robin Wauters: That makes Spentys basically your first venture, your first startup. What were some of the lessons you took away from the internship at Wooclap that you're glad you learned before starting Spentys?

Louis-Philippe Broze: I would say I should have maybe learned a bit more, because we still made a lot of mistakes when we started Spentys. But one of the biggest things I learned with Sébastien Lebbe during the internship is this: we are all legitimate to start a business. Given Belgian culture and having been raised here in Brussels very modestly, I thought this wasn't accessible to me. But I quickly realized that we're all human beings. We all have different backgrounds, but I think we are all legitimate to start our own business. That was really a déclic — an a-ha moment — where I said: okay, even I could start my business.

Robin Wauters: You don't have a technical background, which means that if you want to build a tech company, you need to surround yourself with people who have those skills. Were they easy to find and convince to build Spentys alongside you?

Louis-Philippe Broze: In the early days, when we started Spentys around 2019, 2020, it was still difficult to find the right technical people. We were very young, so we didn't attract much interest from senior people with extensive technical backgrounds. On top of that, we had no experience recruiting or hiring, so we made mistakes. We went through the classic mistakes: hiring too fast and firing too slow. You become too emotional, it's difficult to make a decision, and then things start to spiral. You realize later that you should have made that call six, eight, maybe ten months earlier. We definitely went through a steep learning curve there.

Robin Wauters: What is Spentys? What are you trying to build, who are you building it for, and why?

Louis-Philippe Broze: Spentys is active in the orthopedic world, specifically in custom-made orthoses and prosthetics. Orthoses are immobilization devices, and prosthetics replace a limb entirely. All of those devices need to be custom-made. The problem is that making them custom-made with traditional technology is very labor-intensive and time-intensive. At the same time, there is significant cost pressure in the healthcare sector. Material and labor costs are rising, but reimbursement systems are not keeping pace, so margins are being squeezed.

What we propose at Spentys is to help clinicians digitalize that process through 3D technologies: 3D scanning, 3D modeling, and 3D printing. That enables them to continue delivering high-quality devices to their patients while cutting total costs in half. The latest studies at the University Hospital of Amsterdam show that we've reduced the total cost of ownership by half and that 80% of patients prefer 3D-printed devices. So we do it because it helps deliver quality care, and it helps clinics maintain healthy margins.

Robin Wauters: So you sell to medical professionals, clinics, and hospitals?

Louis-Philippe Broze: Hospitals and clinics, yes.

Robin Wauters: You don't have a medical background, so how did you arrive at this idea?

Louis-Philippe Broze: We come from the technical world. We've always had a passion for 3D printing, 3D modeling, and 3D scanning. The idea was: how can we use these technologies not just to prototype something, but to really disrupt an industry? We saw this whole sector of custom-made orthoses and prosthetics with a big unsolved problem, and we thought: let's give it a shot. We're going to learn how anatomy works, how these devices are made, and how to apply our outside technical perspective. We believed that would give us an edge.

Robin Wauters: Whenever I hear 3D printing for medical appliances in Belgium, I think of Materialise. They were one of the pioneers. I saw that you were at the SuperNova Festival last week, where you also met with their CEO. What is your relationship to Materialise and what they've done?

Louis-Philippe Broze: The journey of Materialise has been very inspiring for me. They brought this technology to healthcare in the very early days, when mass personalization and mass customization of healthcare treatments weren't widely believed in. Building a business case in such a specific niche — and it's not just one niche, there are so many different pathologies — has been remarkable.

I'd look at Materialise as a kind of big brother in the positive sense, a mentor. We look to them to understand how they built adoption inside the hospital world, because we face the same challenge. Challenging the status quo in hospitals and clinics is genuinely hard, and having a big brother who's already been through that path helps a lot.

Robin Wauters: The other upside of doing a venture in this space is that there are hospitals and clinics around the world. Does that make Spentys an international venture from day one?

Louis-Philippe Broze: Yes. We went international quite quickly. Around last year, we did roughly 50% of our turnover in the US. We entered the US market about one year after starting commercialization in Europe. The reason is that we were targeting early adopters of 3D technologies, and there is a limited number of those targets in Europe. In the US, there were many more, and the hospital ecosystem there is more innovation-friendly. Belgium has a wonderful, accessible healthcare system, but innovation is not always as welcomed here as in other countries.

