For two years, Rookoo and the Wintercircus Startup Campus grew side by side. Now, the event management company is ready for its own office, new markets, and ever larger venues.

“This might sound a little silly,” Jeroen Borloo begins, “but leaving this place feels like graduating. Over the past two years, we’ve learned an incredible amount about building a company at the Startup Campus, and we’ve grown right alongside so many other startups. But now it’s time to say goodbye and make room for the next generation.”

Jeroen is one of the four founders of Rookoo, the AI-driven event management startup that moved into the Wintercircus two summers ago. To say that the company and the Ghent tech hub have grown together would be an understatement. “Wintercircus was one of our first clients,” Jeroen explains. “We built their digital employee, Betsy, named after the legendary elephant that once entertained crowds here, and we’ve continued to develop her together ever since.”

So much so that, to this day, Betsy remains the first point of contact for anyone looking to organize an event at the Wintercircus. Spend five minutes chatting with her, and you'll walk away with a tailored event proposal, catering included. “But that was just the beginning,” Jeroen says proudly. “Since then, we've grown to around thirty clients, from Tour & Taxis to Kinepolis, both major players in the B2B events space. And our platform has evolved far beyond handling the initial intake.”

Today, Rookoo is a full-fledged AI-powered event management suite. It uses conditional logic to generate detailed staff run sheets, produce comprehensive reports for organizers, and automate customer follow-up. “We recently also hired a data scientist,” Jeroen says, “to develop models that can identify, for example, which venues or rooms could command a ten percent higher price.”

With that momentum, Rookoo is now active in the UK, it has its sights set on the US, and it’s moving into a new office elsewhere in Ghent. “It feels like the right time to take that next step,” Jeroen says. Although he admits he could have done without spending the past week sorting out insurance, internet, and all that sort of shizzle. “Still, leaving also makes you realize how much Wintercircus has meant to Rookoo. It played a huge role in our growth. So yeah, we're going to miss this place dearly, and not just because of the business insights and opportunities it brought us.”

“Every startup goes through highs and lows,” Jeroen continues. “The highs are fantastic, and I hope every founder gets to experience them. But the lows can be brutal, and that’s when it helps to be surrounded by people facing the same challenges. We were all wading through the same mud, in a way. That sense of solidarity gave us the peace of mind to stay focused, even during the difficult moments.”

According to Jeroen, the interactions between startups always happened organically. “You’d just walk past someone’s desk, ask if they had five minutes to bounce around an idea, and that was it. No calendar invites, no formalities, just a quick coffee.” He knows that will inevitably change. “But I’m sure those Startup Campus connections will last well beyond our time here. And I’ll definitely stay a member of the Wintercircus Collective, so I’ll still have every excuse to drop in for interesting talks and run into people. That access to so many inspiring speakers has been one of the biggest perks for us.”

Inspiring marketing speakers, for example, because that’s Rookoo's next big challenge. “It’s the story of every startup, isn’t it?” Jeroen laughs. “First you build, build, build. Then you reach the point where you have to start telling the world about it.” That’s exactly why he recently traveled to London to tape some customer testimonials with the team at Clays, a chain of cocktail bars where guests shoot clay pigeons. He grins. “If your company is called Rookoo, that’s about as on-brand a customer as you’re going to find.”

And since the Rookoo team was already in London, they decided to shoot their very first brand video there as well. “I can't give away too much just yet,” says an enthusiastic Jeroen, though he happily already shares a few behind-the-scenes photos. “But it’ll take viewers on a Wes Anderson-style journey via some of Britain’s most iconic venues.” To turn every venue featured in the video into a Rookoo client? He laughs. “That’s the plan.”

Sounds like Jeroen and his team could soon be giving a talk at Collective themselves, on how to create great promotional videos without AI. “I'd love to,” he replies without missing a beat. “You have to respect the creative arts. AI helped us develop our platform faster and lets our customers focus on people rather than paperwork. Great! But those plastic AI-generated videos, songs, and texts? They just make me sad. We’d much rather collaborate with talented young filmmakers and copywriters, because the result is simply in a different league.”