Why we invested in SEQUESTO

Published on October 8, 2025

We’re excited to announce partnering with SEQEUSTO as co-lead investor together with Smartfin in their seed round. Based in Ghent, SEQUESTO is on a mission to help European enterprises to structurally reduces content management costs, accelerates time-to-value, and demonstrably increases the win rate on complex RFx processes.

The Changing Role of RFPs

Traditionally, response management has been a reactive back-office function, initiated when a formal inquiry is received, reviewed, accepted, scheduled, composed, and delivered. However, B2B buyers are increasingly issuing formal requests (e.g., RFIs, RFPs, security questionnaires) at various stages of the buying process to meet growing demands for transparency. As a result, response management is evolving into a critical component of the sales motion, playing a more strategic role in driving business outcomes.

And yet, responding to RFx is a complex and resource-intensive process often full of inefficiencies. The typical approach is manual and dispersive (through scattered email threads and files in Excel or Word) and creates significant challenges in coordinating people and data.

Teams often handle multiple RFPs at the same time, working under pressure to create responses within tight deadlines. This demands collaboration across departments and extensive information gathering from various sources, such as previous RFx documents or Subject Matter Experts, which makes the process even more challenging.

Revitalizing a Stagnant Market: New Possibilities Through AI

SEQUESTO offers a holistic solution that combines orchestration and response development in a single, powerful platform, fully tailored to tenders, and deployable across any sector and region

From the very first demo, it was clear that SEQUESTO stands out for its ability to merge powerful AI-driven workflow automation with an intuitive, user-friendly experience , designed for the many stakeholders involved in the complex RFx process. This achievement is the result of a team that has not only embraced the full potential of AI, but applied it to a longstanding problem that no solution had effectively addressed until now.

SEQUESTO breaks from industry tradition, replacing the limited, incremental optimizations offered by legacy vendors with a comprehensive, AI-driven reinvention of the RFx process, putting it a clear step ahead of long-time incumbents like Loopio and Responsive, who have dominated the market for years.

Our conviction is built on the strength and vision of SEQUESTO’s team

At the helm of SEQUESTO are two outstanding leaders. CEO Patrick Dalvinck draws on more than 25 years of experience driving international sales for leading software security firms. Over the course of his career, he has built and scaled sales organizations from small, agile teams to global units of more than 100 people, earning a reputation as a world-class sales leader. Alongside him, CTO Evrard t’Serstevens brings a rare combination of technical depth, ambition, and adaptability. His customer-first mindset is evident in the way he shapes SEQUESTO’s product, ensuring it not only solves complex challenges, but does so in a way that delivers real impact and long-term value for clients.

Since its founding in 2020, Patrick and Evrard have expanded SEQUESTO well beyond its Belgian roots to establish a strong international presence. Today the company is active across major European markets as well as the United States, supporting a diverse customer base that spans fast-growing SaaS innovators and heavily regulated enterprises, among them ISS Facility Services, ooDrive, and Barona.