# Lode Kennes — CTO, Geel, Belgium

> I ran five things at once. Now I run one.

Every job I was responsible for, month by month, drawn from the dates themselves.

Lode Kennes is CTO of Nexa Legal, working from Geel, Belgium. Canonical site: https://lodekennes.com/

## 2014 — 2015 — Sold before I enrolled

PayIvy was a marketplace for selling digital goods, and it took Bitcoin and altcoins in 2014, when that was still a strange thing to build. For a year it was the only thing I did. Ten thousand sellers signed up. Two million dollars moved through it in six months. In July 2015, NewNote Financial bought it.

I was fast, not good. The failure modes of that system were other people’s money, in a currency nobody could reverse. I have never since been able to treat a payment path as an implementation detail.

- Sellers: 10 000
- Processed: $2 000 000 in 6 months
- Outcome: Acquired, July 2015

Sources:
- [PayIvy.com enables anyone to effortlessly sell digital goods for Bitcoin](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/payivy-com-enables-anyone-effortlessly-131500795.html) (Yahoo Finance)
- [Newnote Financial acquires 100% interest](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/newnote-financial-acquires-100-interest-121000656.html) (Yahoo Finance)

## 2015 — 2018 — Then I went to school

The obvious move after an exit is another company. I enrolled in a computer science degree instead. Three years of the things I had been getting away without: complexity, data structures, why a database gives the guarantees it gives.

CodeChamp ran alongside it for five years. Small applications and websites for local businesses, one client at a time. It paid for the degree, and it kept the loop short. Nobody explains a bad abstraction faster than a shopkeeper who cannot find the price field.

- Degree: BSc Computer Science
- CodeChamp: 2015 — 2021
- Working languages: NL · EN · FR · DE

Sources:
- [Thomas More](https://www.thomasmore.be/) (thomasmore.be)

## 2018 — 2019 — The shape of the data

SmartWithFood had a document database being asked a question it was never shaped for. Compare two products by ingredient. Then by nutrition. Then search across both. With a senior architect I moved it onto a graph model in Neo4j and rebuilt the schema around the queries people actually ran.

The part I am still proud of is smaller. I built versioned Docker images of the database itself, so a migration that produced bad data could be rolled back to a known state instead of argued about. It was the first time I designed for being wrong.

- Migration: MongoDB → Neo4j
- Recovery: Versioned database images
- Queries served: Ingredient and nutrition

Sources:
- [SmartWithFood](https://www.smartwithfood.be/) (smartwithfood.be)

## 2019 — 2020 — Eight million lines

TXCare builds and maintains MPLS networks. It is over eight million lines of code. Nobody holds a system that size in their head. You work by evidence instead of intuition. You change one thing. You accept that the codebase knows more about the domain than you do.

In the same stretch, nine colleagues and I built Greenr in our own time — an app to make the company argue about its own environmental impact. I led it technically and as a team. Two very different lessons about scale, running in parallel.

- Codebase: 8 000 000 lines
- Domain: MPLS networks
- Greenr: Tech & team lead, 10 people

Sources:
- [OTN Systems, now part of Belden](https://www.belden.com/) (belden.com)

## 2020 — 2023 — Five at once

This is the peak, and it was not a plan. The integration layer at Axxes was the real work. Every application publishes domain events. Every application gets its own queue. Each one declares exactly which event types it may send and receive. I shipped it as NuGet packages, so a team could join the bus in an afternoon instead of a sprint.

Around it: the Axxes mobile app and Home portal in React Native, React and .NET, including the store releases, the Figma, and the conversations with the people who would use it. And Terraform, Cloudflare and Azure at AdminPulse. Four roles for two and a half years, five at the peak. I would not do it again. I would not trade what it taught me about what only I could do.

- Peak concurrent roles: 5
- Integration: Domain events, per-app queues
- Shipped to: App Store & Google Play

Sources:
- [Axxes](https://www.axxes.com/) (axxes.com)
- [AdminPulse](https://www.adminpulse.be/) (adminpulse.be)

## 2024 — 2025 — Making models specific

A general model pointed at a specific business always feels almost right. The value is not the model. It is the context — the company’s own data acting as its memory, so the system gets less generic every month instead of more.

So the practice is deliberately unglamorous. Stay vendor-agnostic; the best model in eighteen months is not the best model today. Integrate with the data that already exists. Run the hosting, so the client spends attention on the business case and not on inference. Start with small use cases that visibly work.

- Focus: Applied language models
- Position: Vendor-agnostic by design
- Built: Proprietary platform

Sources:
- [Tech Tribes](https://www.techtribes.be/) (techtribes.be)

## Dec 2025 — now — A million euros of other people’s conviction

Jasper D’Hooghe and Sam Van Praet founded Nexa Legal in Antwerp in August 2025 to take the repetitive work out of litigation. I built the AI architecture, came in as a shareholder and became CTO. In February 2026 we raised a million euros from RDY Ventures, Volta Ventures and PMV.

What the product does is narrow on purpose. The Case Flow Wizard walks a litigator through a case: read the intake, build the timeline from three hundred documents, research it against the databases and the firm’s own archive, argue the other side back at you. Research runs about five times faster. The same number of lawyers gets through roughly twice the files.

