The pitch sounded familiar enough: automate enterprise back offices with AI. But Wouter Janssen and Tiebe Parmentier, who founded Tekst in 2022 after watching pandemic-era email chaos overwhelm university inboxes, insist they've found the missing piece—something they call a "process intelligence layer" that figures out how work actually moves through a company before trying to automate it.
Boston venture firm Elephant bought the argument. On May 7, the firm led an €11.5 million Series A (about $13.5 million at that day's rate), with Belgian backer Entourage reinvesting after putting more than €2 million into earlier rounds. That gives the Ghent-and-New York operation fresh runway to prove it can solve what's become a defining problem in enterprise AI: most companies can't deploy AI agents effectively because they have no idea how their back-office workflows actually function.
"Tekst's process intelligence layer enables AI agents to operate effectively in the back office," Matt Tanenblatt, an Elephant partner, said when the funding was announced. Translation: before you automate something, you need to know what you're automating. Which seems obvious—until you consider how many enterprises have spent millions on robotic process automation tools that break the moment someone changes an email template.
The Messy Reality of Enterprise Workflows
Here's what Tekst is actually doing. The platform ingests unstructured communication—emails, PDFs, customer queries that arrive in seventeen different formats—and reconstructs the hidden workflows buried inside. Then it deploys AI agents to handle those processes across SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft systems, wherever the work lives. Email-to-case routing. Complaint handling. Order intake. Quote-to-cash cycles that typically involve half a dozen hand-offs and twice as many spreadsheets.
The company says customers like Becton Dickinson, Securex, Colruyt Group, Daikin Europe, and Milcobel are using the platform now. Securex, a Belgian HR services firm, reportedly processes 3.2 million emails annually through Tekst, hitting 90% routing accuracy and 85% auto-classification. Those numbers come from the company itself and haven't been verified independently, but they reflect the kind of operational lift enterprises are hunting for.
What distinguishes Tekst, at least in theory, is where it sits relative to existing categories. Process mining tools like Celonis analyze structured data and spit out flowcharts; they tell you what is happening but struggle with the unstructured messiness of real work. Robotic process automation vendors like UiPath excel at repetitive, rules-based tasks but choke when processes vary or context matters. Tekst's bet is that you need both—visibility into chaotic workflows and the ability to act on them—in a single layer.
Whether that's a defensible category or just a temporary arbitrage opportunity before larger enterprise platforms absorb the functionality is an open question. Elephant, co-founded by Andy Hunt and Jeremiah Daly, clearly thinks the former. The firm, which focuses on what it describes as fast-growing, capital-efficient tech companies, doesn't typically make cross-border plays lightly.
Belgian Roots, American Ambitions
Tekst now employs 35 people—as of the funding close—and plans to roughly double that by year-end, hiring across engineering and commercial roles. The US market is the priority, which makes sense. American enterprises have shown a higher appetite for AI-powered automation than their European counterparts, though tolerance for implementation complexity remains low. Tekst's positioning reflects that dynamic: "ROI in weeks, not months." "No system overhauls required." The kind of promises that resonate in C-suites tired of eighteen-month ERP deployments.
Entourage, the Belgian venture studio led by Pieterjan Bouten—co-founder of Showpad, the sales enablement unicorn—had led Tekst's €700,000 seed round. Entourage's continued participation in the Series A suggests conviction, or at least the kind of founder loyalty that venture studios depend on to justify their model.
The origin story, as these things go, has a certain pandemic-era charm. Two founders watching email volumes explode, building a student project that turned into something scalable. A 2025 feature from VLAIO, the Flemish innovation agency, traced that arc in some detail. Now the company faces the harder question: can it scale that early traction into a platform that enterprises trust with mission-critical workflows?
What Happens Next
The "process intelligence plus agentic automation" category doesn't quite exist yet, which means Tekst is either creating it or getting ahead of itself. The company has a competitive wedge—understanding chaotic, unstructured workflows that enterprises have been trying to tame for decades—but wedges narrow fast in software.
For now, Tekst has capital and momentum. Whether it builds a durable business or becomes a feature inside someone else's enterprise AI stack will depend on execution, timing, and a bit of luck. The back office, after all, has been promised revolution before. This time, perhaps, the agents will actually show up to work.
