Dieter Vanthournout

Dieter Vanthournout is not your typical tech entrepreneur who went looking for a problem to fit his solution. He worked behind the bar himself as a student job, runs a boutique hotel with his wife today, and through that experience kept running into the same wall: workforce planning that is unnecessarily complex, error-prone and time-consuming. Out of that frustration, he built bookU. Not because he could code, but because he knew things had to be different.

Today, bookU has grown into a leading SaaS platform with two strong pillars. For SMEs, bookU helps hundreds of companies get flexible scheduling, HR administration and staffing costs under control. For staffing, bookU is building something even more ambitious: AI-driven workforce intelligence that frees planners from the operational grind, allowing them to evolve from shift-fillers into true community managers of talent.

Because Dieter knows better than anyone that technology only creates real value when it moves people forward — not when it replaces them.