In late April 2026, two of Lionwood.software’s experts – CTO Oleh Petryshyn and CBO Victor Yezhov – visited Belgium and the Netherlands for a sequence of professional events, establishing connections with Benelux’s businesses in between them. This is part of the company’s conscious ambition to extend its presence and offerings in the region – continuing a series of successful projects over the past several years. Here is what Victor had to share on the trip and the wider context.
In a way, Benelux is a natural destination for software companies who, like Lionwood, specialize in custom logistics and manufacturing solutions – and thrive on unique projects. Not only has this region been Europe’s logistics crossroads since at least the Middle Ages – even the land here is engineered with the region’s characteristic ingenuity. From oil painting techniques, microscopes, canals and dams there’s the logical step to modern software.
And that’s exactly where Lionwood is now searching for unique projects to enrich its portfolio as a software vendor and partner. For years, we have focused specifically on solutions that fell in between categories, required tailored, often previously unthought of approaches, and delivered results where standard tools couldn’t. Both Belgium and the Netherlands are places where the ultra-saturated infrastructure, frenetic business pace, and tech turnover rates provide exactly the background we want to do more than the typical software projects one expects.
We weren’t traveling solely for inspiration, though – our practice has taught us that even coding starts with respect to the business environment you’re coding for: the business culture, the challenges and the way businesses define them. These are insights only gained through connections – and thankfully, the events in our agendas did not disappoint.
The Beacon
Our first major destination was the great port city of Antwerp. A port like that is in itself already a hub for both logistics, transportation, warehousing, manufacturing, and now increasingly digital tech.
This is felt in Antwerp, and manifested in The Beacon. It is a remarkable community that brings together tech companies, startups, researchers and industry players and focuses not only on port-related tech but things like smart cities: innovation tends to cross-influence adjacent domains.
Which is actually in line with our own way of treating tech developments. Lionwood joined The Beacon association in February of 2026; now, we joined two of their many events. The first was The Beacon Breakfast: Easter Edition – an informal networking event where we had the chance to both introduce ourselves and get the gist of what the conversations within the community were revolving around.
The second session was titled Integration as the Missing Link Behind Digital Logistics – and was much more case- and content-driven. Interestingly, the choice of topics confirmed something we at Lionwood.software had used as a maxim for several years now: the more operational pressure there is, the more are integrations recognized as not purely technical, but strategic factors. Today’s businesses often operate in the world of excellent but fragmented software tools – which leave gaps that are filled with manual processes and data duplicates. We’ve mitigated this phenomenon across various projects outside of Benelux, but it seems it is within it that our own experience might be most relevant, after all.
Bootcamp in Deventer
Another important destination was Deventer – formerly a proud Hanseatic city with the associated logistics heritage, now an equally proud hub for innovation, albeit of a very pragmatic nature. Far from the polished corporate environments, the atmosphere in Deventer is about making things work right here, on the local level – as efficiently as possible.
We could feel this at the bootcamp organized by Start Global together with the MKB Trade Office (Netherlands), called Doing Business between Ukraine and the Netherlands. Instead of setting up a conference with presentations, the event was designed as a working business mission – focused on practical cooperation between Ukrainian and Dutch companies.
The most valuable part
That made the bootcamp especially valuable for us. As a software company, we are rarely interested in technology in isolation. What matters more is understanding how businesses actually function internally – how operations are organized, how bottlenecks appear, how decisions are made, and where digital systems genuinely create value instead of simply adding another layer of complexity.
And generally, throughout our trip, the most important thing was to be able to meet and talk to actual local players, learn about their operational environments from first-person accounts and exchange insights on a deeper level than slideshows or LinkedIn posts can allow.
For custom software development, this practical perspective is the main prerequisite. You cannot design a truly adoptable solution for logistics, manufacturing, or operational management based on assumptions – so the opportunity to network with professionals in the field is something we want to thank the organizers of both events.
Thoughts on business culture
One of the more interesting takeaways from the Dutch part of the trip was how naturally the communication felt.
Frankly, we had expected the usual cultural distance when setting off on the trip. Even though our team members have been to the region for many times now, these were either on-premise visits to our existing clients, or traditional conference or exhibition style events. This trip was more informative in terms of business culture – and surprisingly, many interactions felt familiar in tone.
Not that we mean to just equate Belgians, Ukrainians, and the Dutch in terms of business culture and communication – there are obvious differences, but we do share a similar practical mindset.
Directness, focus on how measurable the results are, and openness about problems are, to us at least, some aspects that make communication rather easy. When talking with local businesses, we moved from introductions and courtesies to actual work-related specifics in a matter of minutes.
Taken together, the trip to Belgium and the Netherlands felt less like a series of separate events and more like a single, coherent snapshot of how this region approaches complexity in practice. Here, operational reality is complex enough to require thoughtful systems, but pragmatic enough to expect those systems to actually work. For us, this combination is precisely what makes Benelux not just an interesting market, but a highly relevant one for the kind of work we do at Lionwood.software.