Robin Wauters: What is Spentys today? How many people, how long have you been around, and what's the primary goal right now?

Louis-Philippe Broze: We're around 24 people now, mainly based here in Brussels, and we also have an office in the US in Georgia. The next goal is to grow, especially in the US. It's a big, uniform market. So the focus is to grow in the US and Europe and to expand the number of applications. We started primarily with upper- and lower-limb orthoses. We're now also releasing prosthetic products, and we have interest from the surgical world as well. The 3D engine we've built for Spentys could also apply to other healthcare verticals, such as dental or surgical planning.

There's a big internal discussion about where to play next. But first, we need to stay focused on our core sector. It's always the story of focus versus opportunity, and you need to make sure that when you move to a new sector, you've fully figured out the first one.

Robin Wauters: You've raised investment. When was this, who are the investors, how much did you raise, and what was the learning curve like for a first-time founder going through that process?

Louis-Philippe Broze: We've raised around €6 million to date — mostly business angels, also Finance & Invest Brussels and other public investors, and one smaller fund called Innovation Fund. We also received subsidies due to the medical nature of the work.

What have I learned? I think I would have bootstrapped way more initially. We went to investors too fast. There are two reasons for that. The first is dilution. The second is that when you bootstrap, you're way more resource-constrained, which forces you to focus on what really creates value for your customers. By having a lot of money very fast, especially in the medical sector, where there are so many opportunities, you can easily get sidetracked. That's especially dangerous when you're a young founder with little experience. We went a bit sidetracked, had to refocus, and I believe that cost us around 18 months. I strongly believe we could have bootstrapped longer, understood our market and our personas far better, and wouldn't have wasted that time and money.

Robin Wauters: If you had to start Spentys all over again today, what are some other things you would do differently?

Louis-Philippe Broze: I think the US is very important, and from day one, I would have invested a lot more resources there. One concrete way to do that would have been to hire an independent board member from the US straight away. We did that three or four years after launching, and we've seen significant results. Having someone independent, with a different mindset and from a different industry, has changed the game tremendously for Spentys. So I'd invite all founders to consider that: if the US or another part of the world is a key market, identify an independent board member from that context, get them on board early, and you'll see the dynamic changes completely.

Robin Wauters: Building a company like Spentys in Brussels or in the Belgian ecosystem must have been difficult when you started, compared to now, when the ecosystem is a bit more mature. Do you see it that way?

Louis-Philippe Broze: I feel old saying this, but back in 2019, 2020, when we started raising money, there was a lot of liquidity in the market. It was easy to raise money. But the ecosystem was less mature. There were fewer skilled entrepreneurs to learn from. I think there's been a real paradigm shift. Now it's more difficult to get money, even though more funds are being created. But the quality of initial startups is way higher than in 2019. I think the success rate of startups will be higher in the future because the whole ecosystem — VCs, entrepreneurs, mentors — has learned a lot and has way more experience now.

If we started Spentys today, we would have been challenged way more. Back in 2019, the feeling was a bit "okay, these people seem ambitious, let's go." We weren't challenged that much. Today, we'd have been sent back to the drawing board far more often. That's a good thing.

Robin Wauters: Aside from the investment side, the support ecosystem — places like Wintercircus and WAT here in Brussels — is that also a shift you've seen happen?

Louis-Philippe Broze: Yes, and clusters are definitely rising. We all talk about the Ghent Mafia, and we're a bit jealous here in Brussels. What's being built here with WAT is very positive. That said, I still believe — and I think this is the major shared feeling among entrepreneurs in Belgium — that the Belgian ecosystem is very scattered. And I think that's linked to the fact that we have regionalized power across Brussels, Flemish, and Walloon levels. That's the core problem.

It's not just about creating great hubs — we're doing that. We need the political system to understand that we need less regionalization and more nationalization of economic and research powers. Policymakers need to harmonize across levels to create more synergies and focused policies, so no regions get left behind.

