We raised our €1.6m pre-seed round
Four years ago, Thomas was chasing colleagues and vendors about personal data in websites and apps. Which scripts and SDKs are running? Which vendors get user identifiers? Which trackers fire before consent? Engineers gave partial answers. Vendors pointed to hopelessly vague privacy notices and agreements.
Privacy was an afterthought. Engineers shipped the app. Privacy experts pieced together what happened afterwards and escalated when the damage was done. So Thomas wrote a small script. He patched together open-source test automation, pointed an automated browser at a website, and let it record what actually happened during a session. Within a few weeks, that browser had a clearer view of the site's data flows than any colleague did. That aha moment turned into Webclew.
Today, we run continuous audits on web and mobile apps. Our agents open a real browser or device, click through the app like a user would, and capture every request. A proprietary classification engine decodes what each request does: which vendor, which purpose, which data, which storage objects. Then agents run through hundreds of performance and privacy checks.
Picture your best engineer and your best privacy expert inspecting every single request your app sends for every user type, every country, every release. That level of visibility takes humans weeks, but we can do it in minutes.
For ad ops teams, this is the tool that finds why revenue dropped after a release. Broken consent strings, missing user IDs, vendors timing out on iOS but not Android. The kind of thing that lives in network logs and never makes it to a dashboard.
For privacy managers, Webclew runs the audit you never have time for. Not once a year, but all the time. No more long-winded meetings, forms, vendor questionnaires. Instead look at an interactive data map across your sites, apps, vendors, and jurisdictions.
"Ad revenue, analytics, release speed, privacy — they all come down to controlling what your apps capture and send," says Thomas Ghys, co-founder and CEO. "No human can audit that at scale. Our agents can."
Today we announce a €1.6 million pre-seed round led by imec.istart Future Fund and Syndicate One, joined by angels Roeland Delrue (Aikido Security), Klaas Bals (Maurice & Nora), and Koen Dewaele (ex-Deloitte).
"Software security used to be a report you received weeks after your code had shipped. Aikido made it continuous. Privacy is on the same trajectory. Privacy experts can't keep up with how fast products and third-party dependencies change," said Roeland Delrue, co-founder of Aikido Security. "Webclew is building the continuous audit layer for user data in the hands of engineers.”
This round shifts gears. From two bootstrapped founders to a team of ten. From stealth to venture mode. From a focus on the Benelux to EU, UK, and US. It also closes our incubation at product studio Dashdot. Co-founder Maarten heads back to Dashdot full-time, with two new ventures lined up. It’s not a sad goodbye. We still share the same office.
Most of the money goes to people. Four senior roles in product and sales are open now. If you've spent any part of your career frustrated about flying blind in production as an engineer or frustrated about privacy in retrospect, check our vacancies.