Kenny Willems

Kenny currently takes up the role of “Entrepreneur-In-Residence” or “part-time CFO-COO” for tech startups and scale-ups, both in the area of digital technology as well as materials technology.
Over the past years, he has been active as a mentor/coach in several startup incubators (a.o. StartupFactory, ICAB-X, Watt-Factory, B-Sprouts, StartAcademy, …), and as a Strategic Advisor for VITO (more specifically in the area of Remote Sensing technology). In addition, Kenny is also a member in several Advisory Boards, a.o. for the Techshare program of Euronext, Afsprakenmaker, and Movetex.
From Sep 2019 till Oct 2022, Kenny was CFO & COO at LynxCare, a Belgian digital healthtech scale-up active in Big Data, AI and NLP (Natural Language Programming) for hospitals & big pharmaceuticals.
From mid 2016 till end 2017, Kenny was one of the 4 Founding Partners of VentureWise, a Partnership aimed at launching a European early-growth & scale-up stage digital-tech investment fund. Unfortunately, this fund was not actually launched, but building upon this experience, Kenny started supporting (digital) tech start-ups & scale-ups in raising new capital, either through a VC- or Business Angel round, or through other financing means.
From early 2009 until January 2016, Kenny was CFO at iMinds, the premier digital research center of Flanders, which is currently a part of the world-class research institute imec. Next to his CFO-responsibilities, he was one of the driving forces behind the “iStart” incubator program, which has supported and provided pre-seed financing to more than 120 digital start-ups during Kenny’s tenure at iMinds (such as POSiOS (acquired by Lightspeed in 2014), neoScores, SDNsquare, Waylay.io, Sign2Pay, Seaters, Intuo, Datacamp, Viloc, Limecraft, PieSync, Ontoforce, Graphine, and many others). In this context, he was also member of the Board of iMinds’ investment fund (iVenture) as well as Managing Director of iMinds’ physical incubation center (iCubes). In addition, he acted as Board Member or Board Observer on behalf of iMinds in several digital tech startups (a.o. Geosparc, 8Seconds, SDNsquare, eXia, D!NK, Drobots, Ontoforce, etc.).
Before his time at iMinds, Kenny was a Director at JooS Consulting (currently know as United Consulting) where he was responsible for sales & business development. During his 4 years at JooS, the company experienced an aggressive growth and expanded from 15 to 120+ consultants. As a result, Kenny has built hands-on expertise in how to grow a company from its early days into a robust mid-sized organization.
Kenny started his career as Finance & ICT strategy consultant at Andersen and Deloitte, where he was involved in management consulting projects around performance management, balanced scorecard, and data-warehouse solutions, across various industries, ranging from healthcare over telecom, FMCG and manufacturing to utilities.