Associate Founder

ASSOCIATE FOUNDER
· CEO
· GROWTH
· PRODUCT
· ENGINEER Skip the blank page. Co-found a company with us. Most founders spend their first year alone. Looking for an idea worth the risk, a co-founder they trust, a first customer, a first euro. Most of them never get past it... We're an impact venture studio in Brussels, run as a laboratory. We build and co-own ventures in Civic & Health Tech and Cyber Defense, and we help corporates also build theirs. That gives us something most first-time founders don't have: real problems, real users, a team that ships, and a seat at the table for you. The Associate Founder program is how you take that seat. You join the lab, you build with us, and you co-found a venture with equity that vests in your name. Responsible business, built together and owned together. How it works ? 1. Explore
· You join the studio and work across live ventures and new theses coming out of our Co-think workshops. You test problems, talk to users, and ship. We see how you work. You see how we work. 2. Match We pair you with a venture and a co-founding team, based on what you proved in Explore, not on what your CV says. A new thesis or an existing venture that needs its next founder. 3. Co-found You're a co-founder. You get a founder title, a co-founder equity stake on the venture's own ESOP and vesting plan, and the studio behind you: product, design, engineering, and operations, in the room, not on a call. Four Seats Associate Founder — CEO You'll own the company. Vision, first customers, first hires, the raise, and every hard call in between. You've sold something before, led people before, and you're comfortable being the person everyone looks at when the plan breaks. Associate Founder — Growth You'll find the first hundred customers, then the first thousand. Positioning, channels, pricing experiments, partnerships. You've grown something from zero with your own hands, and you can show the numbers. You'd rather run ten small experiments this week than write one big plan. Associate Founder — Product You'll decide what gets built and what doesn't. Discovery, design, roadmap, and the conversations with users that make the roadmap honest. You've shipped products people use, and you can explain the trade-offs behind each one. You're as comfortable in Figma as you are in a user interview. Associate Founder — Engineer You'll build the thing. Architecture, AI layer, security, and the standards everyone after you inherits. You're a senior full-stack engineer, TypeScript end to end, and you've built with LLMs, tool use, agents, or retrieval in production. You know where they break. What you get :
• Co-founder equity. A real stake in the venture you co-found, on its own ESOP and vesting plan.
• A head start. Validated problems, a working studio, and a team that has already shipped for the European Commission's Rapid Alert System through Uptoolkit.
• A team from day one. Product, design, engineering, and operations from the studio, so you never build alone.
• A say in how the lab runs. We operate as a liberated company through our Coop: self-management, decentralized decisions, freedom paired with responsibility.
• Co-Labs 4EVER. Founders keep a permanent place in the network. This is a long relationship, not a programme you graduate out of. Where you could land to : Our current portfolio: Drimt (AI risk and compliance across ESG, governance, cyber, and reputation), Kookia (AI nutrition assistant and meal planner), Call Up (online mobilization and community resource planning). Plus the new theses we're testing now. Who you are ?
• You've built something before. A company, a product, a side project with real users. You can point to it.
• You decide. You don't wait for the next step to be handed to you.
• You want ownership, and you understand that ownership means living with what you shipped.
• You care about impact you can measure, not impact you can put on a slide.
• You're in Brussels or ready to be. We build together, often physically. Remote or hybrid accepted (we are located at Be Central, Brussels) Nice to have: a previous company (successful or not, we care about what you learned), experience in regulated or institutional markets, French alongside English. Who this isn't for If you want a job title, a manager, and a clear scope, this will frustrate you. If you're looking for a safe salary while you figure things out, this isn't it. If you want to co-found a company, with a team and a head start, and share in what it becomes, this is your seat. The process
• Apply. A few lines on the thing you're proudest of building, and which seat you're applying for. No cover letter.
• Talk. A conversation with two of the founding team.
• Build. A short paid sprint on a real problem.
• Decide. We tell you yes or no, with reasons CTA: Apply to co-build → info@co-labs.tech