One of my recent themes here is that AI isn’t just happening at ChatGPT, at DeepSeek, or in the offices of the Cloud Czars. It’s happening in thousands of places, including Amsterdam.
With the help of a DPG reporter, I spoke today with Nick Brandts and his team at Flowlined, a Netherlands company that makes my words ring true.
Flowlined currently occupies part of a co-working space on top of a 10 story building in the Amstel Business Park, a strip of 21st century architecture set among wide roads south of the city. Nick counts 22 in his team now, including two in South Africa, and their business plan reminds me a bit of what Palantir (PLTR) was when it started.
The way Nick explained it, along with sales and marketing manager Merel Meijer and tech lead Kaedin Schouten, AI is a service, built customer by customer, application by application. Flowlined itself, which launched three years ago, manages a central software repository which assures the team isn’t always reinventing the wheel.
Flowlined sells through subscription, at monthly rates. That’s something that hasn’t changed in 20 years. After all, the whole idea of AI is to train databases, then have them work their magic and improve their performance over time.
“Our engineers understand what’s needed. They bridge the gap between what’s possible and what’s needed,” Brandt said. “The solution we build has to be adaptable.”
Flowlined collects its talent from area universities, where it grows in abundance. An AI class will grow like a weed after it’s announced, I was told. It’s the latest Internet buzzword to make you swoon.
It’s Happening Everywhere
Nick said he’s looking for a mindset. He wants people who like to be challenged, with the courage to take responsibility for their work. All this makes AI a young man’s game, just as with any technology just starting out (although it sometimes takes an old man to put it into context). The Flowlined team works long hours in the office and seems to enjoy it, building camaraderie as well as software.
Nick counts 402 entities in the Netherlands currently devoted to AI. Meijer said she joined after getting a master’s in marketing from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, where she wrote a thesis on AI and posted it on LinkedIn. This led to corporate work at Deloitte, including a stint in Paris, but she wanted the energy of a start-up.
Energy is what drives AI forward, human energy from motivated people. Flowlined puts its clients’ services on all three clouds now re-selling their capacity – Microsoft, Google, AWS. It moves these services among the clouds depending on the software it needs support from. Nick says he can switch loads between the clouds at the push of a button.
This confirmed my suspicions that the Cloud Czars have no moat when it comes to AI. This is a software game, not a hardware game. Victory will go to the teams that can deliver solutions quickly.
I also learned that all proprietary moats are meaningless. Flowlined often uses open source, seeing it as more sustainable. It’s all as I’ve been writing here for a year, but that’s not because I’m some genius. Genius is everywhere.