The engineering that matters is the part nobody demos. Every answer links to its source. A second model sits in judgment on the first. Pseudonymisation happens locally and processing stays in the EU. We switched the automatic strategy generation off and replaced it with a guided process, because the lawyer has to stay liable for the argument, and that means the lawyer has to stay in it.

- Raised: €1 000 000, Feb 2026
- In production: 100+ firms, BE & NL
- Research speed: about 5× faster

Sources:
- [Antwerpse AI-startup Nexa Legal haalt miljoen op voor automatisering advocatenwerk](https://datanews.knack.be/nieuws/bedrijven/financieel/antwerpse-ai-startup-nexa-legal-haalt-miljoen-op-voor-automatisering-advocatenwerk/) (Data News)
- [Antwerpse AI-tool laat advocaten dubbel zoveel dossiers verwerken](https://www.made-in.be/antwerpen/antwerpse-ai-tool-laat-advocaten-dubbel-zoveel-dossiers-verwerken-maar-de-touwtjes-blijven-in-handen-van-de-expert/) (Made in Antwerpen)
- [VUB and Nexa Legal join forces to invest in AI for the lawyers of tomorrow](https://press.vub.ac.be/vub-and-nexa-legal-join-forces-to-invest-in-ai-for-the-lawyers-of-tomorrow) (VUB Press)

## Specimen — chat.wttaa.be

A search engine over the full archive of a Dutch podcast. You ask it a question in ordinary Flemish — about a guest, an episode, a topic, a half-remembered quote — and it answers short, cites the episode, and gives you the timestamp. It says so when it is not sure.

Keyword and vector and metadata together, reranked, never embeddings alone. It is the smallest complete version of the argument in the chapter above, and it took a weekend.

[chat.wttaa.be](https://chat.wttaa.be/)

## The order I do it in

In that order, and the order is the point. Automating before you have found the bottleneck only makes the wrong thing faster. I ask two questions about everything: can this be simpler, and can this be automated.

1. Understand the system.
2. Find the bottleneck.
3. Make it simpler first.
4. Then automate it.
5. Leave infrastructure, not a one-off.

## Off the record

I train five or six mornings a week. CrossFit, mostly, and running I enjoy less than I pretend to. Gent 2025 was my first HYROX, and I finished it faster than I had told people I would.

The rest of my spare attention goes on restaurants with a star. Three hours, someone else sweating the details, nothing for me to fix.

- Training: CrossFit, 5–6 × week
- First HYROX: Gent, 2025

Ahead of the pen:
- HYROX Maastricht: 2026 · solo
- HYROX Gent: 2026 · duo

## One thing

The line comes back down to one. It took about a decade to be able to do that, and it is the only part of this chart I would defend as progress.

I build products, not research. The one job is Nexa Legal: retrieval over legislation and case files, document processing, long-running workflows. The goal is not an assistant. It is to turn what a firm already knows how to do into skills a system can execute — reusable, observable, and boring to operate.

I have no patience for AI optimism without implementation details. Ask me about a model and I will ask you about latency, cost, failure modes, who is liable when it is wrong, and where the data sits. Most of what I run is on hardware I can reach: Kubernetes on bare metal and ARM, durable execution, queues, EU hosting, nothing I cannot move. The rest is on GitHub — a saga implementation for Orleans, an event-sourcing snapshot provider, a few things nobody asked for.

If you are somewhere on your own version of this chart, describe it to me. I will tell you what I would do, not what the options are.

## Contact

- Email: [work@lodekennes.com](mailto:work@lodekennes.com)
- LinkedIn: [/in/lodekennes](https://www.linkedin.com/in/lodekennes)
- GitHub: [@LodeKennes](https://github.com/LodeKennes)
- Nexa Legal: [nexalegal.com](https://nexalegal.com/)

## The rows the line is drawn from

- Nov 2014 — Oct 2015: PayIvy — co-owner & lead developer ([source](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/payivy-com-enables-anyone-effortlessly-131500795.html))
- Sep 2015 — Jun 2018: Thomas More — BSc Computer Science ([source](https://www.thomasmore.be/))
- Nov 2015 — Mar 2021: CodeChamp — owner
- Aug 2018 — Dec 2023: Axxes — .NET consultant ([source](https://www.axxes.com/))
- Oct 2018 — Apr 2019: SmartWithFood — fullstack JavaScript ([source](https://www.smartwithfood.be/))
- May 2019 — Mar 2021: OTN Systems — .NET developer
- Jun 2019 — Oct 2020: Greenr — technical & team lead
- May 2020 — Dec 2023: Axxes Integration — lead developer ([source](https://www.axxes.com/))
- Apr 2021 — Oct 2023: AdminPulse — .NET & Azure developer ([source](https://www.adminpulse.be/))
- Jun 2021 — Dec 2023: Axxes app & portal — project lead ([source](https://www.axxes.com/))
- Jan 2024 — Mar 2026: Tech Tribes — venture owner ([source](https://www.techtribes.be/))
- Jan 2024 — Mar 2026: Intellua — venture owner & AI specialist
- Dec 2025 — Aug 2026: Nexa Legal — CTO ([source](https://nexalegal.com/))