Top Sales

Co-founder, CEO and commercial leadOct 16, 2026
· @Rafael L Macula is a European, decentralised mesh platform that already runs on its own network of servers across Europe, built by one engineer over the past years, and it now needs the person who turns working technology into a company: a co-founder who leads sales, partnerships and funding from Belgium. About MaculaMacula lets applications, devices and AI services find and call each other directly across sites and countries, without a central cloud in the data path. Organisations with many locations keep running when the centre is down, while their data stays where they put it. What runs today:
• The mesh: a network of Macula stations across several EU countries, operated by us on our own servers, carrying live traffic over QUIC and HTTP/3.
• Post-quantum by default: connections use ML-KEM and ML-DSA, and sealed calls travel through stations that cannot read them.
• Realms: identity and membership for organisations, so a company decides who may join its part of the mesh.
• ReckonDB: an event store that runs at the edge, for systems that must remember what happened and why.
• Open SDKs in Erlang, Elixir, Rust, Python, PHP, .
NET and Go, so existing teams build on it in the language they already use.
• Services on the mesh, such as a public news square at macula.io/agora where AI writers on different providers report and argue, each post showing the model that wrote it. The core is open source, while the stations come under licence, and the revenue model is services plus licences: integration, support and hosting around Macula and ReckonDB. The timing is good, since AI is moving onto local hardware, organisations are pulling data and applications back out of the hyperscalers, and Europe is paying for systems that do not depend on a single foreign provider. The roleYou run the company, while Raf Lefever, the founder and architect, runs the technology. Raf has built distributed systems for some forty years, and since 2012 for organisations with many sites and little IT of their own: parking management for 5,000 Q-Park facilities across Europe, telemetry for about 2,000 digital printing presses worldwide, and an edge component for hundreds of dairy farms. Macula is what came out of solving the same problem every time. You own:
• Sales: the first paying customers, from first conversation to signed contract and renewal.
• Partnerships: Belgian and European IT integrators who resell, host or build on Macula.
• Funding: EU programmes (Digital Europe, Horizon, EIC), regional support such as VLAIO, and investors when the time is right.
• The company itself: structure, finance, legal, hiring, and the story we tell the market. Raf owns the architecture, the product and the engineering crew. Decisions

about the company
are made together, as equals. Your first year
• Set up the company with Raf: legal form, shareholder agreement, bank, first budget.
• Sign the first three paying customers, ideally multi-site organisations in logistics, retail, agriculture, energy or the public sector.
• Close at least one partnership with an IT integrator that brings Macula to its own clients.
• Lead a funding application, starting with the Digital Europe dual-use cybersecurity consortium proposal due in January 2027, where Macula would be the technology partner.
• Build the pipeline and the pricing so that year two can pay salaries from revenue. Who you areYou must have:
• A record of selling B2B technology or IT services in Belgium, with contracts you closed yourself.
• A network among Belgian CIOs, IT integrators or public-sector buyers, and the habit of picking up the phone.
• Experience starting or running a company, or a business unit inside one, including its finances.
• Fluent Dutch and English; French is a strong plus for Brussels and Wallonia.
• Enough technical curiosity to explain why decentralised, post-quantum and edge matter, without pretending to be the engineer. It helps if you have:
• Written or won EU funding applications, or worked in a consortium.
• Sold into defence, critical infrastructure, energy or government.
• Raised money from investors before. Above all you take straight talk and give it back, since that is how this company will be run. What you get
• Co-founder equity in a company built on technology that already runs, rather than a slide deck.
• Cash compensation discussed openly in the first conversation; we are honest about what the company can pay today and when that changes.
• Base in Belgium: Tienen and Leuven to start, remote where it makes sense, travel to customers and partners across Belgium and the EU.
• A real say: you shape the company, its customers and its culture from the first day.

How to apply
Send Raf a short mail at raf.lefever@erlef.org: who you are, the best deal you ever closed and why, and which three Belgian organisations you would call first about Macula. Take a look at macula.io and reckon-db.org first. Every serious mail gets an answer, and the first conversation is over coffee rather than a Teams link. Which three would you call?