Take Innoviris, for example. They've had a budget of around €40–45 million since 2020. It hasn't been raised or adjusted for inflation, even though inflation has risen a lot. And now the current regional government is proposing to reduce that to €30 million. For a region like Brussels, €30 million is nothing. We have a lot of tech startups here, great talent, the VUB and the ULB, and excellent universities. But the region doesn't see investment in research as an investment — they see it as a cost. If these policies were nationalized, as the BPI in France is, we'd be able to create far bigger powerhouses and have far more impact.

Robin Wauters: I completely agree. With Syndicate One, we've been trying to address some of that fragmentation by investing across Belgium, wherever ambitious companies come from. But we do sometimes find it difficult to compare the quality of first-time or second-time founders in the Flemish tech ecosystem — particularly in Ghent — with Brussels and Wallonia. Do you see any way out of this beyond the policy aspect?

Louis-Philippe Broze: What's happening in Ghent is a culture shift. When we go there from Brussels or from Wallonia — and I'm French-speaking, as you can hear — we definitely see a level of startup culture that's way higher and way closer to the US ecosystem. I go there a lot for work, and I feel that inspiration. Here in Brussels, and on the French-speaking side of the country, that culture shift still needs to happen. And I think it goes through education. We need more initiatives at the university level, and even earlier. We need students to understand that they are legitimate — that they're allowed to think outside the box and take their futures into their own hands. Education is a very important piece of this.

Robin Wauters: Maybe a trick question, but having had all these learnings at Spentys, do you ever think it's time for your next venture? Or are you all in on Spentys for the next decade?

Louis-Philippe Broze: I still have a journey to finish with Spentys. I still have patient impact targets I'd like to meet, and our technology has significant potential to change patients' lives. But at some point, we'll have to change and do something else. You can love lasagne, but if you eat it every day, at some point, you want a burger. I love what I'm doing, but at a certain moment I'll want a taste of something else. It's coming — but I still have impact to create with Spentys first.

Robin Wauters: Coming back to how companies are built today — what's the impact of AI on Spentys so far, professionally and personally?

Louis-Philippe Broze: I think AI is a double-edged sword for us. On the positive side, our developers' shipping velocity has increased dramatically. They're not writing code themselves anymore, really. They're more like project managers with Claude alongside them, helping them. They're still solving the problems, which they enjoy, but their productivity has increased enormously.

But we also see a threat. Some customers have started vibe coding and building things very quickly, and they've started telling us they're going to stop working with us. That has happened. Fortunately, we've been shipping so many features in a stable environment that basically, they crashed their own builds and came back to us. Six months later, they're saying, "Actually, that's not my core business." I can build it fast, but I can't scale it, maintain it, or get consistent results. So there's still a strong case for SaaS businesses.

But this tells us we need to create far more value for our customers. That means shipping more features that make sense, but also developing AI modules ourselves that are hyper-niche and hyper-specific to our market. Alongside our core software and 3D engine, we're now plugging in AI modules that help our customers create more value — and that they won't be able to vibe code themselves, because it's simply out of reach for them. AI is a tremendous internal productivity multiplier, and the threat it poses forces us to innovate faster.

Robin Wauters: Does it also affect pricing? The whole discussion around per-seat pricing or recurring subscriptions shifting towards value-based pricing — is that something you're seeing?

Louis-Philippe Broze: Definitely. Pricing is something we're actively rethinking. It's a big ongoing discussion internally. Value perception has become very important. What's challenging is that we have very different kinds of customers — some are very educated about AI, and some are miles away from implementing any AI tools. Some of them want a change to our pricing model, and some don't even see AI as relevant to them yet. The question is: when do you make the shift and change the whole pricing structure? That's still an open discussion.

Robin Wauters: Would you ever see yourself becoming a very active angel investor or mentor to the next generation of startups — maybe even joining a network like Syndicate One?

Louis-Philippe Broze: Yes, for sure. I'd like to give back what I've received from the community and the ecosystem. I'm already active at Start Lab ICHEC, mentoring early entrepreneurs. If I exit from Spentys, part of that money will definitely be reinvested in the ecosystem — and I hope, maybe Syndicate One, why not?